I was playing Yahoo! Chess the other day here at work, and a co-worker came by to talk about real work stuff (damn those co-workers and their real work talks).

So he says to me, oh great, nice to know someone else in the office plays chess. I says to him cool, you play too, what are you rated? He says to me, he says oh, about two thousand or so over the board. He makes a gentle try to get me to bring a board in so we can play someday, and I says to him nah, too much competitiveness and ego for co-workers. He says great, no problem.

That “over the board” comment sort of stuck with me, so I googled him. Turns out he was the co-champion of the U.S. Chess Federation’s Absolute postal chess championship in 2000.

Yikes.