After many months of very sporadic playing, the girls asked me to play chess with them. Being is a masochistic mood, I agreed.
Imogen sets up the board while I finish something up in the kitchen and decides that she gets to play white. Genevieve informs me that she will play white when it's her turn as well. Usually I enforce rules of good sportsmanship and make us randomly choose colors, but today I don't care. I sit down to play Imogen and she loses quickly resigning before it gets too bloody. I inform her that I am not a good chess player.
"Wow!" she said. "I'm really bad then!"
Yes. Yes, you are.
Then I played Genevieve. Playing Genevieve is different than playing Imogen, and perhaps different than playing anyone in the world. Early in the game she dramatically declares to me "You're not going to get to take my queen like you did Imogen's!" and then she moves the queen right next to my pawn so that I can capture it. I let her have it back and tell her to reconsider the move.
She opens with a couple pawn moves and moves her knights out, then her game quickly devolves into moving the remaining pieces back and forth on the back file. She moves out the king bishop, sacrificing it with abandon so that she can castle. She takes one of my knights and laughs maniacally ignoring the fact that she traded a rook and two pawns for it. One of my pawns single handedly clears the center of the board which leaves it unguarded and she moves a rook in front of it so that she can block it from queening, neglecting the mundane tactic of simply capturing it with one of her rapidly dwindling supply of pieces.
As I study the board trying to see how to end the carnage quickly, she plays with the captured pieces. A queen feeds a knight some oats. I move and she said, "I don't know what to move."
"You could resign," I suggest hopefully.
"No," she scoffs and sacrifices her remaining rook.
"Check," I say. She gasps. It's over in two more moves.
