My Chess Memoir: From a Kid to a King

By Kyle Creamer

"A great read, even for those who don't know anything about chess. Anyone can enjoy this deeply personal story about struggling with obsession and trying to find your way."
Have you ever felt obsessed?
In my early twenties, I felt lost—with school, with relationships, with everything. At this critical moment in my life I discovered a new passion that gave me the direction I craved: the game of chess.
Could I reach the pinnacle of the game and become a chess grandmaster? This question drove me to immerse myself in the world of competitive chess, a community of incredible characters united by a shared love that transcends age and background. As my rating climbed and I grew closer to my goal, a disciplined practice blurred into a darker obsession as the game began to overshadow everything else in my life.
This story follows my journey as a young, ambitious chess player pursuing a lofty dream with single-minded focus. The highs and lows of battling some of the best players in the world mirror my internal struggle to manage my ambition to achieve greatness.
What does it truly take to become a chess grandmaster, and what cost was I willing to pay?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9780228846352

Kyle Creamer

Kyle Creamer spent his childhood creating games and stories for his brothers, Brandon and Brady, in their small hometown of Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada. He began composing his own short stories in elementary school, and has been writing in some capacity ever since. Kyle's diverse interests led him to receive degrees in Biochemistry/Neuroscience and Computer Science from Dalhousie University. Now a software engineer with a passion for making video games, Kyle founded Trykon Studios, an independent video game company with a focus on challenging puzzle games. Their first game, Omnicube, launched in 2018. While he always wanted to write a book, it took one key element to make that dream a reality: setting an official goal of releasing one chapter per week to his parents, Pam and Garth, and his uncle, Randy. Their love, support, and honest feedback were essential to his writing process. Kyle lives with his wife in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with the ocean at their doorstep.

Book preview

My Chess Memoir

FROM A KID TO A KING

Kyle Creamer

My Chess Memoir

Copyright © 2023 by Kyle Creamer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-4634-5 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-4633-8 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-4635-2 (eBook)

This book is dedicated to the lives and memories of my chess friends.

I love you all.

Table of Contents

Prologue

A Note to the Reader

Chapter 1 - Memories of the Royal Game

Chapter 2 - The Grandmaster

Chapter 3 - First Voyage to the Bluenose

Chapter 4 - My Tournament Journey Begins

Chapter 5 - Ghosts of World Champions

Chapter 6 - Rise of the Rubik Kid

Chapter 7 - My First Brilliancy

Chapter 8 - The Three Musketeers

Chapter 9 - A White Whale Named Eric

Chapter 10 - An Old Friend

Chapter 11 - A Game of Chess for Every Bar in Town

Chapter 12 - A Weekend of Remembrance

Chapter 13 - The Winter of Love

Chapter 14 - The Showdown for Chess Immortality

Chapter 15 - A Series of Spectacular Blunders

Chapter 16 - A New Prodigy Appears

Chapter 17 - The Calm Before the Storm

Chapter 18 - The Canadian Open

Chapter 19 - Chess is Mental Torture

Chapter 20 - Addiction is Forever

Chapter 21 - Life Goes On

Appendix A: A Primer on Chess

Appendix B: Featured Chess Games

About the Author

Prologue

I was sitting in a chair, not moving a muscle, but I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

In front of me was a chessboard. Upon its surface were two armies: the white and black pieces. To the side of the board was a clock that measured and limited our thinking time, a constraint for the generals that commanded and maneuvered the pieces. And across the board sat my opponent—my enemy—the person whose sole objective was to outthink and destroy me.

It was the final round of a competitive chess tournament, and we were the last two people still playing. The tension in the air was so thick I dared not even shift in my seat. I had just made a move, and now I awaited my opponent’s response. My shirt was damp with sweat. My face was red-hot from the stress of relentless mental exertion. At some moments I wanted to forfeit the game and walk out, anything to escape the overwhelming tension.

More than a dozen people had crowded around the board, watching intently as my opponent and I continued to battle. The scrutiny was severe—after my move, I felt like I could hear each person around us thinking: Why did you do that?

I examined the board once more, trying to visualize what the configuration of pieces would look like after my opponent’s next move, and my move after that. Any detail that I overlooked could be fatal. My head was foggy from exhaustion, but I refused to be the one to make the final mistake.

I was sitting across the board from one of the best chess players in the country, and everything was on the line. The winner of this game would earn the tournament victory, and the loser would walk away with nothing but regret. The result of the game teetered on a knife’s edge, and any small slip could cause it to swing in my enemy’s favor.

Chess can provide a rush like nothing else, as you pit yourself against another human being on a purely intellectual playing field. Chess is a game of complete information—both players always know exactly where all the pieces are and what choices their opponent can make. There’s nothing and nowhere to hide. It’s just your best game against your opponent’s.

My experience in chess was a profound detour from the conventional career-oriented trajectory that I assumed my life would follow. I could have lived my entire existence without ever picking up a chess piece. There was no part of me that needed to play chess. And yet I did play chess, and it was one of the most significant pursuits I’ve ever undertaken.

You may be wondering: how did I end up sitting in this chair, engaged in the ultimate intellectual battle? Well, this is my chess memoir, and that’s the story I want to tell you.

A Note to the Reader

This book is intended for both chess players and non-chess players alike. If you are unfamiliar with how to play chess, don’t worry—this book is still for you!

If you’d like a quick summary of the rules of the game and some key terminology, you can refer to Appendix A: A Primer on Chess at the end of the book.

Throughout the book, you’ll find QR codes which link to my website where you can view the moves of the chess game being discussed. To scan a QR code, open the camera on your mobile device, then hold your phone like you are going to take a picture of the QR code – you should see a link to the correct website page pop up.

The QR codes in the book will look like this:

If you don’t have a mobile device, you can also view the moves of each featured chess game in algebraic notation in Appendix B: Featured Chess Games at the end of the book.

All right—let’s jump into the story!

1

Memories of the Royal Game

1989–2005

Chess is a beautiful, terrible game.

It’s a game I have loved deeply at points in my life. It’s a wonderful, complex, and challenging game. It can be the ultimate mental test, a compelling competitive outlet, or a medium for self-improvement.

Chess also has a dark side; at least it did for me. At times chess became an addiction. It may sound a bit silly—how could someone get addicted to chess? And would that really be so bad?

In my own experience, one can certainly become addicted to chess. Perhaps another way to describe it would be obsession. There was a point in my life where I wanted to play chess at the expense of everything else. For a great deal of time, chess consumed me.

Ultimately, like many things in life, chess was not an exclusively good or bad thing for me. There were powerful elements of both. Chess was a game of intense highs and lows. The elation of victory, the agony of defeat, and the tense thrill of competing against someone for hours on end using nothing but your mind. My time playing chess was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

People often ask me, When did you first start playing chess? A rush of memories come back to me when I think about how I got started with the game. I’ll first need to explain a bit about who I am and where I came from.

I was born in the small city of Miramichi, which is on the East Coast of Canada in the province of New Brunswick. Although it was technically a city, it didn’t feel like one—it very much had the feel of a small town. When I was growing up it seemed like nothing of consequence had ever happened, or would ever happen in our humble little corner of the world.

I was born at the tail end of the 1980s, the first child of Pam and Garth Creamer. My dad worked at a nearby pulp-and-paper mill and my mom worked an administrative job at our local hospital.

Growing up I was always more of an indoors kid. Though my parents enjoyed being outside, I preferred to stay in and play with my toys, read a book, or play video games. I was pretty shy growing up, and though I didn’t have the words to describe it then, I can see looking back that I would get pretty anxious when socializing with other kids. The best days of my young life were the ones spent at home. I always felt happy and safe just sitting in the living room of our house.

My dad is a car guy. He loves talking about them, working on them, and driving them really fast. For many years his main hobby was participating in auto-racing events at the racetrack in my hometown. My dad sometimes likes to put on a tough-guy persona, which I think he picked up from hanging out with all the guy’s guys at the racetrack, but I always knew him as a sensitive and loving father who cared deeply about his family.

My dad also has a creative side that he didn’t always get to showcase in his day-to-day life. One of my fondest memories from when I was a kid was him coming home from work and showing me that he’d found the time to create a stack of pencil-and-paper mazes for me. My early love for creating and solving puzzles certainly comes from my dad.

He’s always had a great sense of humor. One time he went to the doctor for a checkup at my mom’s insistence, and the doctor told my dad he was healthy as a horse. For years afterward, anytime my mother would bother him about watching what he ate or getting more exercise, he’d simply reply by looking at her with a big smile and neighing like a horse to remind her about the doctor’s evaluation.

My mom is one of the most loving, caring, and thoughtful people I’ve ever met. She is selfless, always pouring energy into the needs of others before she would spend energy on herself. The most important thing in the world to my mom is that her family is safe and taken care of.

My mother has always had a curious mind and loves learning new things or talking with new people. This made her an excellent conversationalist. I wish I’d inherited more of that trait from her. Despite her ability to navigate social situations with apparent ease, she also had a bit of an anxious streak. If anyone from our family was driving home at night, she’d be unable to sleep until she knew they had gotten home safe and sound. My mom is also strong-willed. She’s got firm opinions on many things and has never loved being told what to do or how to do it. My personality is similar in that regard, and sometimes during my adolescence, that resulted in my mom and I butting heads on things, but never for too long.

I look at the personalities of my parents and it’s easy to figure out how I became the person I am today. Though I never inherited my dad’s love for cars, I’m thankful to have his creative mind and sense of humor. I picked up my mom’s loving nature, curiosity, and strong will.

A few years after I was born, my parents decided they wanted to have another baby. To their surprise, they discovered they would be having not just one, but two—they had twins on the way. My younger brothers Brady and Brandon were born almost three years after me.

My parents have told me many stories from when my brothers and I were little. I was really interested in my brothers for the first several days after my parents brought them home from the hospital; I helped my mom feed them, burp them, and change their diapers. After about a week, though, I grew a bit weary of the routine—according to my mom, I asked her, So when are we taking the boys back to the hospital, Mommy? She had to explain to me that my new brothers were staying with us for good.

When people find out that I have twin brothers, one of the first questions I’m typically asked is, Are they identical? The answer is no, my brothers are fraternal twins. They’re as different from each other as any two regular siblings. In fact, I like to joke that my brothers are very fraternal—in a lot of ways they have polar-opposite personalities. Brady was always more interested in socializing, sports, and getting into trouble as a child, whereas Brandon was reserved, interested in reading and other indoor activities, and regarded as the best-behaved of the three of us.

We all played together frequently when we were young. As the older brother I was the ringleader, and I would organize and prepare games for my brothers. We loved to build blanket forts, explore outside, and act out all kinds of crazy scenarios with our stuffed animals and action figures.

As we grew older, it became clear that Brandon and I had a lot more in common with each other than we did with Brady. Brandon and I would love to stay indoors and make up games to play, often creating elaborate worlds and rulesets with pencil and paper, whereas Brady was more interested in playing team sports and engaging in all manner of shenanigans outside of the house. The older we grew, the more Brady seemed to drift away from Brandon and me. Thus, Brandon and I grew closer in my adolescence and became best friends, and Brady felt more and more like the odd man out and didn’t seem particularly interested in maintaining much of a relationship with us.

One of my biggest childhood joys was playing video games. My dad taught me to play some of the early platformer games when I was as young as two years old, which created a lifelong passion for me. I’ve seen many pictures in our family photo albums of me sitting on my dad’s lap, the two of us looking up at a television, a video game controller in my hands.

My dad has always had a gift for teaching. He taught me all kinds of things growing up, and he still teaches me things today. He taught me how to build wooden forts and other structures using a hammer and nails, how to skate and play hockey, and much to my chagrin, how to hold a flashlight while he was working on something in the garage. He taught me how to be a big brother and always look out for Brady and Brandon.

As fate would have it, my dad also taught me how to play the game of chess.

I first recall playing against him when I was around six years old. He showed me how the individual pieces moved, and after I understood the rules we would play against each other a few nights a week. We would sometimes play on a real board, and sometimes we would play against each other on our home computer.

I don’t remember what our old physical chessboard looked like, but I vividly remember playing against my dad on the computer. We used an old program called Grandmaster Chess, and we’d play for hours at a time. One of my clearest memories from that old program was the background music. One song played over and over, so regal, so elegant, so perfectly upper-class and fancy-seeming: Beethoven’s Für Elise. It played constantly while the software was running, and to this day it is emblematic of chess and my earliest memories of the game. I’ll always remember sitting at our computer in the dining room, especially nearing bedtime, when the lights of the house were turned off and the bright blueish hue of the computer screen lit the space. I loved playing chess in the quiet of the night, listening to nothing but Für Elise—in my mind it will always be the official theme song of chess.

My dad and I were casual players and didn’t study the game in any meaningful way. As I got a bit older we became evenly matched: I’d win a few games and he’d win a few, but it always felt like we both had a shot. I remember those games fondly.

What I remember less fondly were my games against the computer. When my dad was at work or busy doing other things I would play against Grandmaster Chess, which destroyed me game after game. I grew to hate that damn program.

I yearned to finally beat the computer at chess and played dozens of games against the machine. A few times, I felt I had the upper hand, as if I was finally going to win—only to have the computer execute some seemingly magical sequence of moves that miraculously saved the day and resulted in me losing the game. I eventually got frustrated enough that I stopped playing against the computer.

I played chess in elementary school against my classmates—it became popular when I was in Grade 4. I don’t think we even knew all the rules. None of us could really figure out how castling was supposed to work, but it was a fun time nonetheless. The games against my friends were similar to the ones against my dad: both sides always had a shot to win. In those days our strategy was rudimentary. We’d take turns moving our pieces around the board and hoping our opponent wouldn’t notice one of their pieces being attacked. Eventually someone would overlook something simple and they’d lose a piece. We kept doing that until someone was able to checkmate their opponent. We would play two or three times a week at lunch or have a quick game during recess.

After we moved to middle school, we progressed from playing chess during our lunch breaks to playing our favorite monster-catching video games. My friends and I were obsessed with trying to outperform one another with our in-game progress.

We were relentlessly mocked for our nerdy habits. There was a group of athletic boys who were not interested in these things, and they took every opportunity to make fun of our video game playing. We were called losers. We were called even more hurtful slurs. It became an unsafe place to express any kind of intellectual hobby or nerdy pastime. We eventually became too embarrassed to play video games where they could see us, and I’m sure we would have been ridiculed for playing chess as well. So chess left my mind for some time as I endured the abuse those boys administered to me and my friends until we finally left middle school.

One day in high school, our homeroom teacher was trying to get us excited about joining some of the many clubs the school had to offer. A lot of the options were unappealing to me—I wasn’t particularly excited about joining things like the mechanics’ club, where people would tinker on cars after school. Some of the other options sounded fun but they terrified me. Joining something like the drama club or rugby team sounded like it might be fun, but I was far too scared to step outside my comfort zone at that point in my life. One option the teacher mentioned did pique my interest, though: the chess club.

The mention of the chess club instantly reminded me of truly enjoying playing in those Grade 4 lunchtime chess battles. I had been conditioned by the bullying in middle school to avoid these kinds of clubs for fear of being made fun of, but eventually I came to realize that as I got older people cared less about what hobbies I chose. I eventually attended the chess club, deciding to try it for a few weeks. It was a casual pursuit, a fun throwaway pastime at lunch, and I didn’t take it too seriously.

After a few months, however, the teacher who was organizing the club informed us that we needed to choose representatives from each grade level to compete at the provincial championships. On a whim I mentioned that I would be interested. Another boy, Matthew, said he would be interested also. We didn’t have formal rankings of the players or a framework for how we’d decide who got to go to provincials, so it was decided by the teacher that Matthew and I would play one qualifying game of chess and the winner would get the spot.

Matthew was a better player than I was and took chess more seriously than me, and on top of that I didn’t play very well in our qualifying game. Matthew captured several of my pieces and was close to winning the game—things were so dire that I easily could have resigned the game, given the size of Matthew’s advantage. He was closing in with his queen and checkmate was just around the corner. He’d check my king, and I’d move my monarch. He’d check my king again, and again I’d move it.

Unfortunately for Matthew, his comfortable advantage lulled him into a false sense of security—he checked me for what felt like the fifth or sixth time in a row, but this time he placed his queen immediately next to my king and failed to notice his most powerful piece was undefended. Stunned, I looked at the board for several seconds before I reached down and captured his queen with my king.

Matthew immediately uttered a sound of shock—Oh!—and buried his face in his hands. He realized that he had just accidentally given away his queen for nothing. With my remaining pieces I had the advantage, and a few minutes later I had won the game and a spot at the provincial championship.

To this day I feel guilty about that game. Matthew certainly felt like the more deserving player, given that he studied chess more seriously than I did, and especially considering he had a huge advantage before blundering his queen. However, this was an early lesson for me about a cold, hard reality of chess: the player who deserves to win can easily end up losing if they’re not careful. As is often said in chess, one bad move can undo forty good ones, and that was certainly the case for poor Matthew.

A few days before we were going to go to provincials, all the representatives from each grade in my school were brought together to register their information and meet each other. One person in a higher grade—I can’t recall who—sat down across a board from me and taught me a cool trick: the four-move checkmate.

I was amazed—You can checkmate someone in four moves? I soon discovered that if your opponent knows what you’re attempting they can easily stop the four-move checkmate, but not everyone realizes your plan before it’s too late. I reviewed the sequence with this person a few times, amazed at this incredible trick, and I stored it away in my back pocket.

I went to provincials a few weeks later and did pretty poorly. Many of my opponents were much better prepared. They had practiced tactics, knew openings—they were better trained than I was in every way.

I did uncork my four-move checkmate on one person who didn’t see it coming. The room was dead quiet, everyone deep in thought, when I announced checkmate after only a few minutes of playing. Heads turned, people whispered under their breath, and my poor opponent must have been humiliated, though he took the loss graciously.

I would later come to learn that according to chess etiquette, in competitive games like these, you weren’t supposed to actually say checkmate out loud. Although I enjoyed my lone victory, I lost all of the games in which my opponents knew to look out for the four-move checkmate, and I ended up with a bad overall score. By the end of the event I felt firmly out of my league.

Sometime around the provincials, my parents bought me a book on chess tactics. It was fascinating, explaining all the tactical motifs that a person must learn when studying chess seriously. This book was my first taste of what it meant to study chess, and it introduced me to concepts like forks (where you attack two enemy pieces at the same time) and pins (where you prevent an opponent’s piece from moving because it would expose an attack on a more valuable piece behind it). I didn’t yet have any idea what it meant to actually study chess in a rigorous manner and work on improving my game, though. I read through the book casually and solved a few of the puzzles, but I didn’t really use it to practice in any meaningful way.

All these years later, I wish that I had taken the opportunity to invest some real effort into learning how to play chess well, but at that time I didn’t know any better. It hadn’t occurred to me that sitting down and working hard to study chess was something that I could do. Once solving these puzzles started to feel like work, I would lose interest. I solved puzzles while it felt fun, and then eventually moved on to the next thing—some new video game or television show, a fun activity with my brothers. Chess faded out of my mind for a long time. I would drop in on the school’s chess club once every couple of weeks and play games casually, but it largely drifted out of my life.

These are the lovely early memories that I think of every time someone asks me, When did you first start playing chess? I remember my father teaching me how to move the pieces, and our evening games. I remember the sound of Für Elise and that damn chess software I could never defeat. I remember my Grade 4 lunchtime battles with my friends. All of these experiences cemented my affinity for the game and gave me a multitude of beautiful chess memories to look back on.

I had no idea what was still to come in my journey with the game of chess. I could not yet foresee the deep passion I would develop for the game, the purpose and meaning it would give me in in some of my darkest moments—or the ways it would come to consume my life.

2

The Grandmaster

2009–2011

Let’s jump now to the year 2009, when I was facing a pivotal crisis point in my life: I was turning twenty.

It might sound silly, but turning twenty was an anxiety-inducing experience for me. For my entire life up to that point I had been either a child or a teenager, and entering my twenties and transitioning to adulthood felt like some hypothetical life event that only happened to other people, but not to me. Turning twenty was one of my first real moments of realizing that I was not immune to aging, as I had always secretly thought in the back of my mind. It made me fear death, it made me anxious, and it pushed me to truly consider my plans for the rest of my life in a real, concrete way.

I was in my third year of university studies, enrolled in a Bachelor of Science degree at the time, majoring in biochemistry and neuroscience. In truth, the experience of pursuing that degree was not something I was enjoying at all. The workload to complete the necessary reading and studying for the lectures was pretty grueling. We also had a rigorous lab schedule which required us to conduct multi-hour experiments and complete extensive writeups twice per week.

I didn’t mind the lectures but I dreaded the labs; science might look cool on television, but in real life, it required countless hours of performing monotonous tasks, mixing little tubes of liquid together and then putting them into a machine and waiting for something to happen while you make small talk with your lab partner. My lab schedule invariably ruined my sleep twice a week as I lay in bed the night before, tossing and turning, anxious about the following day’s responsibilities.

Attending those classes and enduring the labs felt like necessary dues I was paying to be a good student, but on a day-to-day basis I found myself feeling drained, rather than being excited or stimulated by the topics. I wasn’t quite ready to admit it at the time, but I was very unhappy with my studies.

Turning twenty caused me to look inward in ways I hadn’t before. I had always been very focused on school, because I had learned that’s how you became successful and won at life. At the time, a lot of this thinking was still subconscious, but when teachers and peers and parents indicate that they are impressed with your career trajectory, that validation is influential on a young person. I’d always been taught that getting good grades was essential. Focusing on school felt like the right thing to do, and I was resolved to finish my degree no matter what. I felt like if I didn’t finish my degree, I would be a failure. But if I toughed it out and endured, the struggle would be worth it in the end.

I also felt directionless in my friend group and love life at the time. I had some on-again, off-again girlfriends, and a friend group that I was growing apart from. In our first year of university, my friends and I had been so close. Around the end of our second year, though, it felt like something shifted. As graduation drew closer, I felt overwhelming pressure to spend more time studying. Most of my friends, on the other hand, seemed content to spend more time socializing and enjoying life. I found myself frequently canceling plans in favor of spending more time in the library—I couldn’t understand why my friends weren’t more stressed out about what their grade-point averages would be when they graduated.

At this stage in my life I found myself grappling with the tension between the expectations I felt other people had for my life, versus how I actually wanted my life to go. So much of my life had revolved around trying to do well in school, putting in hard work and making sacrifices in the now so that I could have a happy and successful life in the future. But whereas before I felt an unlimited sense of time sprawling out before me, I now felt a crushing sense of time running out.

I eventually began referring to the feelings I was experiencing as my quarter-life crisis. I told this to my friends, and for the most part they thought I was joking. They laughed, but inside I screamed. I felt afraid and resigned to a life that I was coming to realize I didn’t want.

All that to say, in 2009 I was at an emotional low. I was feeling stressed about school, down about my social life, and particularly overwhelmed as final exams approached. In a moment of deep procrastination, I made a choice that would dramatically influence the course of my life. I was looking for a television show to take my mind off of all the things that were worrying me, and on a whim I decided to watch the reality television show Survivor.

Survivor is an awesome show. A group of contestants live outdoors on a tropical island and help each other survive while at the same time competing against one another in a game of social strategy. Each week one contestant is eliminated until only a single winner remains to claim the million-dollar prize. It’s like a gameshow mixed with a sport mixed with backstabbing social politics.

Survivor became my fun escape from the stress and anxiety of my school life. Over the course of the next few years I went back and watched every season that was available online. It was the show I watched as I struggled to finish out the rest of my classes in the 2009 school year and as I trudged along for the 2010 school year as well. It was the show I watched when I was feeling depressed and unsuccessful and unimportant. My emotional low continued into 2011, but Survivor was there as a constant presence that never failed to help me feel better.

One night in 2011, I was watching an episode of Survivor’s 21st season, Survivor: Nicaragua. One of the most strategic players from that season, a guy named Marty, was talking with a surfer dude nicknamed Fabio.

Marty was sitting beside Fabio in their shelter and said to him, Dude, I have not told anybody this, not even on my own tribe, but I am—he paused before the reveal—a grandmaster in chess.

Fabio looked taken aback—impressed, but full of surprise and disbelief. Marty continued, And have you ever heard of Guillermo Vilas before? Have you ever heard that name?

Fabio had a big smile on his face as he replied, No, man. All I’ve heard of is Bobby Fischer.

Okay, well, Guillermo Vilas is an Argentine grandmaster, and when I was a kid I beat him twice, Marty said. Fabio seemed amazed.

Later, Marty admitted to the camera that his story was completely made up. Guillermo Vilas was actually a tennis player, and Marty was not a chess grandmaster. He just wanted Fabio to think he was smart so that Fabio might be more willing to go along with Marty’s plans.

I laughed in the moment as I watched the scene play out. However, this innocuous lie told by Marty piqued my interest. Later that evening, I began to wonder, What does it actually mean to be a grandmaster of chess? I had certainly heard the term before, but I had never known what it meant. It sounded impressive, almost mythological—it had such an appeal to me.

This led me down a deep Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to figure out what a grandmaster title actually was. It was obvious that it indicated a mastery of chess, but how did someone get the title? Was there some sort of chess exam that you had to take?

I did some research and learned that competitive chess players have an official numerical rating that measures their playing strength. In order to become a grandmaster, a player has to achieve a rating of 2500 and have at least three tournaments where they play at the strength of a 2600 rating. I had no idea what these numbers meant, but they sounded interesting. How hard could it be to get your rating up to 2500?

It honestly had never occurred to me that people played in chess tournaments as adults. Chess was always something I’d considered to be a fun game that we would play in school, but I assumed that as people got older they tended to stop playing chess, the way I had. I learned that many adults played chess—there were various chess clubs and competitive tournaments all over the world. There were even professional chess players. These were people who, instead of aspiring to go to medical school or law school, became chess players. That was their job.

It was an amazing concept to me, and it was one of the first times I had considered how radically different people could make their lives just by deciding to do so.

I read countless articles in the following days about chess grandmasters, about openings, about tactics, about famous players like Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer. I read early articles about this young player who supposedly could become a phenom in the chess world, a prodigy from Norway called Magnus Carlsen.

What a cool name, I thought. I wonder if this Carlsen guy will turn out to be as good as they say?

Magnus Carlsen went on to have quite a chess career since the night in 2011 when I had that thought, but we’ll get to that later.

I’d been learning more and more about chess, and I found myself fascinated. I was watching videos about different opening moves, I was playing a few games online, and for the first time in a long time I felt really truly excited about what I was spending my time on. I’d watch an hour-long lecture about a new chess opening and it was engrossing—a total contrast to how I felt about my hour-long lectures about biochemistry. I felt intellectually stimulated by chess. I felt drawn to the game, and I was eager to see how good I could become.

As I learned more and more about chess grandmasters over the next several weeks, I was already spending a great deal of my time looking inward. My quarter-life crisis had led me to think more critically about why I felt so unhappy. I felt like I was not an interesting person, I felt like I had never accomplished anything significant, and I felt unwanted. I knew I needed to change that. I wanted to be interesting. I wanted to be desirable. I wanted to be impressive.

Most of my life I’d seen success measured by how much the media praised impressive feats or qualifications of certain individuals—movie stars, sports heroes, business moguls. There were stories of magnificent athletic prowess displayed by professional athletes. There were articles about the crazy programming feats that Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had performed as adolescents. These were the kinds of tales that were told about successful people who had interesting, impressive backstories. I could feel the absence of that in my life. I wanted something about myself to point to and say, Kyle Creamer did this impressive thing. That’s something I’d craved for most of my life: a larger-than-life decoration or award or achievement that defined me as a successful person. I didn’t have anything like that, so an intoxicating thought started to take shape in my mind . . . I could become a chess grandmaster.

I continued reading about grandmasters, trying to learn as much as I could. I saw it mentioned time and time again that this was no small undertaking – I read accounts of some people spending their entire lives playing chess and not even coming close to attaining the title. At the time I was doing my search, there were fewer than 2000 grandmasters in