I Play Chess 40 Times a Day. Because I Must.
15 min read
If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.
FOR THE PAST HALF-DECADE, I have found myself playing nearly 40 games of chess every day. I still work a full-time job, write fiction, raise a child, but these responsibilities are not prohibitive. My daughter goes down and I play late into the night, I sleep a bit, then I wake very early to play more. I play during off-hours at work, on lunch breaks, during writing time when I can’t work out a scene, and on Saturday mornings, after feeding my cats and brewing the coffee and giving Alma her egg. Addiction in my life has this quality: Something I was previously not doing at all—drinking, smoking cigarettes, collecting coffee cans, pulling hairs out of my face one at a time with tweezers—becomes all-consuming.
Chess as a game seems ripe for addiction. It has specific rules that, once understood, open out onto a wild horizon of possibility. You can play fast or slow; you can play aggressively, reservedly, violently, or creatively. For a few clicks on any number of chess sites, you can flood your brain with dopamine as often as you like, and if you tire of it, you can delete your account, swear off the game, and, in the morning, start over.
As in life, one can play 95 percent of a chess game perfectly, only to have a pivotal oversight undo hours of meticulous work. Missed opportunities rarely resurface and are far more often punished. Positional advantages still require near-perfect play to be converted to wins. Losses feel like moral judgments and haunt like vengeful regret. In many ways it is a silly game; in others, it is as wide, varied, primitive, and complex as the universe itself. Within the bounds of strict rules, genuine freedom is possible over a chessboard. And when the game ends—and this is the crucial difference from life—one can begin again.
IN HIS NOVEL The Luzhin Defense, Vladimir Nabokov describes the world-silencing effects of chess addiction. His main character, based on the German chessmaster Curt von Bardeleben, riffles indifferently through editions of an old illustrated magazine: “Not a single picture could arrest [his] hand as it leafed through the volumes—neither the celebrated Niagara Falls nor starving Indian children (potbellied little skeletons) nor an attempted assassination of the King of Spain. The life of the world passed by with a hasty rustle, and suddenly stopped.” What finally catches the young chess master’s eye? A single image—a woodcut of a chessboard—and his mind turns instantly to “the treasured diagram, problems, openings, entire games.”
We are in an era of bad habits, of nihilism and the certainty that dread, as a guiding principle, is warranted. In just the past week or so, catastrophic flooding deluged the Midwest, the military attempted a coup in Bolivia, an Arkansas man shot and killed four people in a grocery store, and wildfires went on ravaging the Arctic Circle. As I play chess, these sorts of events begin to blur and fade; they pass by with a hasty rustle; suddenly, they stop. In better times, perhaps I would not have needed chess the way that I do—but alas, we have not had better times. As I play chess, these sorts of events begin to blur and fade; they pass by with a hasty rustle; suddenly, they stop. In better times, perhaps I would not have needed chess the way that I do—but alas, we have not had better times.
I wake one morning realizing I haven’t heard a word of what anyone’s said for nearly three days. I have ignored the news, have ignored myself, have been thinking only of chess. I resolve to end my addiction, and so I delete my account. My abstention lasts 16 hours. I make a new account. In six days, I play 578 games. The nadir comes when I win eight in a row and then lose 12 of my next 14 and go to bed thinking of self-murder. My chess play has devolved into a kind of daily predictive weatherglass: On days I play well, I am cheery, excitable, pleased to be alive; on days I play poorly, I am nasty to those I love best, I place blame for my poor play on others, I feel certain of my brain’s rapid decay, and I know, truly know, that my life will never come to any good.
Still, there have been moments when chess was not on my mind: a night in early January 2021 when I stayed up till 4 a.m. to see the election results certified; an afternoon one spring when I first glimpsed my daughter’s nose, blown up and electrified on an ultrasound screen; and when, just after a miscarriage that we were both grieving, I divulged to my partner, Liz, for the first time in the six years we’d been together, that for my entire life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve dealt on a daily basis with suicide.
Suicide can be about many things, but what it can most often be about is pain: ineffable pain that has nothing to do, really, with happiness or unhappiness, or even with reality. William Styron, in one of the seminal accounts of suicidal ideation, writes, “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.” I like to think of it a different way: “There was so much that was real that was not real at all,” goes the Wallace Stevens line, and this has always struck me as being, in some ways, the predicament of suicide. Folks who find reality inadequate are apt to go looking for better or different things elsewhere. In my lifetime, I’ve sought relief in booze, in books, in self-destructive sexual behavior, in writing fiction. Like fiction, chess has, as the Latvian International Master Alvis Vitolins wrote, no limits. When I play, reality is held at bay for a while. I am even free of having to deal with myself.
The subject of suicide is ugly to talk about, burdensome at best, morbid and harrowing at worst. Although in polite company it is best left undiscussed, the bare facts suggest that in the United States, a suicide has occurred in the time it has taken you to brew your coffee, sit down, and read the first several paragraphs of this article. “Maybe you’ve spent some time trying every day not to die, out on your own somewhere. Maybe that effort has become your work in life,” Donald Antrim wrote in The New Yorker. It seems to me now that more and more Americans are undertaking this work every day. They do so in the shadows. They may not admit to others what dark calculus goes on in their brain. They are trying not to die. They are playing chess, or caring for their children, or riding the bus home from work and thinking of next month’s bills. Whatever the case, they are everywhere among us; it seems likely that, at the very least, you know someone like this.
MY FIRST FORAY into chess was with my older brother at a cigar shop near where we grew up. In our early 20s, we would go and sit with the regulars—all men in their 60s—and we’d smoke four or five cigars and share a bottle of bourbon and play chess into the early morning hours. I was not particularly good then, probably an 800 player (I’m 1900 now; grand masters are 2500 and up), but we were so happy. Much of our relationship is built on a shared language, shared history, shared frequency, and chess is good for this. Together we stepped into the game’s vast universe of possibility, and we did what so much of good existence comes down to: We risked mistakes, we tried for beauty, we played. And we woke in the morning with disgusting-smelling clothes and the feeling that we’d had fun.
Suicides among competitive chess players are not uncommon, though it would be impossible to say if they are any more frequent than in the general population. There was Karen Grigorian, who leaped from the tallest bridge in Yerevan, Armenia; Norman van Lennep, who jumped from a ship into the North Sea; Lembit Oll, who jumped from a window; Georgy Ilivitsky, who jumped from a window; Curt von Bardeleben, who either jumped or fell from a window; Pertti Poutiainen, whose method of suicide I could not find; Shankar Roy, who hanged himself; and the limitless Vitolins, who jumped from a railway bridge into Latvia’s Gauja River.
Antrim, describing his time on a psych ward, wrote that he would say “good luck” to his fellow patients when it was time to be discharged, “good luck, good luck out in the world.” When you are playing chess, you do not have to be out in the world. You are in chess. So I play and play and play, until I am in a full fit and am breathing heavily and am unreachable. Selfhood is a thing of the past, ego is dead, even relations with loved ones are gone. This is it. I am free.
And then my play strays. I make stupid mistakes. I miss easy chances. Chess as an idea is infinite, but my chess, in practice, is already beginning to decay. It is not about freedom. It is about joy-death.
IN CHESS there is a move called a zwischenzug, when the action must pause for an immediate situation to be addressed; perhaps a king is in check, or a queen is imperiled, or an unforeseen move has been made that greatly threatens one’s position. You can use zwischenzug to slip in between the crevices of the normal flow of moves and dramatically alter the course of a game. What once felt inevitable may now never come to pass. The coronavirus pandemic in many ways felt like the world’s longest zwischenzug. Things that in February of 2020 felt inevitable—my partner and I having a wedding, for instance, but for many others, employment, housing—were suddenly frozen in peril. In place of taking the subway to work on the Upper East Side of New York every day, I was now driving up the FDR, one of only three or four cars on the road.
At the worst parts of the pandemic, I was drinking two or more liters of gin per week. I took up smoking again. I would buy myself a nice bottle of scotch as a reward for making it through the week, and it would last less than a night. I was just coping; I was just doing whatever I needed to do to get through. When I cut back on gin, I drank instead a bottle and a half of wine each night. My evening walks to the liquor store were my way of ending the day. These routines comforted even while they pointed toward dependency. But I am dependent. I am dependent on everything I bring into my life. Among the many displeasures of dealing with suicide, one that glares is the transformation it imposes on life’s joys: Everything becomes, in one way or another, a new defensive tool deployed against choosing death.
I’ve written four unpublished novels about the same part of southern Oklahoma, all of them featuring similar characters. They are down-and-out; they are lonely; they love and have beautiful memories of moments when they were happy. They, to me, are realer than real life. Only after several months of playing chess at a heightened clip did I realize that the two impulses—to write, to play—were linked, in the way they are separate from reality. As the Dutch grand master Genna Sosonko wrote of Vitolins: “For him chess was never amusing; his life in chess, outside of everyday concerns, was his real life. He lived in chess, in solitude, as in a voluntary ghetto.” Fiction has been my voluntary ghetto for a decade because it allows me to look at life without actually participating in it. Chess, now, too.
ANY SEASONED DEPRESSIVE knows well the fear that settles in when a bad storm is raging and the old protectors are, for whatever reason, failing. Cherished songs or poems, a long day at the bar, listening to a dear friend tell a story—when these balms prove powerless, a different kind of terror takes hold. The hard-learned lesson of the lifelong depressive is that bad spells are not to be “fixed”; there is no “making it better”; rather, these spans of time—sometimes a week, sometimes a year or longer—are to be weathered. The depressive gathers in the course of his daily life particular items, elements that will be useful to him when, inevitably, the next period of joy-death occurs. But when that store cupboard proves useless, a new thought dawns: This may be the one that finally kills me, and I will have no defense against it. So maybe, today, chess.
It is difficult to explain suicide to people who do not think of it constantly. Difficult in the first because it is so unpleasant to discuss. Relations are burdened by it. Co-workers of course are not meant to hear of it. Pets help. What I think of most when I think of a bad depressive spell, a spell that brings on near-hourly thoughts of suicide, is endurance. How much have I already endured, and how much is there left to be endured. Anyone who has suffered a bad low streak—and here I mean the kind of lowness that makes bridges unwalkable—can tell you (or try to) how bad it can really get. Once you’ve gone through it, there is no escaping not just the terror of having been afflicted, but also the exhaustion of knowing all that’s left to endure when a new storm arrives. How one survived the previous depression seems miraculous; knowing what one will have to endure to survive the next one can be mentally crippling in its own right, the way a person with a chronic illness quivers when the first sign of returned symptoms makes itself known. It’s here; now I will suffer.
The nastiest trick of a suicidal spell is that it demolishes all time; there is no remembering the time before it; there is no belief that there will be a time after. In this sense it is intoxicatingly freeing. One has never been so free, at least as regards the imprisonment of time. Free to do what, though? Not live. Another thing suicide takes is the sense that life is to be filled with activities, joys, hobbies, gratitude for loves and blessings. Instead, during a suicidal spell, life is to be survived. Trains are dangerous; belts are dangerous; long solo rides on the highway are dangerous; too much to drink, dangerous; Hart Crane’s Complete Poems, dangerous. But for me, for these past five years, chess has been not-dangerous. I’ve played it too much now to “enjoy” it, but at the very least, it does not make me think of death. Nabokov writes that chess is an unstable thing. Well, it is, but one does not have to die to try it again.
IT WAS in November of 2020 that Liz had the miscarriage. It was a horrific time for many reasons, not least of which was the cone of silence that descends over people experiencing such a loss. It was around Thanksgiving, and Liz had not told anyone, and so she was forced to still sit through a holiday dinner, my older brother and his wife’s two perfect children seated right next to her. She grew impatient and angry and sad very quickly. She behaved badly, I felt, and when we fought about it, we both sensed that something had frayed. The miscarriage might signal our end, too. She discussed going back to Seattle to stay with her father for a while. We haggled over our three cats.
That night, after Liz went to bed, I sat on our couch downstairs with my younger brother, talking about this and many other things late into the night. Though Liz had asked me to keep the miscarriage between us, I broke that confidence and shared with my brother what had happened.
In the morning, Liz confronted me. She had overheard us when I’d shared the miscarriage news, and she was justly angry. We fought. I grew more and more furious (not with her, with myself), though I could not explain that I was furious because now I did not know if suicide—my suicide; the way I’ve had to, each day, watch the train go by and talk myself out of kissing the 6—was something she’d also overheard us discussing. I had, for more than five years, kept it out of the relationship, but now if I did not address it, it might hang there as something that she’d overheard, but lay hidden. I told her, as best I could, that, as long as I could remember, I’d struggled with suicide. In a major way, I said, trying to emphasize this point. Every day, I said, and then I began to cry. She said that it was all right, and I apologized for the unfairness of this revelation coming while she was grieving, too. She said that she understood, and that it didn’t matter.
HOW IT OFTEN GOES: All morning I play poorly. I wake early, I feed the cats, I make coffee, I arrange my daughter’s breakfast, and soon I’ve lost six games in a row. Top players say you should play only a handful of games a day, but this does not deter me. I play more. I play until I can no longer imagine playing. I walk away from the computer, read some, write some, and then I have to play another, and another. Whatever happens today, I will play my 40 games. I play for reasons beyond my control; I play for respite from the rest of myself.
On the day my daughter was born, a new clock started. It is the countdown to when she’ll discover this inextinguishable urge I carry, but also the countdown to when I might decide to leave her, when the pain of being alive might possibly become too much: freedom, and control. Chess is about freedom, and control. Addiction is about freedom, and control. Depression and suicide and living through an age of catastrophes—these things are about freedom, and control. Admitting to dealing with suicide often necessitates an immediate promise that one will never succumb to the urge, but such promises are empty by nature. They fail to see the point. The point is that no such promise can be made.
All folks have this clock, but if you deal with suicide, yours is slightly different: You feel at all moments that you could be barreling toward the exact second when you will decide enough is enough. Having a child adds yet another layer to this; this clock now affects the person I swear to myself again and again that I will never hurt on purpose.
I continue to play chess, though I hate it now. One of the brutal parts about having an addictive personality is the inevitability of this joy-death. A new thing enters my life, I love it deeply and passionately, and already I know that it’s only so long until this thing I love becomes another thing that tortures. I no longer play for creative beauty or intellectual surprise. I play because I cannot stop.
Knowing this does not give me power over myself any more than knowing about gravity gives me the ability to float. I know that I am simply to wait; soon the addiction will jump, and I will find myself doing something else for that dopamine hit. It might be playing with my new daughter; it might be scanning lines of poems to see how commas work. For now, moving pieces over a board keeps me from entertaining too seriously some of the more terrifying thoughts rolling around in the dark rooms of the warehouse of my brain. I keep the power cut off from those unsafe rooms as often as I can. Instead, I take out my phone, and I begin another game: e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, Bc4—the Italian opening is on the board, and I have, again, survived. Simple as it may seem, by running the power elsewhere, I make sure—for now—that those deadly rooms stay quiet.
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