^{My Kung Fu Is Weak}

I'm officially giving up Kung Fu Chess. If you don't know what Kung Fu Chess (KFC) is, follow the link and I'll see you in about a month. I'm not a big video game person. Most of it just seems like time-killing to me. But I do have a history of selecting certain video games and behaving towards them like an addict behaves towards a drug until I've mastered it.

This might go back to the Atari 2600. The afternoon my family brought it home, the first on the block to get a game system, five of my friends immediately knocked on the door. They might have been hiding on the side of the house until we went inside with the box. "Hey, what you doing?" As if they didn't know I was in the basement with Combat and Space Invaders. Anyway, Kevin Berry beat me at Combat. You know the version with biplanes and machine guns that can only shoot about an inch out (depending on your TV screen of course)? He beat me at that and then laughed about it.

Anyway, it got under my skin. I devoted approximately 30,000 hours to the biplane/machine gun version of Combat and to this day there probably isn't a single person on the planet who could beat me at it. I don't really like video games. I can't clear a single screen of Pac-Man without divine intervention, I maybe could coax three minutes of life out of Defender and I wouldn't even recognize Doom or Myst, but you come at me with a biplane in Combat and I will pinwheel your ass all over the sky.

That's what I'm like with video games. Star Wars. Dragon's Lair. Jump Man. Tetris. Warlords. If I adopt it, I have to master it. Given my normal MO, I wouldn't give up KFC without earning a black square ranking and the ability to take on all comers. Or at least compete. Um, I'm not really there yet. I pushed my average above .500 and earned a yellow square, which I think is third from the bottom although I can't check because I'll start playing again. Then I lost six in a row and *blink* I dropped down to the dreaded white square.

(A tip for those of you still playing: If you're trying to face newbies because you're a newbie yourself, check their win-loss record before you play. Many players who have dropped a ranking simply start over again to purge their losses. I've spotted a bunch of "newbies" with records of 9-1 and better. Do you think anyone could start KFC with nine wins?)

Now, it isn't the losing that has made me turn in my kung fu. Well, it isn't just the losing. Do you know how many quarters I dropped into Dragon's Lair to figure out how to get by the black knight? A lot. Some of it is the way I lost those last six. KFC is played over the Internet, which means you can suffer some lag time. I lost two or three of those games - or at least lost my queen - because my ISP froze up. There's the frustration of losing and then there's the frustration of having two queens, a rook and a pawn to the other guy's rook and pawn and the screen freezes. Then it clicks over to "Black Wins" and the other guy has already asked to play again about five times. Of course Mr. DSL wants to play again, I'm the chump who can't win with two queens and a rook.

I'm not blaming the lag for most of my losses though. KFC is a tough game to learn. To play well, you have to forget a lot of what you might know about chess. Having a rook on an open column doesn't really matter since by the time he sweeps across the board his target has moved out of the way and is about to step back and take him. And when two pieces can move at once, things like pinning and checkmate don't really matter. Or don't matter the same way. KFC is based on moving pieces quickly and learning short term tricks. Someone might describe KFC as Hyper-fast Chess but it really isn't. It's much more like Intellectual Pong.

To see if KFC has destroyed my already minimal chess skills, I played a few games at InstantChess. IC is a pretty good site. It's trying to be a pay site, but you can play and watch for free. You play ten minute games against people selected for you. I think IC remembers you and tries to select someone with a similar win-loss record, which doesn't matter unless you go there a lot. With about a tenth of the graphics of KFC, IC gives me no lag. The first game I got my head handed to me. I tried to use the opening I had developed for KFC. (And by "developed," I mean stolen from someone else.) In KFC, you can move all your piece in the first five seconds, establishing an opening position regardless of what your opponent is doing. In real chess, I was reminded, you should pay attention to your opponent's early moves.

I played a few more games to clear KFC out of my head and remember how chess works. It works like this: I get beat. I have a decent understanding of chess, but no skills, if that makes any sense. I managed a draw against someone who was pretty good, decided that would be my victory and put my pawns out to stud. Maybe if I had the time I would allow myself to get addicted to KFC.

This has also got me thinking about our conversation on TC about Internet community. I have to retract my earlier statement about KFC being an Internet community. I guess technically it is, but not for me. You can talk to other people at the same table, but most of the exchanges are limited to "gg" (good game), if that. I watched a game being played by someone named Tigershark, thinking it might be Primetime. It wasn't, unless PT has dropped about 50 IQ points. He said things like, "You want some of that bitch" and "You were just sitting there, you cocksucking faggot." And, "Were you busy sucking cock you cocksucker." This was how he talked when he lost! He said all that shit to the player who beat him. You talk like that in person you're bound to get your ass kicked, especially if you're a doughy twelve year old boy, which I assume Tigershark is. You can get away with it on the Internet, even when you lose!

But it's not the trash-talking that's making me exit the dojo. KFC falls short of being a community to me, even by the weak standards of video game communities. It's like playing a computer who has a variety of opponents. Some you beat, some you don't and you type "gg" afterwards if you're polite. Back in the day, my buddies would be at the arcade with me. We had six kids crammed into my bedroom to play JumpMan. C-Dog skipped classes with me to play Tetris. I played Warlords on Mega's computer. Maybe it's more my time constraints than the lack of community, but I'm done.

I bought a chess set today to replace my long-lost board. Anybody who comes by is invited to play in a face-to-face, old guys in a coffee shop manner, but if you beat me too badly or make fun of me I'll make you play Combat.