A few years ago I went to a Sunday afternoon party in Brooklyn at the home of a couple who had 2 kids. One was a 7-year-old boy who, I’d been told, loved to play chess–he was a great chess player, but didn’t get much of a chance to play (his parents barely knew the rules). When I was introduced to him I told him I’d like to play chess–he was very happy and we set up the board. Right before we started, he said to me, “I’m gonna kick your ass!” I tried to gently explain to him that he couldn’t really kick my ass at chess, he’s just 7 years old and I’m an adult, etc. (I’m not a particularly good chess player. But I know I can beat a 7-year-old kid.) He didn’t believe me, kept insisting he would kick my ass. I quickly conferred with his mother and asked whether it was OK for me to beat him and she said, yeah, it would actually be good for him to lose a little. So we played, I tried to play like a kid, chasing his pieces around. The game was OK, he was actually pretty good, but I followed his mom’s instructions and beat him. We played again with similar results. He was fine with it.

Anyway, the point of this story is not that I have the amazing skills necessary to beat a little kid in chess–I just think it’s funny that so few adults in that corner of Brooklyn know how to play chess. They have chess in the schools, and somehow this kid picked up the notion that kids know how to play chess but adults don’t.