Chess.com horror story

Note: This story is fictional and nothing written in here is real. It’s all made up, and this is a series, too. Today is day 1, and I’ll upload part 2 (day 2) sometime later. So keep your eyes peeled.

Story (titled: I played a man on chess.com, now I regret it.)

Admit it, we all probably raged quit chess because we got our poor ELOs harvested by someone on here, or you were in a completely winning position but lost on time. This was pretty infuriating, don’t you think? Well, I did. I was about to lose the game, I blundered my queen at one point. But my opponent did spend way too much time thinking, and they only had 18 seconds left. I knew if I could flag him, I could maintain my measly ELO of 1100. So I decided to play fast moves, and weird ones to surprise my opponent so he would spend more time. 

After like 100 premoves, I was able to flag my opponent. He lost on time and I got 10 ELO points. But shortly after that game I suddenly felt quite lightheaded, so I decided to take a nap and clear my head. But when I woke up, I saw that my entire computer had some red font, and there was a file on my computer that I opened, which was a huge mistake.

“I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”

I was shocked, my name was Jonathan. I thought it was a family member trolling me so I rushed down the stairs where I saw my younger sister, Sarah. Sarah was quite the chess fanatic, just like me. She even won plenty of real tournaments, in fact. It’s safe to say she was much better than me. I told Sarah if she changed my computer when I was sleeping, but she said she was at the market at that time. So I rushed up the stairs to show her.

Immediately, she was shocked. She told me that she played a man recently and she was surprisingly already in a terrible position but flagged him, too. And when she finished playing she took a nap and woke up to her phone being stuck in a red tint, she decided to destroy her phone over it, in fact. I knew I must do something about this, so after the weekend ended and school started I went to my chess club to alert everyone about this user.

Immediately, they were all intrigued by this user. The president of my chess club, Jackson, agreed to play whoever this man was and tell us what happened. So he sent a challenge invite to the man and immediately the man agreed. Jackson told us that he needed to focus, so we all left to get lunch. But when we came back we saw Jackson, passed out on the ground. And on his computer was that familiar tint. I needed to do something, so I checked his account and saw he managed to flag the man, too. So this made me investigate the account. I saw that he won every game but three. The game with me, the game with Sarah, and the game with Jackson. I investigated all the won games, and showed he easily defeated all his opponents but usually had only 5 seconds left on the clock. But I then saw some posts he made on the forums.

I clicked through, and I saw a 500 comment thread through one post. I started to read it.

“I’ve never lost against a single person” the man wrote.

I read it, and it was mainly flexing the fact he never lost. But the comments were much more disturbing.

User 1: Seriously? You never lost against a single person? You must definitely be cheating!

User 2: Yup, I agree. Hey OP, if you’re reading this, challenge me!

OP (the person who wrote the post): Alright man, bet.

User 2: I finished playing, why do I feel very lightheaded?

User 3: User 2? Are you still there?

OP: User 2 is long gone.

User 4: You must be joking, challenge me.

OP: Alright.

User 5 (Comment written 5 months later): User 4? Are you still active?

From there, more and more users started to participate in the thread, basically all saying and freaking out about where those people went. I realized that more than just your device being tinted red and passing out was the worst. I investigated the profiles of the missing people and saw the cities they lived. They were:

Brookline, Massachusetts

Spokane, Washington

Toronto, Ontario

I decided to look at missing people reports and sure enough, on the same day User 2 played against OP, there was exactly one missing person report in Brookline that same day. Their name was Evelyn. In Spokane there were two people that went missing the same day User 2 went missing. Their names were Jeremy and David. And looking through their LinkedIn accounts, they both had passions for chess. So one of them was one of those users that went missing. But suddenly, my phone had an EAS Alert. It was a missing person, their name? It was Jackson.

I dropped my phone in shock.

I realized that if whoever plays this man faints, they go missing.

I immediately grabbed my phone and called a friend of mine, Hugo. He agreed we needed to leave the state immediately. And he would pull up to my house at 10 PM. I immediately started to pack my bags, and told Sarah about my findings. It’s safe to say that she immediately started to pack belongings, too. Eventually, Hugo pulled up, and we got into the car. I texted my parents about the situation and my mom was understanding of it and said I would be on vacation for around a week to the school. Hugo said he has a friend in South Carolina he wanted to meet. Thankfully my grandma also lived in South Carolina, so at least I have someone I know there. But we were in Oregon, so it’ll be quite the journey, isn’t it?

Day 2: (Coming soon)