The Day the Russian Tried to Go Postal

I guess I should start by saying that maybe the title is inaccurate.  What I mean is, at the time I was not familiar enough with the Russian language to be sure if this guy was actually speaking Russian.  And even if he was speaking Russian, he could've been Ukrainian, Uzbek, etc.  But let's just say for simplicity's sake that the main character in this story was Russian.

And this photo?  I don't think that actor is Russian either.  But he seems to capture the spirit of the story.  So there he is.  In fact, he looks like a number of Russians I've met.  He's got two of the major qualities: slicked-back hair and exposed chest hair.

On to the story: I used to play chess.  Lots of chess.  I think a fair guess is that I played chess for six hours per day, every day, for at least eighteen months from my sophomore year to my junior year of college.

As white, I played king pawn.  As black, I played the Najdorf Sicilian against king-pawn openings and the Dutch Leningrad against queen pawn openings.  Being able to say that with a straight face made me quite the chess nerd.

I had books.  Lots of books.  I had a 600-page book dedicated solely to endgames.  You know, a king versus a king and a pawn?  I would read chapters about that situation.  And I would enjoy myself.

Over that period, I played in a number of chess tournaments in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Oakland, and I built up a decent-but-not-fantastic USCF rating in the low 1800s, which made me an "A" player.  But in chess, an A is not an A.  With 2000 being the bottom-rung ranking for an expert, I was just a decent player, and I'm pretty sure that an expert rating would have taken another few years to reach.

So I started playing lots of chess, a whole lot, at the local senior citizen's center in Sacramento.  They would meet twice a week at about six p.m., and they'd play through till ten or so.  Now, whatever picture you have in your mind?  Forget it.  Because there weren't any senior citizens there.

Instead, there were college kids like me and Russians in their forties and fifties.  And yes, at least one of those Russians resembled the actor pictured above.

So what do college kids and aging Russians tend to do?  We played chess.  Speed chess.  We'd set the clock at five minutes per side, and we would finish our games within ten minutes.  We'd stage little tournaments, with bragging rights as the sole prize for the winner.

The Russians tended to be supremely crafty fuckers, always playing to trick you.  The college kids tried to play by the book.  For the Russians, there was no book.

Now, I'm not sure if you've played chess or watched chessplayers playing chess before, but if they're in a serious game, they tend to lose track of the world around them.  For example, I remember numerous times playing speed chess with a friend of mine.  We would start at, say, four in the afternoon.  Suddenly, we would finish our thirtieth game and notice that it was nighttime.  And that we were starving.

And weren't there a bunch of people hanging around when we started playing?

Where did everybody go?

So in the senior citizen's center one night, two Russians had been matched up in a single-elimination tournament that we were playing that night.  And they were speaking in Russian.  Angry Russian.  And when their game finished, the loser stood up and bolted from the room.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were playing.  Not more than ten minutes passed before the angry Russian--the loser--pushed the door opened and began yelling--again, in Russian.  With a pistol in his hand.

I was sitting maybe fifteen feet away, and I was in the middle of a game.  And the clock was ticking.

What happened next, in my mind, defined chessplayers as a species.

The group of us looked up from our games.

We saw a Russian with a gun shouting angrily.

And we ignored him.  We just resumed playing.

Another Russian player--one who wasn't playing at the moment--quickly approached Gun-Totin' Russian, put his hand on the barrel and lowered the gun, and appeared to speak words of admonishment.  Both left the room then, apparently to go for a walk (or to go have a bottle).

I don't think it occurred to anyone playing at the time that they had basically weighed (1) potential danger to their lives against (2) winning their game, and everyone had chosen winning.

In other words, losing was more horrible to us--all of us, we were unanimous--than being in the same room with an angry, shouting, gun-toting Russian.