When the Chessboard is Smeared with Blood

Intended to be played for fun, pleasure, and entertainment, chess is part of the human culture and civilization.

I noticed that I played better when considered it as a fun, not as a life-and-death battle. Getting a win at all cost can hardly make you a better payer, not to say a better human being. Respect your opponent. Enjoy chess in yourself, not yourself in chess.

Mediocrity hates talent. As a rule, the most rude, trash-talking players are not grandmasters, not even masters. They are loosers who pour hatred on the world, a kind of inadequate attitude that does not allow them to improve.

Not very long ago, in 2019, there was a criminal case in Ukraine that shocked everybody. It is a real story that got into newspapers. As reported by the Ukrainian news agency TSN, in the city of Lviv a 82-year-old pensioner was found dead in their own apartment. The body was lying in a puddle of blood for almost a week.

Soon the police detained the suspect of murder at a gas station in Nikolaev.

The police learned that the old man played chess with a 33-year-old friend, and won all the time. The guest got angry: he grabbed a hammer and beat the opponent to death with several blows on his head.

It is a story from which a lot can be learned.

There are known historic cases when notorious murderers took interest in chess. Some played chess in prison before being hanged, but it seems they never took it passionately and seriously enough in order to murder somebody over it. Only the one with a desire to win at all cost and whose ambition is bigger than love for the game can do that.

Another such story happened in Dublin in 2014, and was circulated in Ireland's National Media as follows.

"Thomas O’Gorman died after he was severely beaten and stabbed to death in his home at Beechpark Avenue in Castleknock.

There was no sign of a break in and detectives are working on the theory that Mr O'Gorman was attacked following a row over the movement of a piece of a chessboard.

A short time later, detectives arrested a 34-year-old Italian man who was also in the house."

Online chess is more safe than the OTB, especially in today's world when it seems everything is chaos, and nobody can be trusted. Playing on the Internet you risk nothing except getting an abusive message in the chat, but this problem can be overcome by blocking the chat, and the user altogether.