For those of you who are burdened with trust in the human race, the following story will merrily relieve you of it. And yet, it is an encouraging story, for it is about how one may triumph in a sea of trifling self-preoccupation.

I was on Yahoo's Chess forum last night. For those of you who are not aware of how the rating system works, I will give a brief overview. Those who know may skip this paragraph. In real life chess tournaments, your prowess as a chess player is measured by a rating -- a number that sums up your ability. It sounds heartless, but it is a very useful tool for chess players to find other players somewhere near their own abilities. Someone who has never played serious chess before might have a rating of around 900-1000. A novice might be around 1100-1200. My rating hovers around 1600. Chess masters are up around 2200. Garry Kasparov, the world champion, is in the 2900s. The way it works is, if you play someone with a higher rating than you and win, your rating goes up a lot and his goes down a lot, because your opponent was expected to win. If you beat someone with a much lower rating, yours will go up and his will go down, but only by a small number of points, because you were the more highly rated player anyway. So the best way to raise your rating quickly is also the hardest: beat someone with a higher rating. After you've played about 20 rated games or so, the rating is a surprisingly reasonable approximation of your ability, even though talent at chess really can't be measured linearly, as different players are better under different situations. At any rate, Yahoo's online gaming forum keeps track of players' ratings automatically, not just in Chess but with several of their other games. The important thing to realize is that the rating is intended to be simply that: an approximation of about how good you are -- so that you may find players whose abilities match your own. It is also a way to get into the competitive spirit of the game.

Alas, some people take these ratings too seriously.

I was browsing the chess forums on Yahoo, trying to find a player within a reasonable margin of my own rating. I found someone with the username of "dathe"-something; his rating was about 200 points below mine -- a significant but not huge drop. So I joined the table. He was sitting down at the "white" end of the table, as most do, white being the player who moves first. I sat down at the "black" end and hit the 'start' button.

Once a rated game is started, it may not be abandoned by either player without forfeiting the game. You get ten minutes per move, though, so if your ISP knocks you offline, you can still log back in and rejoin the table: your opponent can't force you to forfeit the game until you've not made a move after ten minutes.

So I had hit the 'start' button, and I waited for him to make the first move.

And nothing happened.

Usually the first move of a chess game is pretty quick -- as every game starts with the pieces in the same position, you don't have to rethink the board every time you start a new game. White's first moves are all canned.

But nothing was happening. I wondered if, perhaps, the person had been kicked off line or if something distracted him and he forgot he was in a game. But I hate saying, "Hello?" or the equivalent during a game, because it sounds stupid, and it can be construed as rushing, which would be a breach of etiquette. So I didn't say a word.

Two or three minutes passed, and, in the chat window just beneath the board, my opponent said, "Hello."

"Uh, hi," I said. I wasn't sure what was up, but the light was gradually dawning.

"Since your rating is high, and mine is low, I'm just going to sit here for a while," he said.

I was not altogether astonished when I realized what he was doing, yet I was in disbelief anyway. I had thought of the possibility of exploiting the Yahoo game system in the way he intended to, but I never thought I would actually encounter someone who did it. You see, ten minutes per move can be a very long time. He had plans to take nine minutes on every move until I gave up and resigned the game, either from frustration or necessity. He would thus gain a good sum of rating points, as he was 200 points below mine, and I would lose that same amount.

But I had all night.

I had no intention of letting this person get away with his truly pathetic plan to wrest an ultimately worthless measure of stature without earning it. I had no commitments until it was time to go to work the next day, and it was only late evening. I could wait his nine minutes per move and take nine minutes to make my own. There was no doubt in my mind I could either outlast him, or -- since it seemed more likely than not what rating points he did have were not earned -- beat him and win legitimately. At the same time, it wasn't exactly the best way I could think of to spend my evening, and the risk of mistiming my moves and exceeding the ten minute threshold myself would be nerve-wracking.

My response to him, however, was simply, "Why?"

"Because I'm mean that way," he said, but not with correct spelling and capitalization.

"Ok," I said.

"I think I'm going to go get something to eat," he said.

"Ok," I said. "I will too," I said. "Be back in nine minutes," I said.

And the board sat there for quite some time, neither player present, not a move made. The chess pieces were dutifully patient in their starting positions, lined up facing each other with a clear battlefield between. I set my stopwatch running, calculated about how many more minutes he had left before he had to move. Then I iconified the window and played around in RinkChat. When his time was up, I was going to see what move he made, then wait something less than ten minutes to make my own. The slow motion duel had begun.

The minutes ticked by.

Eventually, nine minutes were up -- or approximately that many: I wasn't exactly sure how much time he had, because I hadn't started counting the time by the second until two or three minutes into his turn. I brought up the chess window and waited.

A dialogue box popped up. "Your opponent has left a rated game," it said, and it presented me with a number of buttons. I pressed the "force forfeit" one.

In the chat window, the chess program reported the results of the game. "stoddard1" wins. It reported the change in our ratings. I gained some points. He lost some points.

"Oh, gosh, that's too bad," I said. "You seem to have miscalculated your time. That sucks."

I left.

A *second* later, a Yahoo Instant Message window popped up. "**** you," it said, only there were no asterisks. He apparently did not realize that his response only made my victory more satisfying. "Heh heh heh," I said, and hit the "ignore" button, indicating that I didn't want to receive any further messages from him.

What can I say? Once in a while, justice is done in *this* life.

It's the last time I will play a game on Yahoo with someone I don't know that is not a timed game. Yahoo's chess program does allow you to have clocked games, where each person has a timer that's only going when it's their turn -- if you run out of time, you lose. With a generous enough amount of time on the timer, once can still play an unhurried game of chess, but it makes schemes like this guy's impossible.

At any rate, amidst the thrill of victory -- and I do mean "thrill" -- is utter incomprehension. I have tried but I cannot -- not for the life of me -- figure out how this person could overvalue Yahoo chess ratings by so much and undervalue what those ratings stand for by so much as to think it prudent to bully total strangers and swipe their ratings points. There are lots of crimes far worse, all the way up to the extreme of murder, but few where the motive makes less sense.