I threw all the pieces on the floor. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you this.

When someone says to you, “I was playing a game of chess and I lost and I threw all the pieces on the floor,” you might think: ok, he was four years old.

That’s cute. But I was 17.  I was shaving. The other guy had just captured my queen so I did what any 17 year old shaver would do in the middle of a match of North Brunswick High School versus Matewan High School: I threw all the pieces on the floor and ran out of the school.

I was supposed to be good. But now this nothing kid from Matewan had beaten me. And the thousands of people at school who cared about chess would know about it the next day.

So I didn’t go to school. Would you?

I called up John Nash. Yes, THAT John Nash. Of “Beautiful Mind” fame. Only it was his son. He had a Phd in Math but stayed at home all day looking at chess games. He was a strong master-level player.

He picked me up at the bus stop (I told someone I was sick and couldn’t go to school. Either that or I just took the bus to Princeton instead of the bus to school and told nobody. Nobody ever asked) and we went over his house.

Along the way, we talked about the Modern Defense, the Bc4 version. Is it drawish if white castles too early and Black equalizes in the center?

We played chess all day. He had a habit of stroking his unkempt beard or scratching his hair where it shot up from his head in odd angles.

I felt like I was in a swimming pool, and making moves was how I would tread water or else I would sink and drown.

We started moving faster and faster until the clocks were set for one minute each. “Maybe if you had opened up the b file,” he said after one game.

But I was drowning and I couldn’t breathe. Reset the clock. Play again.

I would never meet a woman if my chess rating wasn’t high enough.

Technique for getting better:

• I memorized every opening. I was a mental encyclopedia of the latest chess openings. I’d write them down on notebooks and play over game after game.
• I studied the history of the game. Games from the 1800s. Bronstein’s book on the Zurich International in the early 50s. Alekhine’s collected games. The Informant from Yugoslavia that came out every six months.
• I studied with a strong grandmaster. I was jealous of him. Michael W. He had just graduated Yale and was about to become US champion. He was also very good looking. It was like a trifecta: good school, good looks, good at chess. I wanted to be him. He had one piece of advice for me before I went off to college::  don’t tell any girls you play chess and you’ll get a blowjob every day. I didn’t follow his advice.
• I played in every tournament I could. At one point I won 24 games in a row against strong players. My rating shot up from nothing to a point where I felt I could now ask a girl out on a date.

[this is, by the way, my technique for getting better at anything]

So I asked out Marina Svetlov. Smart, and she seemed shy and accessible. I couldn’t believe she said yes!

The day we were supposed to go out there was a little snow on the ground. My dad refused to let me drive the car. There weren’t any cellphones then and I had to pick Marina up outside the school and there was no way to call her.

She waited for me for two hours.

I’m making that part up. I don’t know if it was two hours or if she even stood out there all night. We never spoke again.

First my self-worth was defined by my chess rating.

Then by my Go ranking. Then by whether or not I could sell some writing.

Then by whether or not I could work on a TV show.

Then by how much money I had.

Then by whether or not the other people in Atlantic City thought I was a good poker player.

Then by how much more money I had.

Then by whether or not other Internet entrepreneurs would respect me.

Then by how many positive comments I got on my articles.

Then by how many people signed up for Stockpickr.

Then by how much thestreet.com would pay me for Stockpickr.

Then by how much money I had in my fund of funds.

Then I was lost in outer space.

My lifelong dream is to anchor my self-worth with who I am right now, this second. The sun trickling in through the leaves right outside my window. Cars honking outside. I hear children laughing in the school across the street.

I wanted to find out what happened to John Nash. The last time I saw him we had played in a pair tournament at Rutgers.

The other pairs were father-son teams. Then there was John and me.

I looked him up right now. According to Wikipedia he wasn’t given a name for the entire first year of his life. His mother wanted his father to have a say in the name and the father, at the time, was institutionalized for schizophrenia.

How do you like that? He had no name for a year. I wish right now I had no name. What a beautiful thing that would be.