I was taken to a live fantasy role playing event. Probably around a 150 players. A certain someone in my life dragged me there. 
The players all had costumes and there were rules, etc. I just kinda wandered around and chatted with people. So naturally I used chess as a subject. I figured at least a few players were familiar with the game.
So early in the event, before most of the players had come, I got to chatting with a few guys, ones that came early to help set up the event. One in particular stood out. An older gentleman who was the father of one of the organizers and came to help set up. Anyway, he said he wasn’t a good player, but did manage to spend most of the time talking about how he would trade queens because his opponents loved their queen and were terrible if they lost it.
Now I could tell I was way over his skill level. [I never did play him, seemed trivial, and he’d left hours before I got around to setting up a chess board.]
But it did remind me A LOT of when I was younger. There was a time, early, when I’d found my first chess club at Ft. Hood Texas. I was pretty green in the Army, but as a newly minted soldier of the 1st Calverly division, I needed something of an intellectual pursuit. Needless to say, I was terrible at chess. My first official rating, though the club that met at Ft. Hood was all of 1120 USCF. I was proud of it. Anyway, around that time, I also was of the opinion that I was really good at trading queens in order to have a better game against my opponents.
Nowadays it’s completely quaint, but back then, in my world, there where two kinds of chess players: tournament players and barracks players. Barracks players were looked down as chess players, and I in my mind, I’d stepped up the ladder to something better than a mere barracks players. I too was of the opinion that swapping queens was an excellent way to get a better position against an opponent.
[Obviously after nearly 30 additional years of playing chess, my 1140 initial rating seems quaint at best.] Oddly enough, in some respects I miss those days, since once a month the club ran a couple classical time control rated games, and I could easily play against an opponent for several hours, going into time trouble in the 2nd time control, which was 60 minutes sudden death. If I recall, the first time control was 40 moves in 90 minutes, so ya, I had a couple games that went to nearly 5 hours. There wasn’t a 2nd game those days. Actually, it was pretty cool to get close to end of the 2nd time control, because by then, everybody else in the club was standing around looking at who would win.
Nowadays, after decades of 10 minute games on the internet, sometimes longer controls like 15 minutes, I find myself desperately trying to slow my games down so I could play a much better game. Not easy when it’s so terrible easy to find a quick game against a random opponent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Anyway, when I was talking to the older gentleman, I was really tripping down memory lane about my chess playing ability when I was in the Army. :mrgreen: