Checkmate

After going through various security procedures, we made our way to the prison gymnasium. There, our inmate opponents were seated around the perimeter of a long rectangle of combined tables, boards spaced evenly along them. There was a buzz of excitement and anticipation in the room. After a brief introduction by John Marshall — actuary, chess aficionado and our liaison to the prison — the six of us divvied up six sections of boards, and our games began.

At the start of my matches, I was uptight and anxious. I was not worried about playing the inmates or the magnitude of their criminal backgrounds, but rather that I would not be able to measure up, since the quality of my play on each board decreases slightly the more positions I have to simultaneously concentrate on.

Playing seven boards at once is a fun challenge. Each time you come back to the board, you have to reacquaint yourself with its position, analyzing your potential checks, captures and threats. After assessing those, you look at other candidate moves and follow the resulting line of moves, visualizing new positions. Finally, after examining all credible options, you make your move, then move on to the next board.

"Hey man, just relax and have fun!" one of the inmate opponents encouraged me as I shook his hand and wished him luck. As games progressed I got more comfortable, as I tend to do in competitive matches. Since I hadn't played competitively since 11th grade, I spent the weeks leading up to the prison event practicing my openings, an important element of a successful chess game. During the opening game - the first dozen moves or so - there are a general set of "rules" you follow. But, because of the geometry of certain openings, these rules need to be violated to avoid losing. I try to choose openings requiring a set of counterintuitive moves to maintain equality, putting my opponent in positions where "obvious"-looking moves are incorrect. At a high school or collegiate level, an opening-game mistake occurred in virtually all of my games. At the grandmaster level, there are often only two or three winning chances over the course of a game. As a result, games between grandmasters are drawn more than half of the time, while at the prison there were only a handful of draws.

Throughout my matches I played interesting people. The president of the prison's chess club, an inmate with braided dreadlocks and a muscular build, jokingly referred to their organization as the "Chess Club Killaz," an ironic twist given the reason some of its members were in prison. Active and enthusiastic members of the Chess Club Killaz, several of whom I played, seemed particularly involved in their games, evaluating my moves with comments like "Good move" and "I see what you're trying to do ... you're setting a trap!"

The atmosphere was formal but also jovial. "Just tell me when you beat the first guy! I don't want to be the first guy to go down. Imagine what they [other inmates] would say, being showed up by a 19-year-old!" an older prisoner named Christopher said. As it turned out, several of my games finished before his, and when he learned that my twin had lost three of his games, he joked, "I hope genetic theory proves correct - then I'll have a chance to beat you!"

I heard another inmate say that he liked chess because the moves were analogous to choices that confront you in real life, requiring you to make hard decisions and then live with the resulting consequences on the board. And indeed, the structure of chess, from rules to opening guidelines to preparation outside a game, makes metaphors particularly pertinent to anything involving logic and planning. For several hours, 53 people separated by different lives, backgrounds, ages and (normally) bars shared a common interest and a common goal.

Conor Myhrvold is a sophomore from Seattle, Wash., and vice president of the Chess Club. He can be reached at myhrvold@princeton.edu.