Lost on Time

I told myself I wasn’t going to play. Then I played one game.

One blitz game, to see where the game stood. The opponent was not a novice — fast, deliberate, accurate for the most part. I built the advantage the honest way: I paired my rooks and used them to clear his/her pawns off the board. By the end I was in the driver’s seat. Two rooks and a pawn against a queen and two pawns, one of them already doomed — a lead in material and in position. Then I lost on time.

That is not a hard sentence to write. A winning position, a running clock, and the clock won. I am not aggravated about it. The board said one thing and the clock said another, and both were true. There is a difference between accepting that a game is lost and arguing with the fact of it, and I have no use for the second.

✦

What happened after is the part worth keeping.

I ran the final position past an AI model to check my read of it. It told me I had mate in one. I did not. I was in check — his queen on f4, my king on h2 — and I had to answer the check before anything else. There was no mate. So I said so.

Then it called the position simply won. Overstated; I told it to temper that. Then it described my rooks as facing a lone queen — it had missed the two pawns beside her. I corrected it. Then, pushed off the overstatement, it swung the other way and called my edge positional only, as though the material were even. It wasn’t. Two rooks outweigh a queen, and the pawn making the count look level was the doomed one — undefended, dead the moment I chose to take it. Discount it and I was up material. I corrected that too.

Four passes to describe one position accurately. First too much, then too little, and only at the end did the words match the board.

I keep the tools. I do not hand them my judgment. A machine that tells you what you want to hear is worthless, and so is one you believe without looking. The value was never in the first answer it gave. It was in refusing to let any account stand — its account or my own — until it matched what was actually on the board.

✦

That is the same discipline the clock beat me on, pointed in a different direction. You don’t get to negotiate with what is true. The pawn is doomed or it isn’t. The mate is there or it isn’t. The game is lost or it isn’t. Preference gets no vote. You look, you say what is there, and if you were wrong you say that too — and then you continue.

I lost the game. The account of it is right. Those are two separate facts, and I am at peace with both.

— Marino Apollinari · July 2026

Written with the assistance of AI. Final content and responsibility remain solely with the author.