A moment of deliberate, grumpy, old fashioned-ness.

[Kaputnik]

I don't expect everyone here to share my interest in chess, but I'll try to make this as generally relatable as I can.

I don't play in as many chess tournaments as I used to in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In fact, I did not play at all, except for online correspondence games, between about 2004 and 2017, for reasons of "life getting in the way". Since then, I've tried to get in a few major tournaments a year, which generally involved traveling to another town for a few days, and staying in a hotel. Some tournaments, such as the World Open in Philadelphia, can have hundreds of players, although not all in the same section. As you can imagine, those kind of events have mostly been canceled since fairly early this year. And our local chess club, which met at a public library, does not expect to resume before April or May at the earliest.

Many of the major tournaments have moved online for now. I've played in the Pittsburgh and Chicago Opens from my living room in Connecticut, and have signed up for another one that would normally be played in a suburb of Cincinnati. There are a number of issues with online play which I won't get into here, but sitting staring at a computer screen for hours is somehow less satisfying that sitting in a hotel ballroom staring at a real tournament sized set for hours. Although many would prefer to do neither, I'm sure.

Anyway, I was recently reminded of a particular historical game which I wanted to look up out of sheer curiosity. A modern way to do that would have been to run a search in a chess database program (SCID in my case, since I don't have a Windows computer). Or if I wanted to play through a game from a book, then to use a computer or tablet app instead of a real chess set.

Instead, I unpacked one of my tournament sets, moving aside the smaller one which is more practical for just playing through games on a normally sized table. I got out my Dover reprint of Morphy's Games of Chess, by Philip W. Sergeant, a reprint of a book from 1915. For added old-fashioned-ness, the book is in English descriptive notation, now largely supplanted by algebraic, and a fairly old-fashioned type of descriptive at that.

There is no earthly reason to set up a chess clock to play through a game, but I wanted to check the battery. Yes, that's it.

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