Chess and Cell Phones

Chess and Cell Phones

When my oldest son Mike Griffin was in High School he and all his geek friends acquired CB radios (usually for a song at yard sales) for their cars so they could mobilize and change plans communicating immediately. Eventually cell phones replaced the CB need. What these kids learned was that either device allowed them to be very quick in making and executing plans.

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In contrast I resisted having a cell phone for many years. The kids teasingly called this crazy old man "old fashioned", but I liked the discipline required in planning and thinking through what you were going to do, and when and how you were going to communicate. This requirement gave you an opportunity to reflect about your actions and communications. So you had an opportunity to alter things before they became reality. Today, it's only when your cell phone batteries die, that you realize how your approach to things and task organization is affected by this new cell phone/blackberry reality.

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Sad to say my company gave me a cell phone/computer, so I can be reached 24/7. With this ball and chain I have grudgingly become a cell phone world citizen. On recent vacations out of country I have to lug an international phone to stay connected to work. It's only in the backwoods of Maine where I'm out of the e-shadow of phone towers where I can find the solitude of my earlier and simpler untethered life. And that too is going away.

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But I digress: I was directing one of my first tournaments one Saturday about 7 years ago, when the club was at Clarendon Street, and I noticed that many of the adolescent kids were being dropped off at the tournament by parents who were arming their children with cell phones. I thought that was a pretty good idea as it gave the kids some independence but also a life line.The bathroom was on the seventh floor below the chess club (8th floor) and could either be reached by elevator or via fire stairway assuming the door to the stairs was unlocked to the level below or (more commonly) propped open by the trash barrel that really should have been inside the bathroom. The stairway gambit was the way to go if you knew for sure that the door below was open because you didn't have to wait for the elevator to come up and get you. But if the stairway door was LOCKED you had to travel down seven flights to the bottom floor, get out to the street, reenter the building thru the lobby, and take the elevator eight floors up to the BCF, a real time waster. This stairway was unmarked so the first time you were locked in the stairway it could be disconcerting as you had to figure out it was for escaping fires thus you had to go down to the street.

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That Saturday then teenager Oleg Ogarkov got locked in the stairway. Sharp Oleg simply pulled out his cell phone and called me in the club. I told him to walk up the stairs and knock and I would open the door. And so it happened, problem quickly solved no long march for Oleg. FYI Oleg currently is getting an engineering degree in materials at UMass Lowell and hasn't been playing much chess.

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Cell phones in the chess hall are disruptive and are banned from FIDE tournaments. I asked the USCF if there are formal rules and Walter Brown of the USCF says it's up to the TD, but penalties ranging from time penalties to forfeiture are common for ringing, answering vibrating calls in the playing hall, and texting at the board. The penalties should be announced before hand and it would be good if the rules were posted.

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Just like in everything in life today, this instant communication option reduces the cycle time of every event/transaction/problem. In IT the fact that I have the cell phone I have learned actually decreases the time I need to put into working off hours because being part of a network actually solves problems much faster. In old IT days (when men were men and data was on cardboard) major projects required a team of specialists to camp at work together whole weekends, mostly waiting for their few occasional moments of glory to submit this or that job. A simple phone call may mean people are less apt to mess things up if they have a life line call, thus eliminating your cleanup time and loss to the company. So the fact I can be reached on a weekend by my job actually increases my chess time, most of the time. And these kids can actually play more often because parents are confident enough to leave them as long as they have a phone. And no doubt the ability being connected allows many others the opportunity to play chess. So it's a love/hate relationship with cell phones and chess.

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Please put your phone on vibrate and do not stand in the hall just outside the door shouting into your cell phone while the round is in session.

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What are your feelings about chess and cell phones?

Please Comment. Thank You.

Mike Griffin

04/21/2009