Superfisto had struck back hard and done the unthinkable. Ken responded not by firing Chief (I’m guessing he was brilliant, and a productive attorney), but by erecting a firewall which prevented Chief from entering the Camel Club.
#Yahoo chess online play software#
Superfisto did some Googling and ended up calling “Ken”-the boss Chief often mentioned-and told him his software specialist was spending most of his billable hours every day hanging out in a chess chat room. Chief was vulnerable too, having dropped plenty of hints in his unfiltered ramblings as to which law firm he worked at in Nevada. Although Superfisto appeared to be on the ropes, he had plenty of fight left. He was drifting in post-college life, and was desperate to join the Army. He’d asserted his dominance by playing rough, and Superfisto was stung. He was able to identify Superfisto's Army recruiter (he was in the process of enlisting) by info he'd revealed online.Ĭhief had quickly scored an effective one-two combination on his adversary.
He then called mom and spilled some good dirt on him. He’d mentioned several times that his mother was a professor at UC-Riverside, so Chief went to the school's website where all faculty members had photos posted and identified his mother by her obvious resemblance to Superfisto. Superfisto posted a number of photos of himself for all to admire, which turned out to be a key strategic error. They started looking for ways to hurt each other. Superfisto was very tight with Chief when I first started, but their friendship eventually went sour and things spiraled out of control, fuelled by their mutual egotism and combativeness. When I found out he was a recent college grad, working at Blockbuster and living with his mother, I blunted his assaults, dubbing him "Blockbuster boy," and then "Eddie Munster," owing to his widow's peak. Although I didn’t participate much in the chatting-I had no status-Superfisto attacked me when I did. Superfisto loved bragging about his good looks (unlike Chief, who claimed to be fat) and sexual and physical prowess. The other alpha male of Camel Club was the vain and egotistic “Superfisto,” a skilled chess player and avid chat room pugilist. Stuff like his wife getting busted for shoplifting, fights with his boss, and numerous sexual conquests. He was a novelist's dream, typing away like Jack Kerouac on Benzedrine, sharing details of his private life. Somehow Chief found time during his workday to type hundreds and hundreds of words in the chatroom. I always speculated that he learned to play this "jailhouse chess" at some juvie facility back in California in his teens but, despite his mediocrity at the game, he was still able to dominate Camel Club with the force of his personality. He was what chess players derisively call a “pawn pusher,” perhaps the lowest form of chess.
Before that, he was a juvenile delinquent, and then a touring musician.
The towering figure of the chatroom was known as "Chief." Chief, a colorful individual in his mid-40s, was a lawyer specializing in software issues. And then there was Smeg, a 35-year-old pizza delivery man who could only come to Camel Club from the library because a woman he used to have phone sex with-another Camel Club regular-had gotten some hackers to fry his home computer after their estrangement.
One person cleverly called himself "Dick Johnson," and claimed to listen to one song all day long-Journey’s "Oh Sherrie." Dick's shtick was to regularly claim, with faux outrage, that he’d just been sexually harassed by his male chess opponent, quoting something inappropriate the guy had allegedly said to him. Contrary to my expectations, the chat room more closely resembled a sixth grade playground.Ĭamel Club, like any social group, had both major players and fringe characters. I started with games in the Camel Club venue, which had a chat room where I assumed chess players would spend their time discussing such matters as fianchettos, the Sicilian Defense, and queen sacrifices. I got pretty good at chess by playing online via Yahoo.