I greatly doubt if it is a true story, and it seems highly unlikely indeed. From what I can figure out from the date, place, and description, Grandpa had defeated Willie Ryan over the board, at least if the story is true. Supposedly "this champion" was pretty unhappy. Whatever was the case, "this champion" perhaps didn't take Grandpa seriously enough, and Grandpa won the game and the large stake. I also heard that Grandpa didn't lose very many bets.įamily members told a story about Grandpa, that one day "this champion" dropped in at Grandpa's tavern and Grandpa took him on for a substantial amount of money. Grandpa liked to play for what was high stakes in those days I recall Dad saying that Grandpa played some games for as much as five dollars (think about how much money that was in the 1930s).
He apparently was a checker player of considerable skill just as I couldn't beat Dad, Dad said he could never beat Grandpa. Grandpa Benjamin ran a tavern in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s and 1940s, during the last of checker's golden days. But I set checkers aside for almost 50 years, and there is no doubt that the loss was all mine.ĭad in turn had learned checkers from his father, who passed on before I was born. What a lesson there was there, if only I had seen it at the time. As I reached teen years, as a fairly serious chess player, I became disdainful of Dad's "simple" game that "didn't require much intelligence." But I found that despite my self-proclaimed "intelligence" and "sophistication" I still couldn't beat Dad at checkers. I tired of checkers, played on only half the squares and with only one type of move.
CRACKER BARREL CHECKERS CHALLENGE HOW TO
When showing me how to win with two kings against one, his comment was "Ya gotta make a bridge." And with three kings against two, "Ya gotta trade 'em off first."Īs I got a little older, like six, I wanted to play chess. He instinctively knew about formations, and he played the endgame well. Yet he never missed a shot or combination, some of them quite complex.
His favorite openings were the Edinburgh and the Double Corner but he didn't know them by name. He was not a "book" player and couldn't tell me about The Old Fourteenth or Payne's Draw. I never was able to beat Dad at checkers. In a way I feel that I honor his memory by playing his game.ĭad was what you call a "regular" guy he was a blue-collar worker, his drink of choice for many years was beer, he watched a lot of television and could never be thought of as "intellectual." But I learned a great deal about many, many things from Dad things like being honest and decent, being self-reliant in tough times, not wasting your life being angry, and a whole lot more.īut one of the things I learned from Dad was checkers. I think it's also that I learned the game from my father, of blessed memory, when I was very, very young, probably three or at most four years old. It isn't just that checkers is an elegant and subtle game of great depth and unending challenge. Over the years I've played Checkers, Chess, Go, Chinese Chess, Backgammon, and countless other abstract board games of skill. Checkers: A Mind Sport for the Common Man
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