One is always on the lookout for ways to make money.

One is also rather lazy and wishes

to avoid physical exertion. Today we will examine the game of chess because one has
read that there are people who make a lot of money by playing chess. Chess is game that,
as far as one can determine, is generally played sitting down. We are on the right track
here—money and chairs.

I have spent many playing hours chess. (I have spent many hours doing other things too,
but it is chess that we discussing here.) I have gotten to know the male members of my
family very well by playing chess with them. I have impressed them many a time during
our chess games. Only recently I made a move that stunned my male relative (a Harvard
boy, so of course he is brilliant). He was astonished. He said that never before in his life
had he seen anyone do anything quite that stupid.

People who are good at chess are considered very smart. I think that this is because they
have figured out a way to make a lot of money while sitting down most of the time. They
must be very smart. I sit down much of the time and work on this blog. But I haven’t
earned any money from it. That is why I am looking into the subject of chess.

In order to play chess, you will need some equipment.

This equipment can be really neat and really expensive. The expensive part won’t be a
problem once you start earning a lot of money by playing chess. Once you have made a
lot of money playing chess, you will be able to afford to buy a lot of nifty paraphernalia
from chess-related Web sites and catalogs. Just reading about some of the materials from
which all the stuff involved in playing chess is made of makes one realize how much
money you can make by playing chess. I mean, if there are shops that cater to people who
are willing to buy chess pieces made from pewter or brass or marble (those all sound very
pretty and weighty and handsome) and chess boards made of high gloss polyurethane
(that sounds really elegant), there must be a lot of money in this activity.

And there are those nifty clocks, too. You put a clock down and I make a move and then
punch the clock and not you and then try to rattle you, my opponent. The chess schlock
(spellcheckers) clock is used to measure how much time one is given to think. It would
make me nervous to know that I had only so much time to think, especially if my
opponent is glaring at me or sighing or snorting contemptuously or rolling his eyes. But I
would keep in mind that once I get good, I will make a lot of money and so ha ha.

Sometimes, I don’t even have to think about my moves. Indeed, it is probably just as well
that I not think about my moves as they generate guffaws amongst onlookers when I take
so long to do something not overly shrewd.

Male relative: You don’t want to do that.

Me: I don’t?
Male relative: No, you want to put it here. Here, I’ll show you.
At this point, the male relative takes the piece from your (actually my) hand and puts it
into place and I think, although am never sure, that he begins to play my side of the board
as well as his and I think one of us wins, which is all very nice and things end amicably
and dinner is ready. I have no doubt that my male opponents in the world of professional
chess will be every bit as nice as my male relatives.

I think there are female chess champions and that they make a lot of money, although one
never sees anything about them in the paper. I am assuming that that is because women
are so good at chess that they are able to retire on their winnings early in their careers and
thereafter leave the field to the men. All the more reason for my female readers and me to
get started on our professional chess careers. The sooner we do, the sooner we can retire.

Famous chess players have competed against chess-playing computers and lost but got
lots of money for getting humiliated that way. I get humiliated playing chess a lot and
making a lot of money by doing so would be very nice.

Getting back to the equipment you will need. You will need a chessboard. A chessboard
has upon it 64 alternating black and white squares that are sometimes other colors. I
suggest having lots of rubber cement in the house because the little squares on the board
at my parents' are always coming loose, which is a bother. Once I am a rich chess
champion, I will buy a new chessboard. Maybe one made of ebony or maple or ash or
rosewood. I don’t know that I would recognize some of these materials if I saw them. But
I would have a manager who would handle all that for me and I would tell him to buy
only the best.

I have read that famous chess players are fussy about the conditions under which they
play. They are picky about lighting and venues and the number of spectators. I won't fuss
at all as long as I’m making a lot of money.

So you will need a board with alternating squares. That is, one black and one white or not
and so on. Color seems to be a big issue in chess. For example:

Color matters because there have to be different colors on the chessboard. That is so that
you can tell where you are supposed to put your pieces. Or so that your nephew knows
where to put your pieces for you, so that you don’t do anything that you don’t want to do
or that he doesn’t want you to do and he is usually right since he is playing the game for
you, which is awfully sweet of him. If the chessboard were all of one color, it would be
hard to tell what is going on.

Color also matters because your pieces and your opponent’s are of different colors. This
also helps everyone determine what is going on, which is always useful when people are
playing a game.

Sometimes chess players take hours and hours or even days to play a game. At this point,
my chess games take only a few minutes, as my nephew says, “Checkmate,” a lot and I
think that either I have won or he has won. It is hard to tell given that I am not allowed to
move anything after I first stun him into silence by doing something colossally dumb.

One of you takes one of the pieces and you try to guess what color is in which hand. If
you get white or whatever the lighter of the colors is, you get to go first. Going first is a
great advantage, so many of my male relatives tell me, and they tell me exactly where to
move my pawn so as to gain the initiative. Initiative is important as it is part of strategy
and strategy is all in chess. You have to learn to think strategically. And tactically. And
quickly.

A pawn, by the way, is one of your pieces. And mine too, only mine are of a different
color from yours. This seems to be the point at which we should go over pieces since they
are what your nephews keep telling you not to move unless they say it is okay. It all has
to do with strategy and tactics, you see.

Pawns. You will get several of them. Um—eight. You will start with eight pawns. They
are rather useless and sit in front of things that you want to move somewhere but can’t
because the blasted pawns are in the way. You always try get one of the pawns all the way
to the other side of the board, which takes forever. But if you can do that, the pawn
becomes whatever you or you nephew want it to be to be--usually a queen because you
have lost yours by this point which your nephew scolds you for having been so careless
as to have allowed to have happened, which seems a bit hard on you given that he was
the one who took it.

The pawns are of minimal interest and often in the way, as I say, and there is some
opening gambit the you are supposed to use in which they are supposed to be employed
and you really should write that down. The pawns move in a straight line except in the
highly unlikely event that you have so arranged things that you find yourself in a position
to take one of your opponent's pieces, in which case they can move diagonally, as can
bishops and queens but not rooks and the knight moves in an L-shape fashion and you
lose many pieces to knights, damn things.

The king sits on a color different from the queen who sits on whatever color she is and
that is men and women for you.

It is important to protect the king because if you don’t, you could lose the game unless
you are playing someone really stupid. There is an interesting maneuver called "castling"
which involves the king and the rook and it is very irritating when your male relatives do
that, your having forgotten that they can and here you thought you were doing so well.
That is so like them.

The king is the most important piece on the chessboard, but the queen is the most
powerful. So like her. As noted above (and this would be true even if it had not been
noted above), it is important to keep your queen if at all possible as she can do everything
except, for some reason, what a knight does. Must be something to do with the rules of
chivalry. She can go way, way down the board provided that doesn’t jump over other
pieces in a way that upsets your male relatives who say that you can’t do that and neither
can she. She can scoop things up right and left and is clearly a handy thing to have.

The rooks look a little like pawns only they are higher up in the social scale, wearing
fancy armor and helmets and are bigger. They can go in a straight line and be shifted
around by your opponent in such a way as to cause you maximum irritation.

The bishop can move only diagonally and must stay on only one color. There are two of
them on different colors and you must remember which color each bishop is restricted to
staying on because if they end up on the wrong color your male relatives get all fussed
and ask whether you can keep anything straight and you get fussed and say that
considering that you haven’t been allowed to move a single piece in the last 45 minutes, it
is hardly surprising that you have lost track of what is what, so pooh!

There is a handy rule in chess that if you keep your hand on a piece, you haven’t actually
made the move. Take full advantage of this rule. Put your piece down and look at your
opponent. If he is shaking his sadly at yet more evidence of your total lack of skill in
chess you probably should not make that move. Look around and see what could happen
if you were to put your piece down in the place in which you are considering putting it. If
there are any pieces of your opponent's nearby or even way, way down the board that
could swoop in and gobble up your piece retreat at once. You definitely don’t want to
have your piece knocked over with that obnoxious finesse that your male relatives
sometimes treat themselves to. Luckily, they are usually gentlemen or men capable of
behaving in a gentlemanly fashion and indulge themselves in such discourtesies very
rarely. And your opponents on the international chess circuit surely won't engage in such
things, and you will soon be mixing with such people provided that you practice
diligently and think strategy, strategy, strategy.