Kibitzing the world championship

I can now say that I’ve attended a world championship contest.

It wasn’t held in a 100,000-seat stadium or a 40,000-seat arena. More like a theater with a few hundred seats.

And I didn’t watch it in even that large a venue. My vantage point was a large, comfortable room with overstuffed chairs and couches, lots of large electronic screens on the walls, delectable hors-d’oeuvres served on trays, an open bar with high-end vodka offerings, and a magnificent view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River from the building’s large deck.

It was one of the 16 games of the 2016 World Chess Championship Match, held in November in the Seaport District of lower Manhattan in New York City.

Game Two, to be exact.

Our son and daughter-in-law, Dan and Ann, took us to New York City for a five-day outing last month. They are familiar with the ins and outs of Manhattan through Dan’s business career travels, and we did lots of stuff and saw lots of things we would never have been able to on our own. It was special, both for the experience and for the quality time we spent with Dan and Ann.

I’ve been a chess buff for more than 60 years (the dictionary word is “patzer,” defined as “an inept chess player”), and a Life Member of the U.S. Chess Federation for the past four decades.

You might think I’d have acquired a certain mastery of the Game of Kings over those years.

You would be wrong.

I’ve never risen above Class C status (a rating between 1400 and 1599). I’m now a Class D player. I once won second place in the Class C division in a statewide tournament, my greatest accomplishment ever in chess.

Class ratings advance in 200-point grabs, from Class E up through Class A, until after level 2000 they switch to titles with more status, starting with Expert. Next come the Master levels: Master, International Master and Grandmaster.

The 2016 World Championship in New York pitted the reigning champion, 25-year-old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, against the challenger, 24-year-old Russian Sergey Karjakin.

Karjakin is the youngest player in history to reach Grandmaster status, which he achieved at age 12. He is currently rated at 2785. He had won the Candidates Tournament, after a multi-year qualifying sequence, to earn the right to challenge Carlsen.

Carlsen’s no slouch either.

He achieved Grandmaster at age 13, the third youngest ever to do so.

At age 5, when he learned chess, he could also recall the area, population, flag and capital of every nation in the world. As a Grandmaster he has earned a rating of 2882, the highest in history.

Dan secured tickets for him and me for the VIP room, which I described above. About 100 chess buffs populated the room, kibitzing the moves of the current game which was taking place in the adjacent chamber and was being shown on the wall screens around the VIP room.

There were also chess boards and sets on coffee tables throughout the room, where the guests could play for fun.

Dan and I had a game. I won’t say who won.

Some of the guests were phenomenal.

A 6-year-old girl — barely tall enough to see over the board when she was seated at one of the low tables — was playing a man of about 50, who buried head in hands in concentration to keep up with the youngster. He would finally move, whereupon she immediately countered with her move and looked up at him with a sly grin. It was great sport to watch.

In the chamber where Carlsen and Karjakin were locked in battle, their board and table were set back from a floor-to-ceiling glass partition. We could enter the chamber and watch the actual match from the darkened entry portion of the room, but the players and board were too far beyond the glass to let us follow the action. That was what the wall screens in the VIP room were for.

In tournament chess, each player has two hours to make 40 moves. Time is kept on a special chess clock next to the board. If no one wins after those hours have expired, or if there’s not a draw, then another, shorter number of moves is made in a reduced time slot, and so forth.

Forty moves in two hours per player seems very slow if you’re unfamiliar with chess. Usually, for Grandmasters, it’s not nearly enough time. They think many moves ahead (my limit is about three moves), and in their minds explore scores of possible sequences before actually moving a piece.

A win counts as one point, and if the players draw, each receives half a point. The championship match is a series of 12 games; first player to 6½ points is the champ. Players alternate playing the white and black pieces, since white always moves first and therefore has a slight advantage in that game.

The players played one game each afternoon, with a day off after every two games. The 2016 championship went the full 12 games, with each player winning one game. The other 10 games were all draws. So the score was tied 6-6 at the end of the 12-game sequence.

So the tie-break kicked in.

It was a four-game set, with much shorter time periods. The first two of those games were draws, but Carlsen won the final two games in the set, and thereby retained his world championship.

You have to be either independently wealthy or possessed of a very high rating to devote your life to chess.

I am neither.

But I very much enjoy the game, the concentration of thought it requires and the study of chess history and chessplayers of the past.

Taken together, over the past 150 years, they’re a certifiably squirrelly bunch.