Quest for Redemption

Chess has been a part of my life for a long time now. It's been well over a decade since I learned how to play, and I have regularly played matches with different people from around the world and locally. My peak year, I would say, was in 2020. I invested the most in that year and grew exponentially.

2020 was the year of the lockdown. Just like everyone else, I was just at home with my family without much activity to do. Chess was one of the few things that I had to get by, alongside Call of Duty Mobile. There was so much time in my hands that I spent most of it on chess. It was always one game after the other, until I burned out.

I wanted to get better by all means, but at the same time, I enjoyed some levels of dopamine and won a game, especially the very challenging ones. Even though I wasn't exactly studying as I should to really improve, my growth was evident. And then, when the lockdown was over, I returned to school, and there was a physical chess tournament I could attend.

I was in my final year. I wanted to try out activities that I had never considered before because I was always focused on academics, so I joined the chess club. And then, I found that there was an upcoming Nigerian University Games Association (NUGA) tournament the club wanted to prepare for. And so we started an internal tournament to determine the team. I participated.

Now, I knew I wasn't going to be a part of their tournament in another state or practice so regularly with them because I was already too occupied with school work to afford it. I only wanted to beat a particular guy that I terribly lost to years ago in another tournament. He was the best in the club.

I was new, and so people didn't think much of me when I came in. I beat the coach in a match at my tryout, and a couple of people, and some more people, then people started to figure that I was probably a hot shot. Then the tournament day came.

The tournament was set up in a way that would allow every person to play with every other person at some point in the tournament. So, for sure, I was going to be paired with the person I came for at some point and get what I came for—my revenge. Heh.

On that day, I was going to play more than eight matches without much time to rest in between. The time control we had was 15 minutes, zero incremental (15 + 0). That is, each player had 15 minutes on their own clock, making a total of 30 minutes max for the entire game. And each match consisted of three games to determine the winner of that match. You either win by checkmate, your opponent's resignation, or if your opponent runs out of time.

I wanted to make it to number one, but at the same time, I was mostly focused on playing really good games. I had to bring in my best that day because I didn't come all the way to lose points and not get what I came for. At the end of the day, my performance was astonishing, even to me.

I played all my matches and won all of them. Each match had three games. In some games, my victory was clean; others took a lot of brain power to get; and I was just lucky in the rest of the games. Playing a 30-minute game so many times in one day was the hardest thing I did at that time. But somehow, I was at my peak, unleashing all that I was capable of, and I won all matches except one.

The last and final game was with this guy that I came for. He had also been coming strong with a clean sheet like I was, and so the entire club was very eager to see the outcome of our games. I was perplexed this time.

I knew the guy was a strong player, but I also knew that I was a strong player as well and that I had greatly improved since our last match. I became perplexed because I had gone through so much stress with all the seven times three games I had to play prior—about 21 games. So I knew I was already drained, but I came in strong regardless.

In our first game, I was clearly going to win. I just had a much stronger position for a long time. I could see the quandary in his eyes, as I was posing so much of a threat to him. And then I grew confident that I was going to win. There's something about chess, however, and things took a drastic turn at some point.

You see, one thing about chess is that one wrong move can cause your downfall. A "blunder"—that's what such a move is called. And I made one. The more moves you both make, the more combinations and possibilities you have to evaluate. And the deeper you go into the game, the deeper you have to think to determine the best moves each time.

I made a blunder. And the thing about blunders is that a strong player would likely see them and then seize their opportunity to claim victory. As expected, this guy found it, and that's how my empire crumbled, and then I lost that first game in the match with him. I was totally demoralised, couldn't give my best in the next one, and lost that one too. There was no need for a third match.

I wasn't bummed about the loss for too long afterwards. I gave myself a pat on the back for performing so outstandingly that day. I had never played that well before, and it made me feel proud of myself that I had greatly improved with chess. I was my strongest that day, and it was all the achievement I needed. That day was "it" for me in all my time playing chess. If anything, I went on to improve even better after that day.