Chapter 7: Peter’s after school adventure

Dean convinced me.

I will give it a go after school.

I still couldn’t believe everything that happened to him today.

I wanted to try for that.

Yesterday, I couldn’t conceive of this, but now, Dean had done it, so maybe I could.

Dean walked with me to the chess room. It was on the top floor at the very back.

“Dude, you can do this.” Dean said and massaged my shoulders.

“Yeah.” I squeaked out and entered the chess room.

It was not big nor was it anything you wouldn’t expect.

There were tables with chess boards and chairs.

The walls were covered in inspirational posters.

A few chess members were playing games but Mr. Henckle, the chess teacher, was not yet present.

I wandered around while the other students ignored me.

I finally found myself staring out a window.

In the distance I could just see a few girls standing around smoking.

Wow, they can see girls from here. Well, you couldn’t really see them that well, but still, girls.

“They stand there and smoke every break.” Frederick said beside me.

He was the chess champion of our country.

He was a mini-god.

“Oh.” I mouthed.

“You can’t see much.” He added.

“Could use binoculars or a telescope I guess?” I commented back - trying to stay in control as I talked with this tier 2 student.

“Good idea, not sure why we never thought of that.” Frederick commented.

Did Frederick just compliment me?

Did he say I had a good idea?

Maybe I could do this.

Mr. Henckle finally arrived.

“Oh, Peter, do you want to join the chess club?” He asked me, looking very skeptical.

“Yes, sir.” I replied.

“Do you know how to play?” He asked.

“Yes, sir.” I answered.

“Ok, well, let’s have a game and I will see if you can join us.” Mr.Henckle said as he sat down on the white side of a chess board.

I joined him and waited for his move.

Everyone else was ignoring us as they played each other or read chess books.

“Let’s see what you can do Peter.” Mr.Henckle said as he moved his first piece.

The opening moves of the game were very uneventful, he was playing very conservative so I matched his style.

“Interesting, you do know how to play.” My confidence started to sore.

As we continued to play, I began to realize that Mr.Henckle was much better than me, but it was just nice to play a human and not a computer.

He seemed to purposely make sub-optimal moves to see what I would do.

I just played a very conservative game and tried to prolong it as long as possible.

After about 20 minutes, Frederick walked over to watch.

Shit, why did he have to do that?

I was doing fine - this was why I had never joined before.

I was good when playing the computer or one on one with no one watching, but as soon as someone started to watch, I started to doubt myself.

‘Should I move the pawn, what if it’s a trap, then the knight would be better, but that could be too aggressive, would the pawn be too passive. What about the queen, no, do not expose her too much, I could castle, that’s often a good move’ So I castled, paused, and realized that I could not have made a worse mistake.

Two moves later, it was over.

“You played well Peter until Fred started to watch. Is that why you haven’t joined us before?” Mr.Henckle asked.

“Yeah, I get nervous.” I replied.

“Ah, all chess matches will have someone watching. But I can fix that. We spend time every practice session working on dealing with distractions and maintaining the correct cone of focus.” He informed me.

We were joined by the other 7 members of the club.

“Everyone here has heard this story but I think you need to hear it Peter and it’s a good reminder to the rest.” He explained.

“Years ago, when coaches could still sit directly behind the player, in fact, this incident caused the rule change banning chairs directly behind players.

The match was the semi-final for the championship. It was not expected to be a very even match. On one side was the reigning champion and the other was someone who lucked out in the past 2 matches - his opponent both times had made really stupid mistakes late in the game.

As expected, the champion started to easily take apart the challenger’s board. Until something happened, the champion started to make stupid mistakes. Maybe not as stupid as your castling, but very poor decisions.

The challenger was coached by his father and it seems his sister, who was sitting in the other chair. She had moved both her feet onto the chair, hugging her legs to her chest. For an outsider, it would appear that she was nervous. In fact, as she was wearing a skirt and she was actually exposing her pussy to our champion. This was such a distraction, as you can imagine, that he started making stupid mistakes and lost fairly quickly.

Of course, he complained to the officials and everyone who would listen, but just like the other 2 people our challenger beat, everyone just thought our champion was being a sore loser.

The challenger went on to win the championship using the same tactic - however, in the finals, there were more people around and someone did notice her.