Addiction in "Love in the Time of Cholera"

OK, we were e-mailing about this (the fact that there are several references to chess and to Dr. Juvenal Urbino & Jeremiah de Saint-Amour suffering from an addiction to chess) during the day today, and I was reminded of a quotation... (It’s a long one, bear with me). As a ‘recovering chess addict’ (tournament-free since 9/2005!) I can confirm that chess addiction is no joke. :-)

“When one of us first plays chess, he is like a man who has already caught a dose of microbes of, say, Hong Kong Flu. Such a man walks along the street, and he does not yet know that he is ill. He is healthy, he feels fine, but the microbes are doing their work.
Something similar, though less harmful, occurs in chess. You have just been shown that the knight moves like the Russian letter “L” (actually the Russian letter is an upside down version of our L - but the knight move is the same - Jay), the bishop diagonally, the castle (rook) in a straight line, while the queen likes her own colour. You lose the first game. But at some time, if your father or elder brother or simply an old friend wants to be kind to you, then you win, and as a result feel very proud of yourself. A few days pass, and suddenly you involuntarily begin to sense that, without chess, there is something missing in your life. Then you may rejoice: you belong to that group of people without a natural immunity to the chess disaease…”

Mikhail Tal - “The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal” 1997

Note carefully the wording of the last sentence: one rejoices because he is without immunity…

Mikhail Tal was a famous Soviet Chess Grandmaster from Riga (Latvia) who was World Champion in 1960 & 1961. He was famous among chess professionals for being a bit of a 'party animal' - drinking, smoking, chasing women, i.e. all the good stuff - compared to his contemporaries. (I actually met him briefly in 1988 at the National Open tournament in Chicago, where one of my friends had the honor of playing against him in one of those 'simultaneous exhibitions' - where the master takes on many players at once to ‘even the odds’ - and actually managed to draw the game.)