Alright, I’ll come clean - I still haven’t beaten my niece at chess… It’s shocking on so many levels – I’m older than her, I’m supposed to be her mentor, I’m a man for God’s sake- isn’t analytical and strategic thinking supposed to be our forte? OK, breathe calmly… I will not panic… It’s just a board game… And I have a fairly valid (hopefully face-saving) excuse – my niece is the only one I know who plays it and she is a real expert. I have no one “at my level” to practice with, someone I can beat a few times to build up my self-confidence. I try to convince myself that this is the real problem. It's not that I don’t like the game, I quite enjoy it.

Alice, my girlfriend, thinks otherwise. She says I need to focus more on learning about the game and enjoying it rather than treating it as a test of masculinity or superiority and acting like an alpha male who has to be the winning expert at everything he sets his mind to. I tell her that I’m following whoever it was who said, “It's not whether you win or lose that matters – it’s whether I win or lose!” Am I really like that? Do I set too high a premium on winning? Serious introspection called for…

This is what happens when you are a part-time professor, you become used to instructing the “younger generation” and it is galling to the ego to have a member of this particular population group beating you flat at what is essentially just a board game (sour grapes galore I admit!). My niece tells me it is estimated that over 600 million people in the world know how to play chess (in a voice that seems to subtly indicate, to my chess-paranoid mind, that I am not yet privileged enough to be counted as part of this number).

I realize that chess is a game of strategy, of patience, of waiting – none of which qualities I have really used a lot in my life. Almost always impulsive, rushing into things – that’s more my style. Hmm, maybe I’m learning something more important here after all…