Chess, blindfolded, on a bike
On Thursday nights, the bridge players sit at one end of the Wellington Bridge Club and the chess players at the other.
Both hold competitions in nearidentical rooms of a building adorned with wooden plaques, awards, New Zealand flags, and school hall-style furniture that has seen better days.
Pinned to the wall is a prominent warning about getting too drunk, which is clearly intended for the rowdy bridgeplaying fanatics whose low hum of chatter across the hallway occasionally rises to a giggle or a cough.
Tonight the bridge players are standing by the Wellington Chess Club’s door peering in at the seriously odd event taking place.
For a mental image, picture the final scenes of Eyes Wide Shut. Now imagine if the semi-masonic ritual at the end of the movie took place in complete silence in a brightly lit meeting room at the local RSA.
A dozen chess players are lined up in two rows at tables, their eyes almost always averted from a single blindfolded guest who strokes his wispy beard while sitting atop an exercise bike reciting chess moves.
American chess grandmaster Timur Gareyev is the guy on the bike. He later tells me the silence is at his request.
He is carrying 12 chess games in his head and if he overhears any inane chatter about the weather or Marie Kondo, it could set him off his game.
The best players of the dozen facing Gareyev don’t even have pieces on their chessboards. They’re Gareyev without the bike or blindfold, playing a game in their mind and staring out into the distance while occasionally pausing to fill their beer glasses with water.
As the game clock hits 9.30pm, the whole thing looks set to stretch past midnight and Gareyev needs a break.
He’ll chat – the old-fashioned way, without blindfolds – which is more difficult than it seems.
At the bridge club, there is no door without a glass window in it and Gareyev can see some schoolkid’s chessboard from every corner of every room we try to stand in.
Finally, we find a surprisingly spacious attic up a flight of stairs with no line of sight to the board-flaunting child. The 31-year-old relaxes.
He tells me about his childhood in Uzbekistan, where he played chess from a young age, his recent trip up Mt Ruapehu where he played chess, and the times in his life when he frequently spent 10 hours a day studying the game.
When Gareyev puts the blindfold on, he says he sees every move. He calls it ‘‘chess meditation’’.
He even says he feels energised at the end of a multi-hour chess binge.
‘‘It’s like painting where you’re continuously doing something, you’re immersing yourself in that moment, and you become that brush, that paint, so here you become the chess pieces.’’
By the end of the night, Gareyev had won eight of his 12 matches, drawn three, and lost one.
Two of the draws were against the joint New Zealand champions, and the loss was to a 15-year-old Wellington College student.