Hammer & Mauling

29 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When my own life was the most important thing to me, I used to be an extremist. If I was hot, I’d crank up the AC as far as it could go, and the same went the other way. I didn’t have a middle ground because the middle ground was like no man’s land. It held nothing of interest for me.

When I played a game, it was about building up forces. Yes, I allowed the opponent to position himself in the best place without hindrance, while I was allowing loss of ground purely for the interest of hammering him hard in the end. Actually, it was the end that was so important to me. It had to involve the strike of a hammer.

That is why I never won anything. I was not good at Chess, and when I was introduced to a new game, I would find a way to work it so that I would sacrifice initiative and the gaining of ground to build that heavy army to come forward and devastate right at the end, just like in the movies.

If a game did not allow the opportunity to build up your forces, then it was not my type of game, and I would probably not play it for long. In practical matters outside the realms of gaming, this made me somebody who was constantly burning or freezing.

I would slowly freeze in my room and never even notice that I needed to put on a sweater or to turn on the heater. Maybe I was off in other worlds. I never noticed noises either. If we were playing paintball war games out in the Everglades, noises were what you had to go on because they were what spelled out who was near you when you were hiding in the bushes ready to ambush your friends. That meant I was good at tuning out the shit from neighbors too, although I was such a light sleeper, a noise of any kind always bothered me, nonetheless.

In Chess, my friend had an easy time with me, toying with me because of my obvious propensities. As we were setting up the board on our first game, I told him I liked knights best of all, and he then started the game by annihilating my knights. I thought he was just being a jerk, but later he confessed that he had been reading a book on Chess psychology. It brought up the new Chess of the day, where you use the opponent’s attitudes and whims against them. If somebody said they liked their horses, and you took them out in the beginning moves of the game, you were not just sending a message by capturing them, you were also making the opponent upset, playing this person, making him desperately look for a move for revenge. Another good reason to remove the knights was that if that person were telling the truth and they were good at using the knights, it was best to remove them early. And as every Chess player knows, knights are most useful in the beginning, anyway.

At the time, all of this was shooting over my head. I wasn’t good enough to know how to use horses well enough, anyway. I just knew my friend was annoying. I did want to get revenge, and this kind of attitude always got me into worse trouble.

Later, I was living on the other side of the country, and when I came back for Christmas, I played my friend, and he was shocked. In our first game in almost a year, I was putting him in a corner, and he wanted to know how I got better.

I didn’t study the game, and I didn’t practice. But I was a different player. I went through experiences in this other city, and I became a different person. My behavioral clock had been retuned, and I was making decisions in different ways. That was how I was adding it all up.

On a Chess board, I was playing in a way where every piece and pawn was susceptible to sacrifice if it got me closer to the opponent’s king. I was now playing with the speed of developing your forces and with the understanding that the pieces themselves were not important; rather, what was important was their proximity to the other king.

We played three times during my visit. I beat him twice and had him in the ropes in the third game when he was finally understanding what it was I was doing. We didn’t finish that last game, but I have to admit he was about to turn it around.

I was going through life now moving with the moment. If I lost my horses in a Chess game, that only meant I didn’t lose something else, and it might give the opponent the false sense that they had done something valuable, pinning them to a strategy that might not have worked. I was going with the flow, and I now knew that speed was important. If I needed to sacrifice some pieces to get that much closer to the throat of my opponent, I was going to relieve myself of those pieces.

The one thing I was not doing correctly was being judicious with my sacrifices because sacrifices that did not share mutual destruction with opponent pieces were going to weigh heavily on the player who was two or three pieces behind toward the end of the game. If I got my opponent quickly, it might work, but if the game dragged, I would likely lose. It was the idea of hitting someone with everything you had, fast. I was starting to notice that it was not a winning strategy in the long run. Once my friend knew what I was doing, he could hold back and wait until I was weak enough to overwhelm. I thought I had hit the perfect strategy and was proved wrong, and when I looked at it hard enough, it was nothing but a different version of the old hammer I used to rely on, except this speedy attack was more like mauling.

Eventually, I did get to study Chess a little. I read books about certain tactics. I was never a real Chess player because you have to study the openings, and I never did. Openings didn’t interest me. But I was reading books about Chess psychology and began to understand my friend. He was still a better Chess player than I was, but I could now give him a run for his money.

With time, I can’t say I ever got significantly better. I was still using a modified version of my maul. If my old hammer were the slow move to the explosion at the end, the maul was the fuse already lit at the start with the idea that we were not going to ever reach the end. Both approaches were still about climax. That quirk was still inside me. I would still crank up the heater in response to my being cold.

When I think about this, I must have been doing it because I waited until the last moment of being cold — until it finally dawned on me I was cold — to rip it open and reverse the tide of frost. For me, it was only natural to go to extremes, and I think it was because I liked to experience the sudden changes. If you wash your car after six months of it collecting dust, it was satisfying to wipe off the grime and witness dramatic changes in surface gloss, beholding the filthy water run down the driveway.

I got into a couple of other games. It was funny, but with me, it was always about war games. I would play a skirmish-style game, and again, I would go into the extremes of mauling the other war band with sudden death, if not getting mauled myself.

When I got into board games of all types, I slowly started understanding the parameters of certain games. Now that I was exposing myself to a vast variety of these new board games, I discovered that there were all types of games out there. As I slowly became a better overall player in different types of games, I was starting to wean out the old bad habits. I now started to understand that games were about balance and timing, as well as playing your opponent against self (the psychological factor). If you were hoarding your forces until they were ready, you were not playing with timing or balance, and your opponent can see the slow-moving punch coming at them with enough time to do something about it.

Enlightenment comes in bits and pieces. It is no exaggeration when I say that games have changed the way I go about a problem and how I make decisions in life and in my work. They also honed my ability to focus, to go about the next few steps in any process, whether it be in games, art, or writing. When enlightenment finally arrives, you quickly gather that you had it wrong all along. Because now you know better.

I haven’t played Chess in a long time, what with all these games that are more fascinating right now. These days, it’s getting colder, and I noticed that I apply the force that is needed in my car’s heater almost like a chemist who needs the right amount, and if I need to adjust, I do so with the slightest change as if getting that exact number to make the interior of my cabin perfect. So instead of the extremist that allowed his fingernails to go opalescent, I am someone fascinated with precision.

An extremist takes his argument to its logical conclusion, much to the chagrin of anybody going against the argument. This was the seed of feuds that progressed outside of game environments and thermometers. I used to have a logically sound argument to defend any point, no matter how inconsequential. And nowadays, in order to retain precision in a discussion where both sides do not agree, let’s say, I profess to not really know very much about anything — not in any significant way. My viewpoint is still lurking in the background, and I now defend it with just the right amount of detail and force, coupled with the right timing to deliver the best argument. In the interest of not losing when it really matters, I keep myself and my tendencies out of it, playing the opponent and not myself. It makes life simpler, and it keeps me sharp.

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