The other night, my youngest son and I found ourselves with some time alone at the house. With my knee the way it is, playing basketball or soccer is not possible, so I suggested we watch a show or play some Mario or something.<\/p>\n
I left him to set things up while I took care of some quick chores.<\/p>\n
When I came back, he’d set up a chess board on the ottoman.<\/p>\n
“Really?” I said, sitting down on the couch with a smile. “You wanna go?”<\/p>\n
“You’re going down!” he said.<\/p>\n
The board was turned so that I had the white pieces. “Are you sure?\u00a0You’re even letting me go first?”<\/p>\n
“It won’t matter.”<\/p>\n
…and we settled down to Chess the way it was meant to be played, with jokes and trash-talking and a whole lot of tension. The rest of the family\u00a0came home halfway through the\u00a0game.<\/p>\n
“No way,” his brother said. “Who’s winning?”<\/p>\n
“It’s really close,” I said. “It could go either way.”<\/p>\n
“I’m crushing him,” my opponent said.<\/p>\n
Then he made his biggest mistake of the game. It wasn’t an obvious mistake, but it guaranteed I’d take one of\u00a0his rooks in the next three moves.<\/p>\n
“Are you sure about that?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Oh yeah!”<\/p>\n
“Take another look,” I suggested. “You can take it back if you want to.”<\/p>\n
“I’m good.”<\/p>\n
His brother jumped on the bandwagon. “You’re going down, Daddy! You’re going down!”<\/p>\n
“Perhaps not,” I said, moving a pawn.<\/p>\n
The moves progressed. I took the\u00a0rook, which exposed his bishop, which would eventually force his king into a very bad situation.<\/p>\n
“Oh no,” he groaned as he figured out the pattern that was developing.<\/p>\n
“Can I help?” his brother said.<\/p>\n
Usually, we have a strict “no-kibitzing” rule during chess. You can watch and spectate, but you can’t suggest moves. In this case, though, I figured there was no point to that. “Sure,” I said.<\/p>\n
The two of them huddled together over the board, strategizing against me. They\u00a0stretched the game out a lot longer than I thought possible, but in the end, I won.<\/p>\n
“Good game,” I said. “That was really close. . . up until that one move.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” he said. “But\u00a0I know which one that was.”<\/p>\n
“Next time,” I said.<\/p>\n
“You know it!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The true spirit of Chess. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DpYi-chess","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}