Losing a Game on Time
I am bad at resigning. For years I would carry a lost position for another twenty moves, against a patient opponent who had already won, purely because the words would not come out.
This month I finally got better at it, not through courage but through a piece of bookkeeping. I now keep a small note of what the position actually is, and I resign when the note says so and I have checked the note twice. That is the whole method. It removes the moment of decision by putting the decision somewhere else, in a private room, where nobody is watching me fail.
What resignation is for, I think, is honesty and time. The game is over in every sense that matters; the remaining moves are a fiction that both players are politely maintaining. Continuing it wastes the evening of somebody I am supposed to like. There is also a mechanical point: the draw is claimed and the game is recorded as a draw, which is a small lie that gets filed, and I would rather my losses say what they are.
I do not know if it is the same for everybody, but resigning feels strange. There is a moment of lightness, an actual physical sensation, as though something being carried in the shoulders has been put down. And then immediately a hollow feeling, which I do not think is grief about the game.
Chess has no ceremony for this. In football there is a handshake and a crowd. Here you press the clock, or say the word, and the board is taken away and put in a box, and in a moment you are just two people in a room who have spent two hours on something.
I have been trying to do it sooner rather than later in the evening, and the strange thing is that the games I resign quickly are the ones I remember best. The ones I drag out are a grey smear of the last twenty minutes and the fact of the thing.