The clock ticks on a wooden table,
A rhythm measured in decades,
While sixty-four squares stay static,
Trapping the minds of the obsessed.
A century ago, the pace was glacial,
A gentleman’s game of long silences,
Played in smoke-filled drawing rooms
Or through the slow magic of the post.

# The Era of the Stamp

Correspondence chess was a test of patience,
Writing a move on a postcard,
Licking a stamp with quiet hope,
And waiting three weeks for a reply.
“Knight to f3,” you wrote in June;
By August, you realized it was a blunder.
But the postman was a silent accomplice,
For who was to know if you consulted
The dusty leather tomes on your shelf?
Or if you and your opponent, by unspoken pact,
Both leaned on the brains of a local master?
It was cheating by candlelight,
Slow, dignified, and utterly untraceable.

# The Brooklyn Hurricane

Then came the era of the lanky genius,
Bobby Fischer, the boy from New York,
Who treated the board like a battlefield
And the tournament directors like servants.
He was the king of the sixty-four squares,
A man who could see the end at the beginning,
But he was also, to put it quite bluntly,
A massive, unrelenting arse.
He demanded the lights be exactly so,
The cameras removed, the chairs upholstered,
While he dismantled the Soviet machine
With the grace of a surgical strike
And the personality of a cactus.

# The Silicon Invasion

For a while, the humans reigned supreme,
Mocking the clunky boxes of wires.
“A computer cannot feel the soul of the game,”
The grandmasters bragged over vodka.
Kasparov stood as the carbon-based wall,
Staring down Deep Blue with icy disdain,
Until the wall began to crumble,
One calculated calculation at a time.
Now, the engine is the undisputed god,
A cold, unblinking eye of pure logic
That laughs at our “romantic sacrifices”
And finds a win in a plus-zero-point-eight.
We don’t play computers to win anymore;
We play them to be told how stupid we are.

# The Digital Wild West

The game moved to the glowing screens,
Where icons click and premoves fly,
And women have entered the arena in force,
Breaking the seal of the old boys’ club,
Proving that the brain has no gender,
Even if the internet trolls haven’t noticed.
But with the web came the old temptations,
The “browser tab” of forbidden knowledge.
How do you know if your opponent is a genius,
Or just very good at toggling windows?
The resources are there, tempting the weak,
A Stockfish siren song in the background.

# The Scandal of the Century

Enter Hans Niemann, the young disruptor,
Who admitted to clicking where he shouldn’t,
At least in the digital, distant past.
But Magnus Carlsen, the Viking King,
Sensed a disturbance in the physical force.
He lost a game, he packed his bags,
And the world of chess went absolutely mad.
The rumors spiraled into the gutter,
A theory born of the internet’s dark wit:
Was there a device? A vibrating secret?
A hidden vibrator assisting the moves?
The commentators spoke in hushed, awkward tones
About “internal assistance” and “signals,”
While the world wondered if a Grandmaster
Had turned his anatomy into a receiver.

# The Future of the Fittest

Now, to play a game of honest intent,
We must treat the board like a high-security wing.
Forget the handshake and the polite nod;
We need a wanding and a full-body scan.
“I see you have a filling in your molar, sir,
Is it transmitting the Sicilian Defense?”
We must play in lead-lined bunkers,
Stripped to our basics, shivering in the cold,
To ensure that the moves are ours alone.
Two players, consenting to a pre-game X-ray,
Just to prove that the Knight’s move to e5
Came from a lobe, and not a battery pack.

Despite the chaos, the game survives,
A beautiful, maddening, logical mess.
Whether by postcard, by mouse, or by probe,
We are still trying to trap a wooden king,
Regression or progress, it matters not,
As long as the clock is still running.