The Constant Board
A personal journey through the coffee houses of Tunisia and across the Atlantic—how a vinyl board, a humbling defeat, and a father’s quiet faith shaped a lifelong relationship with chess.
Every story has a board. Mine was vinyl, cracked at the d4 square, and it traveled with me from a sunlit balcony in Mégrine to a cramped apartment in Manhattan. The pieces were plastic, mismatched—a replacement rook carved from a wine cork, a queen borrowed from another set entirely. But the board was constant.
In the coffee houses of Tunis, chess was not a game. It was a language. Old men played without clocks, their cigarettes burning down to the filter, their silence more articulate than any analysis. I watched before I played. I learned before I understood what I was learning.
My father taught me the moves when I was six. He did not teach me openings or tactics. He taught me to sit still, to look at the whole board before touching a piece, and to accept defeat without excuse. These were not chess lessons. They were life lessons delivered sixty-four squares at a time.
The first real defeat I remember—the one that meant something—came at a local tournament in La Marsa. I was twelve. My opponent was a boy my age who played the Sicilian Defense with a confidence I had never seen. He did not just beat me; he made me feel like I had never understood the game at all.
That night I replayed every move. Not on a board—we could not afford a second set—but in my head, staring at the ceiling. I found my mistake on move fourteen. A knight retreat that looked safe but surrendered all initiative. I swore I would never make a passive move again.
Years later, carrying that same vinyl board through JFK customs, I realized the game had carried me. Chess was not my escape from Mégrine. It was Mégrine’s gift to wherever I was going.
This book is about what chess teaches us when we stop trying to win and start trying to understand. Each chapter examines a different dimension—psychological, sociological, cultural, technological—of the game that has shaped civilizations for fifteen hundred years.
The board is constant. Everything else is in play.