On Saturday I attended the London Chessboxing Championship, which was more or less what it said on the tin. For those unfamiliar with the emergent hybrid sport, there is chess, and there is boxing. Every bout alternates between successive rounds of speed chess and boxing until one of the contenders secures a checkmate on the board or a knockout in the ring (along with the usual victory conditions for resignation or time).

It should be no surprise that chessboxing’s promoters sell it as a perfect biathlon of mind and body. Chess has an ancient mystique of intellect about it even among those who barely know the game, and boxing is far and away the most story-rich of sports. Both activities stand as cultural paragons of some indefinite struggle of individual mastery. And the combination is hardly arbitrary: the boxing forces the chess to be played under conditions of high adrenaline and extreme physical fatigue, imposing a test of mental stamina quite unlike any other.

Not so clear is whether the chess takes a toll on the boxing. Andrea Kuszewski has argued that the most cognitively taxing part of the game is the rapid task-switching, which demands superb emotional control; indeed, chessboxing may prove to be exceptionally well suited to training one’s aggression management. In theory, a good chessboxer has to box with the ability to play chess very shortly in mind. (In practice, as we will see, this is not necessarily the case.)

The London event at the Scala was reportedly the world’s biggest night of chessboxing to date, with five bouts on the card drawing a capacity crowd of 1000. Before the first match, my own estimate was 400-500 spectators on the floor with many more in the balcony and VIP lounge, but the audience swelled as the night wore on and the official count became more plausible. One of the organizers called it the largest live audience on record for a game of chess, though I believe Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky drew similar numbers in the Piatigorsky Cup (Santa Monica, 1966), and that’s only the record in the United States.

Nevertheless, the sport shows signs of rapid expansion, filling a former cinema palace kitty-corner to King’s Cross that doubled the capacity of its previous venue in Tufnell Park. There are rumblings that talks have begun to bring chessboxing to Royal Albert Hall next year, presumably to catch some of the Olympic spillover, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Pressboxing

All of this you can already gather from the press—and for years now, there has been a lot of press. The Guardian covered chessboxing as early as 2005, when the sport was not too far removed from its inauspicious modern beginnings as a novelty act by the Berlin performance artist Iepe Rubingh, who just so happened to win his own inaugural world championship in 2003. The London club was founded in 2008 with an initial membership of seven, although it is now arguably the most prominent of the multiple international clubs that have sprung up outside of Berlin. London, too, handed its first title of British Heavyweight Chessboxing Champion to the club’s founder, Tim Woolgar.

Put this way, one might come away thinking the whole activity’s integrity was suspect—and a few observers have said as much. Justin Horton, who writes for the Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog (which, incidentally, is running an outstanding series of posts on tracking down the chess players in a 19th-century painting), has repeatedly taken journalists to task for reproducing the promotional claims around chessboxing without further corroborating research. Horton calls chessboxing a “circus” and a “swindle”, marking as his prime targets the sport’s alleged popularity and the chess competence of the predominantly unrated participants. Private Eye has similarly attacked the coverage of chessboxing as a case of media hacks being suckered by a small-time carnival-standard affair.

So one does have to be careful not to overstate chessboxing’s reach. It undeniably has a bit of a weird-news appeal that makes every event a renewable story, but this also means that in every article, quite a lot of space is wasted on gawking over the novelty of the affair (or treating it with prepared derision) instead of seeing it for what it is.

My impression was of a sport where the growth of spectator interest is far outstripping that of participation—and it shows. It is indeed impressive that Saturday’s event drew the audience it did when only three years ago, the London club boasted of attracting the highest turnout for a chess match in the United Kingdom since Kramnik/Kasparov in 2000—an estimated crowd of 150. That is a clear promotional success. But good publicity and a firm conceptual foundation aren’t enough for a game to thrive; the players and their tactics have to be interesting enough to be worth following long-term, or there’s no incentive for a one-time curiosity seeker to return. There needs to be a recognizable sense of expertise, of nuances open to appreciation—and that depends on a base of participation vast enough to propel the standard of competition skyward.

If chessboxing is like any other competitive club activity I’ve seen, be it Scrabble or parliamentary debate, doubtless there’s a great deal of involvement behind the scenes that never makes it into the ring in front of a paying audience—trainees and casual fighters who fall back to logistics when it comes to the big events. (Kat Sark’s report on the Berlin/London chessboxing summit in June, which cast an eye on gender equality, suggests this is the case.) This is normal and expected, but until there is a deeper competitive pool, I doubt we will see a true escalation of skill towards the game’s natural ceiling—which, it must be said, looks very high.

But enough of the ringside theory. Let’s have a look at the fights.

The fight card

1. Chris Levy (white) vs. Mike Botteley (black)

The opening bout on the undercard was advertised as having the strongest combined Elo rating in a chessboxing match. (Justin Horton has found this to refer not to the FIDE Elo, but the ECF equivalent; I think the term ‘Elo’ has been sufficiently genericized to include Elo-like rating systems that the implicit conversion is fair.) Despite an interesting start from the Réti Opening, Levy fell far behind on the clock, exiting round 3 of chess down by a knight with 1:13 remaining. Unable to secure a knockout in the boxing round, Levy whittled the endgame down to a dance between king and king-pawn until he ran out of time. (The endgame itself was difficult for the audience to follow, as the display board couldn’t keep up with the action.) Win for Botteley in chess round 4.

2. Emma Richardson vs. Kath Dodson

Billed as the first women’s chessboxing match, this was a bout where the boxing clearly took its toll on the chess, with plenty of material thrown away on both sides. The decisive moment came when Richardson gave up her queen in the third round of chess, after which Dodson missed a mate but quickly recovered to trap the white king. Richardson couldn’t find a way out of the impending mate and ran out the clock. Win for Dodson in chess round 3.

3. Ben Robinson vs. Richard Kavanagh

As a fellow spectator next to me exclaimed, “They’re not even the same size!” Kavanagh replaced Mark Lech on the ticket at the last minute and surely set a new record for the most heavily tattooed figure to grace a board. The chess turned out to be a formality: after Robinson spent much of the first boxing round looking well out of his weight class—at one point Kavanagh picked him up off the ground with one arm before the referee waved off the hold—he landed a devastating right hook from the corner that knocked his opponent down flat, scoring an unexpected TKO. Win for Robinson in boxing round 1.

4. Andrew McGregor vs. Hubert van Melick

For the heavyweight main event, the time constraints on the chess were relaxed to 12 minutes per player from the 7:30 that was allotted to the preceding bouts, and the audience was told to expect up to 11 rounds of chess and boxing apiece. There was an audible hush as the 6’11″ bearded ‘Man Mountain’ McGregor strode into the ring, draped in a scarlet cape and looking like he’d just come back from lugging Harry Potter off to school.

The match opened into the Italian Game and a defensive pawn structure on both sides, suggesting a more measured game than the others, but this never came to fruition. The first round of boxing was by far the most ferocious of the night, and van Melick chased McGregor around the ring until McGregor’s cornerman threw in the towel. The disappointed audience erupted in boos as Tim Woolgar and the other officials took the stage to award van Melick the Bobby Fischer Belt. (Yes, there was a gaudy championship belt emblazoned with the image of Bobby Fischer. Fischer, who felt exploited by something as innocent as the title of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, would have been furious.)

Keith Kolb, who fought in the final match (and who, like McGregor, flew over from Los Angeles to compete), later revealed that McGregor had only met his cornerman that night and was very upset with the call. He was on the back foot and van Melick was driving him into the corner, yes, but the letdown of seeing the main event end so abruptly cast an unfortunate shadow over the whole evening.

5. Charlie Hayter vs. Keith Kolb

The final bout, which wasn’t listed in the original advertising and was no doubt added late, followed a course that paralleled the main event: once again, the chess looked to be one of the more promising and defensive games of the day, and once again, we never got to see the middlegame owing to an early knockdown by Hayter. Kolb’s cornerman threw in the towel, only this time it was clearly the appropriate call. Win for Hayter in boxing round 1.

Check, please

With three of the bouts finishing before we could see the boxing’s effect on the chess, it’s safe to say that the London Chessboxing Championship fell short of exhibiting the promise of the game. This was apparently anomalous; the summaries of the last event in March suggest that matches do tend to go longer, one of them (the middleweight fight between Svein Clouston and Alan Riley) being decided on points after the full 11 rounds.

I’m not sure what can be done to ensure more consistently entertaining bouts, but one possibility is to have the fighters wear headgear, which Andrew McGregor already requires at his club in California. Purists will say this takes away from the visceral pleasure of boxing—nobody ever imagines it with headgear—but it could have the effect of being more welcoming to new competitors as well as limiting the risk of an early exit in the boxing segment. A quick and dramatic knockout is fun to watch in boxing, but in chessboxing it trivializes the chess completely. (Then again, nobody complained when Robinson landed his hit on Kavanagh—easily the boxing highlight of the show.)

Less tractable is the problem that the sport favours boxers new to chess over chess players new to boxing. Unless you fall into an obvious opening trap, it’s much easier for a neophyte chess player to survive four minutes of chess than it is for an inexperienced boxer to make it through the first round of boxing, even when the opponents are well matched. The skill curve in chess rises astronomically at the higher levels of play, but its minimum standard of fitness isn’t nearly as stringent as that of the boxing half. Furthermore, chessboxing is by its very nature designed to produce poor play on the board, full of mishaps that are visible to the audience but not so perceptible to someone who has just shaken off the gloves. It may never be a game that is open to producing quality chess, which limits its appeal to audiences that don’t take the game seriously either. But in another way this flaw may be an asset: the liability of the players to make mistakes encourages them to wriggle out of theoretically lost positions and play their games through to the bitter end.

Going by what I saw on Saturday, there is a lot of minor tidying that can be done with the production. Aside from the problem of the computer display of the board, which was not ideal for tracking endgame patterns at blazing speeds, the audio for the chess commentary was not very clear. As such, the chess was difficult to follow. It didn’t help, either, that much of the commentary was aimed at an elementary crowd. The commentator was International Master Malcolm Pein, chess columnist for The Telegraph and the voice of Fritz, who indisputably had the knowledge and experience for the job; but from the moment he announced 1. e4 as “Bobby Fischer’s move! That’s Bobby Fischer’s move!” it was clear I wasn’t the target audience—and I’m someone who hasn’t held down a tournament rating since junior.

I’m not saying that the commentary should dive into book jargon without much in the way of explanation, but I would have liked more insight into the positions and their strategic shapes. Commentary has the power to add exceptional spectator value for audiences with only a passing idea of tactics and strategy without talking down to their level. Witness this video of a blitz game from 1994 between Vassily Ivanchuk and the current World Chess Champion, Viswanathan Anand.

This is perhaps a bit hopeful. Bundled with an awkward breakdancing pre-show, Frankensteinian mimes, and a frustrated hula dancer whose music kept cutting off, chessboxing was first and foremost packaged as a grand night out in London. And yes, while entertainment is where all spectator sports begin, I do feel as though the tackiness of the packaging underserves the game itself. For one thing, it sets the audience apart from the competitors like visitors from animals at the zoo: one is there for the detached amusement of the other. It’s worth remembering that for all the titanic reputation of Muhammad Ali or Lennox Lewis, boxing has always made for great stories because it creates such identifiable struggles. It’s the everyman’s sport, the same sweet science that gave us Terry Malloy.

As someone whose favourite spectator sport happens to be StarCraft II, and who recently joined thirty others to watch a professional tournament broadcast in a 19th-century pub (along with a hundred thousand others worldwide, hundreds of them in bars), the concept of chessboxing wasn’t outlandish to me at all; besides, I’d been aware of it for years. I’m certainly not one to judge a sport that, past its novelty, has the genuine potential to be great. What was alienating was everything surrounding it, this mysterious metropolitan ‘nightlife’ I’d heard of only in the urban legendarium. But when Iepe Rubingh brought chessboxing to the fore eight years ago, the game picked its target audience and committed to its peculiar cultural veneer. I’d say the strategy is working out pretty well, but I’m not so sure it’s ideal for inviting new contenders into the ring.

(The photographs in this post come from galleries of the event by James Bartosik and Ray Morris-Hill.)

Today, it looked like this:

The Times covered the day as it unfolded, and the Telegraph reports we should expect at least six more days of snow. Here in East Anglia the weather has struck me as tame and, to be honest, rather pleasant; the snow is fluffy and there isn’t much wind. If this is what passes for a meteorological calamity on a national scale, I shudder to think how Britons would take the conditions I saw in Alberta only a week ago. The difference is in preparedness, I suppose.

I don’t think my potato chip snobbery is a consequence of marketing; I liked these snacks before the organic foods craze ever came to fruition, and I savoured them for flavour and texture alone. But there’s no denying that the companies behind specialty chips pay careful attention to packaging their foods to evoke nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial authenticity. They appeal to images of the harvest and of kettle-cooking by hand. You certainly see this embodied in high-end brands like the king of root vegetable snacks, Terra Chips (who substantiate their boasts in every way with an astonishing assortment of vegetables and spices), but midrange brands that can be found in supermarkets and convenience stores like Miss Vickie’s (which, by the way, has really gone downhill since it was acquired by Frito-Lay and switched from peanut to vegetable oil) also call upon a rustic ideal where their products, in their words, “remind people of a less-hurried time, when people cooked with care and patience.” We know, of course, that a high-volume national product like Miss Vickie’s isn’t exactly a pastoral manufacture, but that’s how they distinguish themselves from the competition all the same.

I’ve sampled a few of the potato chip brands here in Britain, where they are known as crisps. So far, I’ve been unimpressed, and the potatoes are clearly to blame. I know this from having tried the control group of the global Kettle brand, which is here a cut above your typical crisp, yet oddly stale and inert in comparison to the North American equivalent. Most well-travelled individuals have likely experienced this sort of brand-name dissonance with respect to breakfast cereals; it’s a shock to many a Canadian when travelling abroad that the formula for Kellogg’s Special K everywhere else doesn’t taste anything like Rice Krispies like they do at home.

Then I discovered Phileas Fogg.

Phileas Fogg potato crisps are nothing special, although their Indian Red Chilli mini-poppadoms are one of those unique and delightful pleasures of the British imperial legacy that I haven’t seen before. What caught my attention about these snacks, though, was the branding. The copywriting is magnificent. Far from the usual blurb about the innocence of cottage life, the inscription on every bag aims for a loftier romance:

Embodying the pioneering spirit of the legendary PHILEAS FOGG, our snacks have been created using carefully selected authentic ingredients from around the world to satisfy the most discerning culinary explorer.

It gets better. Here’s the description of their Sea Salt and Indonesian Black Peppercorn crisps:

Indonesia; the breathtaking land of volcanoes, emerald green pastures and the home of our black peppercorns. Here they are known as the king of all the spices and are treated almost as royalty. The pepper farmers are fiercely protective of their crops and watch over them as they dry in the sun. We think it’s worth all the trouble. They give our crisps a satisfyingly balanced flavour—fruity and fresh, with a hint of fiery heat.

And those mini-poppadoms I mentioned earlier:

India. Land of mogul palaces, mystical cities, vibrant colours and delicately spiced poppadoms. Ours are carefully flavoured with hot and fiery red chillies from the Guntur region. Then they are sent to Chennai in the sweltering south to be used in the creation of the perfect poppadom. For an evocative flavour they are sun dried and then cooked to split-second perfection. This gives a crisp, bubbly texture that melts in your mouth, leaving a gentle, aromatic and authentic taste.

If they were really taking this seriously they would have called the city Madras instead of Chennai, but that’s a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. What astounds me is how the brand has co-opted the name of Jules Verne’s quintessential globetrotter, Phileas Fogg, as a great symbol of imperial adventure who brings knowledge and goods from faraway lands to home soil. Their television advertisement speaks of Fogg as a real historical figure! Nowadays, popular fiction in all media is so tied up in licensing and property rights that we see contemporaneous promotional products like C3PO’s and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, but one can only wonder what cultural or literary sources snack foods will draw on a hundred years from now, not to promote the original text but to deploy it as an emblem of a more flavourful time and place.

Not content with restricting myself to the usual landmark-hopping tourist experience of scheduling ill-lit drive-by shootings (now in digital), I thought it would be rewarding to amble around the City That Sleeps As Much As I Do with little planning and forethought, and let adventure ambush me as it will. At times, the excursion assumed the manner of a pilgrimage. Mecca, with less ululation. This isn’t to say that I didn’t tick my way down the usual checklist—the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more navigable corners of Central Park, a Broadway production or two—but stopping there wouldn’t have made it my New York, and like any good tourist, I populated my list of things to see with a few sentimental items, guided as always by the invisible hand of personal entitlement.

So when I wasn’t busy getting lost in more of Central Park than most New Yorkers will ever see, I went looking for Scrabble and jazz.

For readability’s sake, let’s switch to point form. I intend to meander, after all.

First, Scrabble:

• If you’ve read Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, the definitive book on the subculture of competitive Scrabble, you know about the “parkies”—the legendary players in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park, some of them reputed to be the best players outside of the tournament circuit. (This was before the rise of online play, of course; now there’s a whole generation of players on ISC and Scrabulous who have never touched a real set of tiles.) Naturally, I went hunting. To my chagrin, the parkies were nowhere to be found: the entire northwest quadrant of Washington Square Park had been torn up for restoration.
• This didn’t stop a chess hustler from pulling me aside at the southwest corner, where the chess tables lie. Now, I know I’m not very good at chess, and I accept his challenge fully expecting to lose a few bucks. At five dollars a game, it doesn’t sound like such a bad proposition. What I didn’t foresee was how quickly he’d turn my pockets inside out. The first warning was when he pulled out a clock and set it to five minutes apiece. Dear God, chess I can handle—but speed chess? I don’t think it should come as a surprise that I lost the first game on time. My opponent swept the pieces aside and set up another game with the colours reversed, and the spicy taste of challenge was enough to pull me back in. With the pressure of the clock now firmly in mind, I tried to play like a speed demon. Careless, that: his queen kicked me in the nuts in five or six moves.
• After a reluctant escape—and believe me, that Stockholm-syndrome part of me wanted to remain captive, especially when the hustler offered to play without time constraints—I toured the perimeter of the park just in case there was Scrabble about. Later, I passed by the chess corner again: there was a prowler amidst the tables, and an arrest in progress. The scene would have made for an exceptional photograph, but I thought better of it: I wasn’t about to get involved in a mess in front of the NYPD and the most dangerous chess players in all of Manhattan.
• Still intent on playing Scrabble with people I didn’t know, I paid a visit to the weekly meeting of NSA Club #56, directed by former World Champion Joel Sherman. This was actually my first experience of club play outside Alberta, and the fact that it was one of the most competitive clubs in North America (and also featured in Word Freak) was a bonus. “G.I. Joel” runs four rounds a night in two divisions, and works out all the pairings himself. The Manhattan club plays under a time limit of 23 minutes instead of the usual 25, and several of the players have boards shaped like apples. There is also a frozen yogurt machine on the 14th floor.
• “Nicholas Tam? From Calgary?” I was flattered that Joel Sherman (the Joel Sherman!) had at least a cursory recognition of who I was, given that Scrabble-wise, I haven’t done anything that I would be known for in the last four years at least. (Joe Edley knew my name when I was introduced to him at New Orleans, but that was back in my prime, when I was bounding up the standings 100 rating points at a time.) Then I remembered that I was talking to a guy who knew every word in the dictionary up to nine or ten letters. At one point, another player argued that he was certain BEJESTS* was a word. “Look in this book,” said Joel, holding a dictionary shut. “You will find BEJEEZUS and BEJEWEL. You will not find BEJESTS*.”
• The two divisions at the Manhattan club are divided by NSA rating, with the boundary line at 1300. I was in the unique circumstance of being above 1300 before Orlando, and tumbling to about 1260 after my little four-day disaster, so Joel let me choose where I wanted to play. Naturally, I picked the upper division. I lost every game, and this time around, I couldn’t even post any decent scores. For record-keeping purposes, the club has a spread cap of 200 points—that is, you record a +200 or -200 even if the spread in the game exceeds that margin. I’m embarrassed to say that I had to use it twice.

And now, jazz:

• The first leg of my visit had the good fortune of coinciding with the Jazz in July festival at 92nd Street Y, a posh concert series directed by pianist Bill Charlap, who plays in every concert but refrains from carrying on like a star. If I had my way, I’d have attended every night: at the price of $25 per concert for under-35s, it wouldn’t have been infeasible. There was a concert dedicated to Leonard Bernstein featuring vocalist Kurt Elling, whom I saw wow Edmonton at the Citadel two years ago. An all-star tribute to George Shearing. Another tribute to Billy Strayhorn. A piano masterclass that regrettably overlapped with my trip to Orlando, though I received fair compensation for missing it: it took place on the apotheotic Day 3. I’m satisfied with what I did see: a piano jam on twin grands, featuring rotating permutations of Charlap, Billy Taylor, Bill Mays, and Cedar Walton, including a few solo improvisations and a two-pianos, eight-hands setting that involved more than a little on-the-fly seat-swapping. Or should I call it musical chairs?
• The most pleasant surprise of the piano jam was not a pianist at all, but cornetist Warren Vaché. This is the same Vaché whose recording with the Scottish Ensemble, Don’t Look Back, was the subject of a Paul Wells encomium not too long ago. Vaché has an ineffable stage presence that stops just short of calling too much attention to itself. When he isn’t delivering his pithy bebop aphorisms with clarity and grace, he responds to the music around him with a substrate of subtle gestures—a brush of the knee here, a straightening of the collar there, as Sandy Stewart (Charlap’s vocalist mother) danced over the lyrics of “Tea for Two”. Needless to say, I bought myself a copy of Don’t Look Back, which is every bit the landmark jazzer-with-strings recording that Wells venerates. To be fair, I was sold on it already, thanks to Vaché’s interpretation of what is probably my favourite Irish reel, the Percy Grainger setting of “Molly on the Shore”.
• I missed Monty Alexander when he played at the Calgary International Jazz Festival in June, but I caught his engagement at Birdland for about the same price—that is, before you count the souvenir polo shirt, chocolate martini, and succulent striploin steak. This isn’t the original Birdland, Birdland-comma-Lullaby-of, the Charlie Parker temple that witnessed the doorstep billy-clubbing of Miles Davis, which has long since closed. The Birdland name carries on at a fine little dinner establishment where they seat you along a semicircle of candlelit tables that hug a nine-foot Steinway handpicked by Oscar Peterson. In a trio setting, Alexander’s brand of jazz piano belongs to the same branch of the family tree as Peterson’s glistening swing, but with a homegrown Caribbean presence in its rhythmic underbelly. I was seated at a table from which I couldn’t see the keys, nor could I see bassist Hassan Shakur behind the lid of the piano; at first, this seemed to be a problem, but I seized on that whole other dimension of entertainment in live music performance: the facial expressions, the stomping of feet. It provides an insight into improvisational thought that we too often forget.
• I wasn’t about to leave New York without a visit to the Village Vanguard. For those of you who don’t know, the Village Vanguard—a cozy, intimate basement club with a fire-hazard capacity of 123 and no food—is a site of monumental importance in jazz history, the venue at which a staggering number of legendary concert recordings were produced. Chief among them are the last recorded sessions of the original Bill Evans Trio (Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Paul Motian on drums; LaFaro would die in a car accident two weeks later). As a piano enthusiast, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (originally released as Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby) is the crown jewel of my CD library. I’d say more, but Adam Gopnik’s article in The New Yorker will do more than I can to convince you that the Bill Evans engagement at the Vanguard was, and remains, a very, very big deal.
• So it was, to say the least, a special occasion for me to visit the Village Vanguard to see Paul Motian, the original Bill Evans Trio’s last surviving member. Motian played in a nonet setting—in essence, the septet from his 2006 album Garden of Eden plus Jacob Sacks on piano and Matt Maneri on viola. The curious thing about Motian is how he manages to remain a background presence, never overpowering his soloists and and never taking extended solos himself, while always doing something interesting whenever you consciously decide to pay attention to him. The music for the evening consisted mostly of originals with an emphasis on collective improvisation over free structures that appear to defy harmony, but somehow manage to remain coherent. There was only one standard: Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, the jazz canon’s preeminent funeral dirge.
• Here’s something I don’t get to do every day: solicit an autograph from Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard, a few feet away from a 47-year-old photograph on the wall of Motian sitting with Evans and LaFaro… at the Village Vanguard. Motian doesn’t look anything like his picture anymore, now that he’s shed the moustache (and indeed, any trace of hair on his head), and wears shades when he’s under the lights. I tell him that I wish I’d brought my Evans albums with me, to get his autograph on them as well. “Yeah, I heard from a lady in London,” he says, as he struggles to help me unseal a copy of his own CD. “She’s doing a documentary on Bill Evans, and she wants to interview me—fifty years later!”

I finished on a record of 10-18 (-533), ending up in 125th place of 133 players in Division 3. I was bottom-feeding all day, but at least I was feeding.

Truth be told, this was an unremarkable day. I didn’t come away with many stories to tell, though I did pay more visits to the challenge table than on the first three days combined. On one occasion, I opened the game with FEDEX for 48 points, drawing a challenge and buying myself an extra turn. My opponent didn’t know that FEDEX was added in the 2006 dictionary revision, along with a whole smattering of genericized trademarks like PYREX and KLEENEX. This worked to my advantage, since I’d placed the word in a risky position: if he knew the back extension, my opponent could have plopped an -ING on the end to make FEDEXING and hit the TWS for 60 points.

Really, though: that’s the most interesting thing that happened all day, unless you count the incident where my opponent and I were mistakenly assigned to Nadine Jacobson’s permanent location at Table 65. Nadine Jacobson, I should explain, is the blind player with the Braille Scrabble set who reads the board in caresses and keeps score on a Perkins Brailler. She famously refuses the extra playing time that she is entitled to on account of her handicap, preferring the standard allotment of 25 minutes per player simply because it’s fair.

This year’s National Scrabble Championship did not feature a televised final, unlike the ESPN-affiliated editions that ran from 2004 to 2006. It reverted to the old format, where Division 1 is treated like all the other divisions, with no separate best-of-five showdown. In a way, this is fairer—why shouldn’t the top prize go to the player with the best record?—but it’s also a shame, because the thought of witnessing a Richards-Cappelletto battle on a closed-circuit feed in a room full of kibitzing experts strikes me as both educational and intensely entertaining. Oh well: I could always trace my way through Nigel and Brian’s top-table matchups in Rounds 26 through 28 online.

So that just about wraps it up for the Orlando NSC. According to the full tsh report, this tournament chipped my rating from 1315 to 1254. In a way, it was Day 1 that did most of the damage; I went 10-11 in the remainder of the tournament, good enough to save my rating from too steep a plummet (i.e. I can still play in Division 2 at the WCSC). Nevertheless, I think it may be high time to start being concerned that I haven’t appreciably improved in the last four years: sooner or later I’ll have to face the decision to either shape up or ship out. You know which one I’ll pick.

(Day 4 bingos: REtAINER, RERAISE, ABATeRs, RECLINeR, OVERPILE*, RIsIBlE, OUTROSE*, RESoLVES, FLOATIER—bringing my tournament total to 38 bingos over 27 games played, which is merely ordinary and not reflective of the travesty that was my win-loss record.)

“Good intentions,” I said, “and bad tiles.”

I am now at 6-15 (-528), and sincerely having the time of my life. I may be losing, but at least I’m playing real Scrabble. In my 133-player division, I’ve gone from 133rd on Day 1 to 132nd on Day 2, and now I’m 131st. At this rate, I should finish the tournament in fourth-last place, a smidgen worse than New Orleans (where I finished 165th of 169).

So why am I having so much fun? Round 19, that’s why. Oh, golly. Let me tell you about Round 19—instantly one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played, and enough to make me stop worrying and love the bomb (aka the SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game). It was like falling all over again for a lost and unrequited love that had already jilted you a dozen times. Like making beautiful baroque music with her after months of distant longing and minimal conversation. No, not whoopee, you unchivalrous pervert. Just music.

I lost Round 19, you know. It was euphoric anyway. Sometimes a loss is a loss, and all you can do is make the best of it. Is there a word for the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory?

(Before I proceed—Day 3 bingos: ESTUARY, WOrRIeS, WEARYINg, VISITOr, NOTaRIZE, ELECTOR, RADIANT, OPERATED, SANdBILL*, UNAIrEd, ANTSIER, FLATIROn, COILIEST*. More blanks, more phonies, and more laughs.)

So, Round 19 versus Jeanne Freebody. I fell behind early in the game, thanks to Jeanne’s 90-point JOIsTED. Not to worry, though: I suddenly had an outstanding run of luck, and played three consecutive bingos—RADIANT (71), OPERATED (80) and SANdBILL* (76), vaulting me ahead to a tremendous lead, 335-234. They didn’t take much searching, either. They just fell right into place, and I found myself with over twelve minutes left on the clock at the end of the game.

I was especially proud of SANdBILL*, which, alongside my tricky placement of ESTUARY in Round 15, was one of the few plays of the tournament that made me feel like a real Scrabble player for a change. Jeanne and I were absolutely certain it was an acceptable word, too, as did some of the players seated at adjacent tables who peeked at our board afterwards. We didn’t have a shred of doubt. And we all had the same definition in mind: isn’t a sandbill a kind of bird? Like a sandbill crane?

So it was quite a surprise when I tried to look it up in the dictionary, and didn’t find it listed. “I think it’s a sand-hill crane,” suggested one of our neighbours. As it turns out, SANDHILL* isn’t good either, but that’s because it’s a proper noun—the Sandhill Crane, capital S, capital C. Grus canadensis. So what does that make a sandbill? My theory: a cross between a Sandhill Crane and a HANDBILL (or, the product of rival campaigns for political office flipping each other the bird).

As an aside, there are a number of sevens in my rack, ABILNS? (BASINaL, LeSBIAN, ABLINgS, AIBLiNS, ALBINoS), but no valid bingos that would have fit the board position. I got away with that one, and I got away clean.

But that’s not all! As if three consecutive bingos weren’t exciting enough—I mean, it was the first time I’d laid down three bingos, consecutive or otherwise, in any game at this forsaken tournament—Jeanne immediately fired back with an outstanding play: HEISTER (99) parallel to the last six letters of OPERATED, making six auxiliary words: EH, RE, AI, RADIANTS, ET, and DE. The score: 335-333.

By the time the dust settled, she had sealed up the game with a third bingo, EVERSION (71). Final score: 403-474.

And this is how it looked:

If there was a specific blemish on the game that kept it from being an expert board, it was the trouble with word knowledge on both sides. I lost two turns to unsuccessful challenges: the HEISTER/RADIANTS play was the first. RADIANTS is an odd duck, but the one I was mostly unsure about was HEISTER. I suspected EVERSION was good, but challenged it anyway because I had the slightest doubt about it, and letting it go would guarantee my defeat.

I must emphasize that the unrelenting joy of Round 19 wasn’t just about the pendular drama of great comeback plays. It was the camaraderie, the sportsmanship, the mutual respect. There was never any bitterness about seeing the other person do well. Quite the opposite, in fact: we were literally high-fiving each other for great plays.

Not that we intentionally left openings for each other, of course. The game was still adversarial, not collusive; but most of all, it was friendly. After the last round of the day, Jeanne and I sat down together to fill out a board diagram in order to submit her HEISTER play for the tournament’s Flashiest Bingo award. I’m not sure how it will stack up against the kind of bingos that come out of Division 1—the top experts have a way of weaving 11-letter words through disconnected tiles—but we thought we’d give it a shot.

After Round 19, this Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tournament didn’t bother me anymore. I’m love with Scrabble again, and I don’t care if it won’t love me back.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to let my other losses off easy, though. There’s a lot I have to work on going into Day 4.

Now that my luck is a little more balanced—I’m drawing blanks for a change—it’s my vocabulary deficiencies that are beginning to collect their toll. Round 17 was, in a word, horrendous: I posted my lowest score of the tournament and lost by the largest spread thus far, 290-497. My opponent admitted that he was drawing perfectly balanced racks (in terms of consonant/vowel ratio) every turn, while I was coming off bingos with draws like ORTTTTU, but that doesn’t mean I did the best I could. I was unsure about UPSOARS, so I didn’t play it. Then I tried IVOrIST* for 90 points, missing VIOlIST in the same position, and it was challenged off; my opponent used his extra turn to block the lane, and I had to settle for VISITOr (64). Drawing both blanks and using them aren’t enough to stay competitive, that’s for sure.

The most stressful game by far was Round 21, which I lost 383-393 after a heart-stopping endgame in which I saw the clinching play, miscalculated it as a guaranteed loss, and attempted a phony instead (BANDIER*—no, not a bingo). Still, it was an exciting fight to the finish, and my opponent and I were visibly on the verge of cracking. It was also a reminder of why I’m still a sub-1400 player: if I knew the word ZONULE, things would have been different.

It’s all part of a grand learning experience, I suppose. The tiles fall where they may, but good players rise and bad players fall. There’s no escaping the bottom half of the division now—I haven’t even been out of the bottom tables all tournament—but I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings. More bingos, I should hope.

Yesterday, I had a lot more to blame than luck. Today was mostly bad luck. I drew 2 out of 12 blanks over six rounds (Rounds 13 and 14, to be precise), and I am at least relieved that I fired them off on bingos as soon as I picked them up. The blank in Round 13 was very nearly useless, too, coming as it did in my last draw from the bag.

That isn’t to say I haven’t been making bad decisions—missing bingos (like seeing RETILES and LEISTER, but giving up on the rack when a tiny bit more searching would have revealed STERILE), forgetting common stems (I knew there was something in BEIORST but tried SORBITE* instead of ORBIEST), and losing boneheaded challenges (LAYED looked funny at the time, and I let my opponent get away with PLIAR* instead of PILAR)—but they weren’t any worse than yesterday’s unmitigated silliness.

Time management is going better: I had over a minute left at the end of every game, leaving me time to find bingos on tight boards in the last turn or two. I benefited from not having to play against any speed demons, for the most part, so I didn’t get killed on the clock like I did on Day 1. Defensive play could still use some work: in Round 12, I missed a crucial bingo lane when I had almost tied the game (243-245), letting my opponent run away with it.

All in all, my play has gone from atrocious to average. It would be nice if the tile bag started cooperating. Then again, I suspect that I’m drawing at a disadvantage because I’m playing too many short words when I’m in a tight spot; I need to turn over more tiles.

(Day 2 bingos: LEANEST, TRAINER, ETESIAN, COUTURES, STANDERS, SPRINTER, CONFRONt, ERECTOr, SPITTLES.)

This is not my first seven-game losing streak at a Scrabble tournament. I’ve done it twice before, both times at my first National Scrabble Championship in New Orleans. This is, however, the very first time I have ever gone a full day at a Scrabble tournament without winning a single round.

It’s not like I haven’t been scoring points, either. According to my statistics page (which all of you can follow, quasi-live!), I scored an average of 375 points per game—greater than or equal to the Day 1 averages of… all seven of my opponents (370, 346, 369, 375, 372, 364, and 329, respectively). Compare this to my average score against: 421 points per game. Conclusion: every single one of my opponents had an aberrantly high-flying game against me.

Bad luck? In Rounds 6 and 7, maybe. It would be more accurate to blame the first five on poor time management and gross incompetence.

(More on this in a moment. But first, my Day 1 bingos: OUTGROwN, TAINTING, FAGGIEST, TORsADE, COSINES, HANGArS, wRANGLER—wait, was that it? Was that all?)

I photographed every board for reference, as I almost always do, but I’m not particularly inclined to do a round-by-round, blow-by-blow summary of my day as I did for Orlando and Phoenix. So here’s to a quick diagnosis of what I’m doing wrong, which will give me an opportunity to use bullet points for a change, now that I’ve fixed the way lists are handled in my CSS stylesheet.

• Time management. This is becoming my curse. As I predicted, my ability to make quick, decisive manoeuvres has taken the greatest beating from seven months of Scrabble-muscle atrophy, with word knowledge running a close second—and keep in mind that I’ve been having time trouble for a few tournaments now. I finished virtually every game with less than ten seconds remaining on the clock, and I can attest that far too much of my thinking time was needlessly expended in the middle game instead of the endgame.
• Poor defence. The way I understand my relatively high points-per-game averages (both for and against), I’ve been going for high-risk, high-scoring plays, leaving dangerous openings sitting about as a consequence of a greedy point grab. I don’t manage my rack well enough to capitalize on the openings, and I end up dumping low-scoring tiles while my opponents stomp on all the bonus squares. This is a far cry from my usual defensive aptitude, and it may be because after being away from the game for so long, I’m far more confident in my knowledge of long words than short ones (which have always been a muddy alphabet soup), making me reluctant to shut the board down.
• An atrocious endgame. Again, it’s because I’m not leaving myself any time to think—and the endgame is when the most precise, methodical computations should occur, as that is when you have the most knowledge of your position in the game, and have to contend with the least randomness. I threw away at least two games in the last two or three moves.

After the first five rounds, I was sitting at 0-5 (-94), which was pretty good in terms of point spread, as I was only falling behind by about 20 points per game, and never getting blown away. Rounds 1 through 4 were more or less quite winnable; Round 5, certainly so. Unfortunately, those are the games that make all the difference: the ones that could have gone either way. As for Rounds 6 and 7, not much could be done once bad luck decided to show up to the party.

The one round I’ll talk about is Round 5, because of an interesting circumstance that handed me a game I’d seemingly lost on a shiny, silver platter—which I promptly dropped on the floor.

A few moves before the end of the game, with three tiles left in the bag, my opponent knocked one of her tiles onto the floor, and didn’t notice it. She saw that she only had six tiles on her rack, and we both presumed that she simply hadn’t replenished her rack. (My tile tracking seemed to be off by one, but I blamed my tile tracking, which has had some unreliable moments in the past.) So she drew another tile from the bag. Two in the bag.

I’m holding the unenviable DDIIILT and am behind, 360-386, and play DID for 12 points, drawing the last two tiles from the bag (L and K) for IILLKT. An empty bag, with eight tiles unseen (again, I blamed this on a tracking error): IIMNOSSU. My opponent plays SUE for 18, I play KILT for 24, and she plays MIB for 14. The score is 396-418, and it looks out of my reach. I’m holding IL, with INOS unseen (but only three tiles on my opponent’s rack).

Then the Division Leader, while making his rounds, notices our dropped tile on the floor. It’s an S, so I know my opponent holds INO. The director’s adjudication is to back up and figure out who should have drawn the S, were it the last tile in the bag. That’s me, as I emptied the bag (with room on my rack to spare) when I played DID. So, right before I was to play my last move, I was basically given the mighty S for free.

I saw a winning move that would have given me 18 points, plus 6 off my opponent’s rack, for a narrow 420-418 victory.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see it until half a second after I hit the clock to end my turn, after having given up on the search for a play that would get rid of all three of my tiles, and dumping the S for 18 points elsewhere.

So I lost, 414-430, with ten seconds left on the clock. The fallen S ascended from the depths to give me one last chance, and I threw it in the dumpster like it was a dead hooker.

It was all downhill after that. Well, it was already downhill, but then it got steeper.

I have a bye in Round 8 (thanks to being in last place, I think), which nominally puts me at a 1-7 (-270) record in the standings heading into tomorrow morning. We’ll see where things go from there.

And if you want to hear something exceptionally cool: there’s always a lot of talk about how the King once played alongside America’s own King of Swing, Benny Goodman (indeed, that’s the subject of the photograph atop the musical archive’s introductory page), but now I’ve found some aural proof—samples from Benny Goodman’s 1955 concert in Bangkok, in which he plays several of the King’s signature compositions, including the Thai Royal Anthem. I’ve linked to my personal favourite, “Sai Fon” (“Falling Rain”); the song is written as a waltz, but the band plays it in 4/4.

My own interest in King Bhumibol’s music originates from my first visit to his realm in December 2003, when I first heard that he was a noted saxophonist and big band composer in addition to everything else he did (painting, translating Economist articles, ending military coups with a single command, and so on). It wasn’t until after the adventure that I actually listened to some of his music and fell in love with a number of the tunes. But this time around, I went to Thailand prepared—and after traipsing around the country for nearly three weeks, I can absolutely confirm that the King’s music is as ubiquitous as the documents about it claim.

I also returned with a handful of compact discs, all of which I will discuss below.

But first, a few more words about the music’s ubiquity: maybe it’s a function of it being His Majesty’s 80th birthday in December, an occasion that left everyone in the country bedecked in the glorious pinks and yellows of polo shirts that read “Long Live the King”, but his songs really are all over the place. They’re on the popular radio stations that play in the specialty coffee shops. They play in Thai Air’s 747s as you deplane. A week into the holiday I hijacked a hotel piano (surprisingly in tune, considering the decrepit quality of the rest of the establishment) and played a bit of “Sai Fon”, and one of my non-musical travelling companions already found it oddly familiar. A big band played a medley of the King’s compositions at Assumption Worlds’ closing ceremony; a royal military orchestra played them at the opening ceremony.

(As an aside: at one point, the same military orchestra played an international medley of songs from all over the world, from countries arranged in what was apparently alphabetical order—that is, inferring from how they began with “Waltzing Matilda” (Australia), worked their way through “La vie en rose” (France) and eventually worked their way to some John Philip Sousa (the United States). What fascinated me was the selection that represented Canada: Eddie Heywood’s “Canadian Sunset”, which I don’t think any of the Canadian delegates recognized apart from myself. This brings up an interesting question: “O Canada” aside, what can we actually settle on as Canada’s national song? The mildly intoxicated singalongs I’ve seen invariably settle on “Barrett’s Privateers” or “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, though being from Alberta, I can see an argument for “Four Strong Winds”. My personal preference is for “The Maple Leaf Forever”, but I can never remember the words.)

Observing that I’m only ever going to be in Thailand so many times, and that I’ll only be there for the special occasion of the King’s 80th once, I picked up a few recordings that I would probably be unable to find otherwise. (Looking them up, I’m not even certain I can order some of them online.)

First up is The Royal Lullaby: Compositions by His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, new orchestral arrangements recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Emmanuel Siffert. I regrettably only have the standard one-disc edition; apparently, you need to telephone the record label directly to inquire about the other ones. This is a pity, because the more I find out about the King’s music and the making of this recording, the better.

That said, the album is a splendid and versatile presentation of ten of King Bhumibol’s works: his popular tunes are given treatments that range from the lush and neo-Romantic (“Falling Rain”) to some that retain the swinging lilt of a semi-stately foxtrot (“Love at Sundown”). The highlight is a four-part ballet suite that I hadn’t heard before, “Kinari Suite”. (The video in the preceding link is a live performance of the fourth movement, “Kinari Waltz”; yes, those are yellow “We Love the King” shirts, and yes, YouTube has a way of kicking serious ass every now and then.)

Next, I purchased the 2-disc CD set of the H.M. Blues 80th Birthday Celebration Concert; at least, that’s what I think it says—remember, I don’t read a single character of Thai, let alone a word. My edition, the yellow box, includes a bonus CD with the video tribute entitled “King of Kings”, which I didn’t find all that compelling, being in Thai and all. The accompanying booklet has complete English lyrics where applicable; everything else is in Thai. Let’s just say that I was really glad the track data was already on the GraceNote database, because I sure wasn’t going to punch in all of the song titles myself.

As far as I can tell, H.M. Blues is a tribute band that may or may not have been assembled specifically for the birthday concert, and the vocal performers may or may not be well-known Thai pop stars. What I do know is that it takes its name from one of the King’s compositions. The “H.M.” alludes to “His Majesty”, but in the context of the song, it stands for the “Hungry Men’s Blues”—as explicated by a later composition of the King’s, “Never Mind the Hungry Men’s Blues”. What I also know is that the album consists entirely of interpretations of the Royal Compositions in contemporary popular idioms—predominantly rock and blues, but not without the occasional dash of a hopping Latin clave.

To offer a point of comparison, the extent of variation in the treatments of King Bhumibol’s music isn’t a significant departure from the range of interpretations that one affords the songwriters of the Great American Songbook, the Gershwins and Porters that gave us the standards of the Sinatra era that are reintroduced and repopularized by one new generation of crooners after another. So I’m not at all surprised to hear a chorus of wailing guitars take on “H.M. Blues”, even though I was introduced to the tune in a style more befitting of good old New Orleans. For those who don’t have a particular taste for the textures of jazz and classical music, and prefer to get into a song with the aid of vocals and a strong drumbeat, this album quite capably serves as a comfortable point of entry.

A number of the songs are performed bilingually in Thai and English, sometimes in the same cut—the sexy-saxy bossa nova version of “Blue Day” comes to mind. The enunciation of the English vocals are generally quite good, especially when the singers are given some room to stretch on a down-tempo tune like “Can’t You Ever See”. Often, vocalists forget how important enunciation is when it comes to singing in another language—and this applies equally, if not especially, to anglophone singers that chance to fiddle with other tongues. There’s an exceptionally high risk of sounding ridiculous, and native speakers will be the first to notice that something’s off. It says something for the standard of this album that I never encountered that problem.

Finally, I obtained a pair of albums by Hucky Eichelmann (Candlelight Blues and Sweet Words, with accompanying sheet music of the solo guitar arrangements). Eichelmann is a classical guitarist of German origin who became fascinated with the King’s music, as every musician damn well should, and eventually delivered his renderings to His Majesty himself at a Royal Command performance. On the other side of the cultural equation, he is credited with introducing classical guitar into the Thai mainstream. I recommend a cursory look at this recent interview with him in Modern Guitar, in which he discusses the state of Thailand’s guitar culture, and offers a bit of insight as to his own side of the story.

The music itself is naturally a world apart from that of the other albums: on a solo instrument, it has the rhythmic freedom of a tempo rubato aligned to the musician’s whim. Eichelmann explores that freedom sparingly—it’s a classical texture, after all, and one that prizes clarity and tone. The harmonies are diatonic, the voicings open; every now and then he strums a melodic statement with a vibrato that wouldn’t be out of place on a Venetian canal. And none of this is to say that Eichelmann can’t swing—indeed, he sounds all too happy to bend a few blue notes when it’s called for. On a tune like “Friday Night Rag” or “Love at Sundown”, there’s no getting around the blues, and the arrangements admit this readily. Some of the tracks leave me longing for a little less rigidity and a little more colour in the tonal palette, but again, these recordings don’t claim to depart too much from their ostensible mission statement (composed music with a spacious, resonant timbre), so I didn’t go in expecting Joe Pass.

That wraps it up for my CD shelf, but it certainly shouldn’t spell the end of my interest in the King’s music, nor yours. The selection of music to which we are popularly exposed is a lot more hermitic than we often realize, and to that end, King Bhumibol’s works strike me as more of a well-kept secret than they have any right to be. In sum? Give him a listen. And long live the King.