In the now distant past, we had spent long evenings together analyzing our opponents’ games in preparation for team matches (we both played in the same club and on the same team), or endless Saturday afternoons playing Blitz.
When in the last decade of the last century (and to a small extent in the first decade of the next) I was still trying to arrange pieces on the chessboard, the only way to learn was to attend chess clubs or to study in specialized books, which however were mostly in Russian (the alternative was Serbo-Croatian, more rarely English and Spanish).
Books in Italian were very few, often very outdated, and the computer revolution was still far away.
You learned by playing and mostly by studying.
And when you played in tournaments, regardless of the prestige of the opponent, whether you won or lost, you always analyzed the game you had just played.
This was a crucial moment that very often led to real friendships, as it happened with Marco, with whom I became friends after an endless analysis of a tournament game that we had played as opponents on the chessboard.
Unlike life, in chess you can go back after the game and analyze its “history”.
And the “history” of a chess game can be made, remade, rewritten and rewritten again by the same players who just finished it.
A “story” that is reconstructed together through joint analysis, in which both players contribute, and whose goal is no longer victory, but the search for absolute truth.
Marco was a valuable chess player, mathematician, puzzle solver and computer scientist.
But above all I considered him a friend, the real kind, even though I did not know much about him outside the chess world.
Years go by and, as is often the case, we completely lose touch : interests change, work commitments take you away from home.
In short, all the unpredictable situations of life.
Marco died on December 5, 2022.
I learned this sad news only a few days ago, along with some details of his life, common to the vast majority of chess players, which I do not think it is appropriate to mention on this occasion, and which gradually led him to the choice of a very dubious variant indeed.
And perhaps, re-analyzing his “life story” backwards, he would have chosen to play a much less orthodox game, definitely much more consistent with his lively, edgy and unconventional style of play.
Unfortunately, however, there is no turning back in life.
Marco is gone (and will never return).
