Don't go getting the wrong idea. This was in broad daylight, out in the open, at the chess pavilion. Last Friday was a gorgeous day, the lake the color of jade, the wind blowing in from the northwest. I'd heard about the cutthroat competition on the chess risers there, seen the players from Lake Shore Drive, and wanted to revisit the game I'd played fairly well back in high school. (Yeah, I was on the chess team; wanna make something of it?) Yet over the years whatever skills I possessed had atrophied. I don't know nothin' about the French or the calculus I took, and as I gave up my queen to stave off checkmate it was clear I didn't recall much more about chess. I was trying to complicate the play in this game of speed chess and take advantage of the five-minutes-to-two advantage I'd been spotted on the clock, but it ran quickly to its inevitable conclusion.

Nevertheless it felt good to be sitting in the sun, to be distracted by the occasional big wave splashing over the revetment that runs north from Oak Street Beach, and to be playing chess again, even if I was losing $3 on the game. It helped that the opposition was a nice guy, though he showed no mercy on the board.

Afterward, Ron Washington told me he's been playing at the pavilion whenever weather permits for 20 years, mostly for stakes of $3 a game. A part-time cabbie, he also gives chess lessons for $20 an hour--most teachers charge $40, he insisted--at the pavilion and in the winter months at a nearby Starbucks. I asked if this makes him a living. "I do all right," he said. There are always players at the pavilion, he said--more on the weekends of course--and most play for money, though there are free games as well. Chess is as popular as ever, he said, though the renaissance suggested in recent newspaper stories about inner-city high school teams is probably exaggerated. Aside from the pavilion, he said, "you have to know where to go" to find a good game.

....

I said I'd picked up the game during the mania over the 1972 world-championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. "That's when everybody picked it up," Washington said. Him too? "Oh no, I couldn't wait for them," he added, without saying exactly how long he'd been playing. He knows the game. He whomped me with a mildly unconventional English opening, which begins with the advance of the queen's bishop's pawn, while most games begin with a move by the king's or queen's pawn. Five-minute speed chess, played with a two-faced clock that times each player separately, calls on a player's knowledge of set openings, and the English was a good choice to throw at an unknown opponent. I could have been anybody, even a master who needed $3, but when I uncertainly tried to respond with the old Nimzo-Indian defense I used to play against the queen's pawn, Washington knew I was out of my element and made short work of me. He was very nice about it, though, and later said he studies the game constantly. "You have to if you're gonna survive on chess," he explained.