Retirement
The Popeye moment has arrived: “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!”
All things must pass. This decision wasn’t easy for me to make; in fact it’s overdue. I feel like I’m letting Fred and Marshall and Pearle down. But I just can’t do it anymore. The game has changed. The players have changed. I’ve changed. I would hope they would understand.
Scenes from the life of an organizer and coach:
The time one of my players was making a meteoric rise. He deserved to play on a higher board, and the website ratings supported that move. The organizers of the state scholatic tournament, however would not use the website ratings in his case. Another coach in the same event was allowed to do so.
The time one of my players, a borderline varsity player, walked up to me during a match, and threatened to throw his game, and with it quite possibly the match, if I wouldn’t guarantee him a seat on the team I would be taking to Nationals.
The time I actually had to forfeit a player over cell phone use, after three times making the announcement that I would, and having to listen to hours of whining afterwards, then having him stalk off in a huff, never to return (OK, so there was an up side to that one).
The time the USCF, then in the middle of a push for drug-testing chess players, endorsed a supplement (an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, of all things) to help you play better chess.
The moment I came to accept that getting high ranking chess players to come to your event was one thing, but that getting them to actually play a game (instead of regurgitate a few moves from theory and shake hands) against each other was quite another, and in the rare event that happened, getting either of them to turn in a copy of their scoresheet was impossible, anyway.
The many times I overheard players, who thought I couldn’t hear or understand what they were saying, “negotiating” the final tournament standings.
The year I spent in the middle of a fued between officers of an organization that were old enough to know better.
The time a mother threatened to sue me because I dared ask if her precious and perfect little girl had moved one of my books to another table, one of middling commercial value but priceless to me sentimentally.
Just a few moments from the last decade or so. There are plenty more where they came from. Straws on the back of a camel.
This is my last year as an organizer; my last year as a coach was a few years back. I could continue a litany of reasons, but it all comes down to one very simple one: It’s just not fun anymore. I’ve spent upwards of $15K over the last decade or so on chess organizing and coaching, and while I don’t begrudge doing it I just can’t keep spending that for an activity that I no longer enjoy.
I’m tired. I’m tired of begging players to share their games with the organizer of the event they’re playing in. I had planned on publishing a book of the best games from the Western Open. Trouble is, only a few really good games are played there every year, and only a small minority of those ever made it into my hands, despite my entreaties.
I’m tired of complaints. In the same event I’ve heard complaints from players that the time control was too fast and too slow, that the entry fees were too high and not high enough. That the prize fund was generous and low.
I’m tired of dealing with a national organization that’s more interested in sniping at each other and playing with children than actually promoting chess tournaments to adults.
I’ll keep playing chess, and maybe even play in a tournament or two. But I won’t be behind the big table. I’ll be the grumpy old guy in the corner at the chess club. My interest in chess as a game continues (I just renewed my subscription to New In Chess, if you need proof of that). It’s just my interest in chess organizing and organizations that has evaporated.
And I’ll keep on writing about chess history here. The chess players of the past still interest me. The computer-generated progeny of today don’t.
Maybe I’m just old and grumpy, living in the past. Whatever it is, the prospect of tournaments today fills me with more dread than excitement. I refused point-blank the idea of making players pee in a cup for the absurd drug-testing schemes that were proposed. I’m even less thrilled at the prospect of following some kid into the bathroom to make sure he’s not running Fritz on his iPhone, or frisking players for dubious “hearing aids.”
It was a fun ride, but now it’s over. I just don’t fit anymore. I don’t relate. It’s time to step aside.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:42 am
Are you still going to update the WI webpage?
It still shows tour information from 2007!, it’s almost 2009
January 6th, 2009 at 12:51 am
I don’t understand why you want to tell me how to spend my time. I don’t get the WI tour info since I left the board. You could always write the tour stories yourself and post them on the site. The mechanism is there, if you just use it. If you’ll too lazy to, you don’t have grounds to come at me, now, do you?
January 7th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Arlen,
Thanks for all of your hard work and generous contributions towards chess in Wisconsin. I will never forget our last tournament encounter!
I will be happy to organize either the Levit or the Western in the middle of July if there is enough interest.
Alex Betaneli
January 10th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I have mixed feelings about it. I wonder about things like “what if I just gambled it all on the advancing pawn instead of defending a back one?” but given the slop that usually occurred on our board (and I freely admit that I brought the the slop) I don’t have any regrets about the choice I made.
Like the club game with Sasha V., where he gave me a free hand in the center, prompting me to sac my Italian bishop on f7, opening the floodgates. The me of then loved to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” but hated to do the mop up work after. The me of today would be more open to the latter, so the game would be different. But then I’d make different choices earlier on, so there’s little point in it.
Still, what matters is the grist both games gave my internal “chessmill” to grind. Both games played a part in future developments, and served, in some small way, as fulcrums upon which my personal chess world began to turn. Hopefully, as time goes on, I’ll have more time to play (would you believe I failed to play even one game of chess in 2008, lowest number in decades) and more energy with which to do it. (Although I wasn’t able to completely shed chess teaching; one of my favorite groups of kids asked me to come back again this year, and I wasn’t able to resist.)
When I finally step back into the arena, much will be different, I’m afraid. For good or ill, we’ll have to wait and find out then.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Arlen: Good luck in retirement. Hope to see you at the Club (SWCC) to play in some of our tournaments this year. Happy New Year! Robin
January 20th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Sorry, Alex, I missed your offer in my last comment; stuck in nostalgia, I guess. I couldn’t support dropping the Western on Luke’s GBO like that (middle July). I offered to trade dates with Luke a few times, to get him out from under the EAA and me out from under Summerfest, but he wasn’t willing.
The Levit is yours, remember? You let me borrow it for a while, and FWIW, I think there’s a real future in it’s format. If you want to run it again, go ahead.
Rob, I’ll probably drop in on the club, but I’m not sure when. I still intend on playing, but right now I’m too busy trying to pay the mortgage to think about anything else (I’ve got five chess history pieces sitting here on my desk that I haven’t had time to polish and post). Maybe last half this year, though.