Really Bad Chess

Viktor Petrov's trainers made no sound on the worn path through Regent's Park. At fifty-three, he moved like a man who'd learnt to occupy space without apology—shoulders back, chin level, the kind of posture that comes from winning things. His earbuds delivered the smooth baritone of a philosophy podcast, some American academic dissecting Epictetus whilst Viktor's phone buzzed with notifications he'd check later. Another thousand followers who'd watched yesterday's video of him checkmating a physics PhD in eleven moves whilst discussing the dichotomy of control. The algorithm loved him. Everyone did, really. Except perhaps his second wife, who'd stopped returning his calls three days ago, though the divorce lawyer was still cashing his cheques promptly enough.

The October light slanted through the plane trees, catching the silver at his temples. Distinguished, the Instagram comments said. A lion in winter. As if fifty-three was winter. As if he hadn't just acquired his fourth company last month, each one absorbed into his portfolio like a pawn taking a bishop. Clean. Efficient. Marcus Aurelius had written that loss is nothing except change, and change is nature's delight. Viktor had built an empire on that principle, shedding the useless weight of sentiment with each transaction.

The chess tables stood in their usual spot, a cluster of wooden boards scarred with decades of games. Viktor pulled out his earbuds and tucked them into his pocket with practised efficiency. A small crowd had already gathered—they always did—phones ready, comments streaming. Viktor set up his pieces with the same ritualistic precision he'd learnt in foster care, where order was the only thing separating you from chaos. The state had taken him at seven when his grandmother died, another second-generation immigrant kid lost in the system's machinery. But unlike the others, he'd found the sixty-four squares, and in them, a universe he could control absolutely.

"Marcus Aurelius said, 'You have power over your mind—not outside events,'" Viktor announced to his phone, propped on its portable tripod. "Today we prove it again." The first challenger sat down—a university student with nervous hands and dreams bigger than his rating. Viktor demolished him in fourteen moves whilst explaining Stoic philosophy between captures. The second lasted nine. The third, a confident American tourist, managed seventeen before resigning with good grace and a hefty tip in Viktor's collection jar.

By noon, he'd played eighteen games, won them all, and gained three thousand new followers. The metrics sang. The engagement rate soared. And yet, walking away from the tables as autumn wind scattered leaves across the path, Viktor felt the familiar hollow space opening in his chest. The same emptiness that had swallowed his first marriage, then his second. The same void that made him wake at 3am, scrolling through comments from strangers, searching for something he couldn't name.

He chose a different exit today. Not the usual route past the boating lake, but left, through the dense grove where fewer joggers ventured. Perhaps the change would shift something. The Stoics believed in fate, but also in the small choices that defined character. A different path. A new variable in the equation.

Viktor slipped his earbuds back in and pressed play. The podcast resumed mid-sentence—something about voluntary discomfort as a path to virtue—then stuttered. Buffered. The WiFi had dropped. Viktor frowned, pulling out his phone to switch to downloaded content, but the screen was between apps, loading, that spinning circle mocking his optimised life. He hesitated, finger hovering over the podcast library, then the music app, unable to decide, and in that moment of unusual indecision, something reached him.

Laughter. High, unselfconscious, the kind that comes from genuine delight rather than social performance.

Viktor pulled out his earbuds and shoved them in his pocket, irritation rising at the interruption, at the chaos of unplanned variables. The laughter continued, clearer now, coming from somewhere beyond the trees. He followed it, unable to stop himself.

He rounded a corner and stopped. A group of children, perhaps twenty of them, sat in a rough circle on the grass. Ten years old, maybe eleven. Each held a white cane propped beside them, and in the centre, a chess set unlike any he'd seen before. The pieces were jumbled, misplaced. A rook where a knight should be. Pawns moving backwards. The queen trapped behind her own pieces, immobile.

"Check!" shouted a girl with dark plaits, moving her king directly into danger.

"No, double check!" countered a boy, shifting a bishop to attack his own knight.

They were butchering it. Deliberately, joyfully, completely destroying every principle Viktor had spent decades mastering. His jaw tightened. One of the children—a small Indian boy with thick glasses that magnified sightless eyes—picked up the white king and placed it directly next to the black king, both monarchs standing adjacent, impossible, wrong.

"That's not—" Viktor's voice cut through the laughter. "You can't play like that."

The children turned towards his voice, their faces curious but unimpressed. An adult approached from the nearby bench—late thirties, wearing a faded jacket with a logo Viktor didn't recognise. Her expression held the patient amusement of someone watching a predictable play unfold.

"They're playing Really Bad Chess," she said simply, as if this explained everything.

"That's not chess." Viktor moved closer, unable to stop himself. "The rules exist for a reason. Structure creates meaning. Without discipline, it's just chaos."

The woman smiled. "Perhaps. Would you like to join them?"

Viktor shouldn't have. He had calls to return, emails piling up, a board meeting at four. But something in the casual dismissal of his entire life's work ignited a spark of anger—no, not anger. Something sharper. The need to prove, to demonstrate, to win.

"Fine." He sat in the circle, the grass damp through his expensive joggers. "Let's play properly."

The children cheered. The small Indian boy—Arjun, the others called him—handed Viktor the white pieces with a grin that suggested he knew something Viktor didn't. The game began, and within three moves, Viktor had established dominant centre control. Within six, he'd trapped Arjun's queen. Within nine, it was essentially over.

"See?" Viktor addressed the circle, feeling the old rush of triumph. "This is chess. This is how you—"

"I win!" Arjun announced, knocking over his own king with a flourish.

The children erupted in applause. Viktor stared at the board, then at the boy, then at the woman who'd settled beside them on the grass.

"The point," she explained, "is losing first. Fastest checkmate against yourself wins. They call normal chess 'Really Bad Chess' because it's boring when you play it their way."

Viktor's mouth opened, then closed. The logic broke something in his mind, a fundamental axiom he'd never questioned. Winning was the point. Winning was everything. What else could there possibly be?

"Why?" The word came out harder than intended.

The woman studied him with unsettling directness. "Why do you play chess in the park, Mr Petrov?"

He started. She knew his name. Of course she did—everyone did, now. The thought should have pleased him. Instead, it felt like exposure.

"To challenge myself. To prove—" He stopped, the words suddenly hollow in his mouth.

"Hmm." She stood, dusting off her jeans. "Arjun, would you play boring chess with our guest? Proper rules, his way. Just one game."

The boy sighed dramatically. "Do I have to?"

"Ice cream in fifteen minutes if you do."

"Fine." Arjun reset the board with quick, precise movements, his fingers identifying each piece through touch alone. "But boring chess is boring."

Viktor felt reality reassert itself. This would be better. A real game, proper rules, a chance to demonstrate what decades of study produced. The boy was blind, talented perhaps, but certainly no match for a grandmaster. Viktor had played champions, defeated chess engines, conquered every board he'd encountered.

Arjun moved first, a standard king's pawn opening. Viktor responded symmetrically, establishing control. The boy moved again—knight to f6, perfectly standard. Viktor developed his pieces, building the classical structure that had served him for forty-six years.

On move four, something shifted. Arjun's hand hovered over the board for a fraction longer than necessary, then placed his bishop with a soft click. Viktor frowned. The move seemed passive, defensive. He pressed his advantage, advancing his knight to threaten multiple pieces simultaneously.

Arjun tilted his head slightly, listening. His fingers drummed once on the grass beside the board, then moved his rook with absolute certainty. Not to where Viktor expected—to a square that seemed pointless, disconnected from the main battle.

"Your move," Arjun said, his voice flat with barely concealed boredom.

Viktor captured the exposed knight, material advantage secured. But as his piece contacted the board, he heard it—or rather, felt it—for the first time. A subtle difference in the sound. The click wasn't quite the same as previous moves. The resonance changed depending on which square, which piece, how the other pieces surrounded it.

Arjun moved instantly. Bishop takes knight. The sound was different again, a fractionally higher pitch. And suddenly Viktor saw it—not the position, but the shadow of something beyond the position. A dimension of the game that existed in sound, in the microscopic vibrations of wood on wood, in the acoustic geometry of thirty-two pieces creating interference patterns across sixty-four squares.

Three moves later, Viktor's queen was trapped. Two moves after that, his king stood naked, surrounded, mate in one.

"Checkmate," Arjun announced without satisfaction, the way you'd say 'it's raining' or 'it's Tuesday.'

The other children gathered round, some with canes, navigating the space with perfect confidence. They took turns, each playing Viktor for two or three minutes before delivering devastating defeats. A girl named Simran beat him in seven moves. A boy called Marcus—Marcus, of all names—needed only five, calling out positions without touching the board: "Knight to e5, rook to h3, queen to d7." Each piece landing with its distinctive signature sound, creating harmonics Viktor had never imagined existed.

He wasn't playing chess. He'd never been playing chess. He'd been playing a sighted person's approximation of chess, a purely visual representation of something infinitely deeper. These children experienced the game as a four-dimensional soundscape, each move creating ripples through the acoustic space, each piece possessing not just position and power but voice and resonance.

"You see," said the woman—her name was Dr Sarah Chen, she introduced herself, director of the Royal Institute for Blind Children—"they process about seven hundred distinct sound variations across the board. The wood grain density affects resonance. The proximity of other pieces creates dampening patterns. They're not playing by memory or calculation. They're listening to the music of the game."

Viktor's hands trembled. Forty-six years. Four companies. Two marriages. Millions in prize money. Hundreds of thousands of followers. And he'd been deaf the entire time.

"I need to—" He gestured at the board, at Arjun, at the impossible revelation cracking through his carefully constructed worldview. "I need to understand—"

The timer on Dr Chen's phone chimed, bright and cheerful.

"Ice cream time!" she announced.

The children erupted in motion, canes unfolding, hands finding shoulders, the whole group streaming towards the park's edge where a vendor waited with a small freezer cart. Their laughter echoed through the trees, pure and unselfconscious, the sound of people who'd never mistaken winning for living.

Viktor stood slowly, his legs stiff, his mind reeling. Arjun paused at the edge of the group, his face turned back in Viktor's general direction.

"You play boring chess pretty good," the boy offered, a consolation prize wrapped in brutal honesty. "For someone who only uses eyes."

Then he was gone, white cane tapping rhythmically, following his friends towards ice cream and whatever came after, which definitely wasn't chess, boring or otherwise.

Viktor found himself walking behind them, not following exactly, but drawn by something he couldn't name. The children clustered around the cart, calling out orders with the easy confidence of regulars. The vendor—a tired-looking man in his sixties—served them with practised efficiency, accepting payment from Dr Chen with a nod of recognition.

Viktor stood at the edge of the group, suddenly uncertain. His phone buzzed in his pocket. The board meeting. The emails. The curated life waiting for his attention. His hand moved towards his pocket, then stopped.

"Can I help you, mate?" The vendor's voice was neither friendly nor unfriendly, just transactional.

"A 99 Flake," Viktor said, the words emerging from some forgotten place in his memory.

"Right." The vendor prepared the cone with economical movements—soft serve in a spiral, chocolate flake pressed into the top. "That'll be £1.85."

Viktor paid with a note from his wallet, accepted the change and the cone, then walked to a nearby bench and sat down. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun, worn smooth by decades of use. He took a bite of the ice cream, felt it melt cold and sweet against his tongue, then another.

The children's voices faded as Dr Chen herded them back towards the Institute's van. A breeze moved through the grove, carrying the scent of turned earth and fallen leaves. Somewhere to his left, a couple argued in Polish about whose turn it was to call the plumber. To his right, a dog barked, high and insistent, then stopped. Behind him, traffic on the Outer Circle maintained its constant hum, punctuated by the occasional siren or horn.

Viktor ate his ice cream and listened.