Grandblunderers > grandmasters

Pictured here is the result of Howard and Arnav’s first game against each other, which resulted in a stalemate and atrocious accuracy ratings.

Even though we are quite possibly the worst chess players alive, we feel like the best players in the world when we win by timing our opponent out while down half our army.

It was 1 a.m. during winter break, and Howard and Arnav were on a Discord call playing virtual chess against each other. As Howard attempted the four-move checkmate like he does every game, Arnav played openings he learned from watching YouTube, like the London System and Queen’s Gambit. While we may look like average chess players, our cover was blown once one of us accidentally moved a queen right into a diagonal covered by an opposing bishop.

But since neither of us is capable of identifying and acting upon such blunders, it often does not matter. In the slim chance that the other player actually captures the hanging queen, the phrase, “I’m bad” promptly follows along with resignation.

Our games often end in draws. They are always entertaining and frustrating messes, and they would probably make any experienced chess player lose hope in humanity.

We both started playing chess regularly in early December after deciding to play one game after copy editing our newspaper’s print issue.

It was also the same day that Howard peaked in his illustrious chess career when he participated in the Fall Interschool Tournament Team Battle chess tournament earlier in the day. It was a casual competition hosted by Sacred Heart Prep and the top five scorers out of SHS’s seven participants counted for the chess team’s final score.

Howard snuck into fifth place with five points, with one win from a resignation right at the start of the game, one actual win and one draw by repetition. Each tie added one point and each win added two, with extra points being awarded for win streaks. Of course, our friend, junior Andrew Hong, who happens to be a grandmaster, contributed just a little more than Howard, earning 55 points and leading the school to a 2-point win over the second-place team.

Although Howard’s exploits were nothing to brag about, the team wouldn’t have won without him.

While Howard was valiantly blundering for the team’s interschool tournament title, Arnav was relentlessly fighting on chess.com to gain the virtual rating points, or elo. Through inhaling videos by International Master Levy Rozman, known as GothamChess on YouTube, Arnav learned a multitude of tactics and opening schemes that he experiments with to evade Howard’s predictable four move checkmate attempts (despite this, he still falls for obscure versions of this idiotic checkmate).

A few days after our first game of chess, Andrew decided to join us on Discord calls on many days during winter break. When Andrew joined, he tried to beat his own world record of puzzles solved within three minutes on LiChess puzzle storm (eventually succeeding near the end of break) while we emulsified ourselves in the hopeful gamble of winning games of chess against random virtual players.

Periodically, Andrew looks at how we’re doing in our chess matches and more often than not, says, “You’re royally screwed.” This wouldn’t be surprising news to us since we’re both rated around 450 elo (around the 20th percentile of all players and very slightly lower than Andrew’s 2,968 rating) on bullet matches while averaging around 60% accuracy every match.

We’ve improved our chess skills over the past few weeks, but we’re still far from good since we seem to blunder our queen every other game.

Nevertheless, we enjoy playing the beautiful game. Though our chances of becoming truly good are remote, it’s fun to get a checkmate, whether they’re accidental or 100% planned.

Andrew calls these victories “immaculate” for some odd reason; we call them beginner’s luck.