Tessa Fenn Suggests Chess Devotee Try a Hobby That Doesn't Involve Calculating Variations for Six Hours

"You have been on move 23 since Tuesday," Tessa Fenn said. "There are hobbies where you're allowed to stop."

Marek did not look up. He said he wasn't stuck, he was verifying, and that verifying was more or less the hobby.

The position on his screen comes from a file named for an opponent he has never played. The engine version he runs, at depth 24, gives +0.31 and then asks a follow-up question he has now spent forty minutes not answering. Beside the laptop sits a second digital clock, three-second delay, bought from Basil Holloway, which now paces household decisions such as whether to order food. On the board itself a Traxler Counterattack sits assembled and unused: he learned 4...Bc5, he learned the patterns after 5.Nxf7, and last month his opponent opened with 1.c4 and transposed four times before he recognised the position at all.

Tessa had come prepared, which was her first mistake. She offered birdwatching; he said counting was the same skill. She offered walking; he said walking has no increment. She offered the seed swap. He said seeds don't tell you where you went wrong.

Every alternative was treated as a candidate move, held up, and declined for cause. The only concession he offered was scheduling: he would stop at midnight, and midnight, for three weeks running, has arrived with a new file open on the screen.

Room B is the scheduling problem. He books it in two-hour blocks on Tuesday evenings for engine review, and the sheet by the door now carries his name three times in a row, which is more often than any position in his files has repeated. The seed swap still believes Tuesday belongs to it. Asked whether a solo review session counts as use of the room, Inez Gable ruled without hesitation. "A session is a session," she said. "Nothing in the booking rules mentions an opponent."

Here I will note, in Edda's Rulebook Margin, that the Laws permit a draw claim only when the same position has appeared a third time with the same legal moves available. No rule allows a claim on the fourth evening of the same conversation. I would also note that his own logs record the last six losses ending on time, not on theory, and that no amount of Traxler has ever moved a flag from white to red.

On Thursday, Tessa asked for one evening with no variations in it. He said, "Give me a move." She said, "Leave." He wrote it down and opened the next file, because the next game always begins before the lesson has settled.