One of the guarantees in life is that there will be times when you will be humbled while you least expect it.  You might be a helluva developer, but then you take a look at a simple app on OpenNTF and understand that you still have a lot to learn.  You might be able to put the rock in the hole with the flick of your wrist, but that won't keep your 12 year old son from whooping you in a game of H.O.R.S.E.  You might be able to consistently get 4 stars on the Hard level of Guitar Hero III, but your 8 year old niece in pig tails kicks your butt in Faceoff and she's playing on Expert level.  Such an event happened last night at my house and, thankfully, I wasn't the one being humbled.

For Christmas this year, my sister, who is 5 years my junior, bought Jackson, the 5 year old, a game called No Stress Chess.  The purpose of the game is to painlessly teach someone how to play chess.  Along with a regular chess board and pieces, it comes with a deck of cards that contain a name of a piece, a picture of the piece, and the rules around how a piece can move.  This allows new players to get an understanding of how the pieces move without having to worry about the strategy of game play.  To play with the deck of card, you simply take turns drawing a card and you move which ever piece is shown on the card.

From the time the game was first played. Jackson loved it.  He would often try to "help" you play your turn and was a pretty good winner and loser, most of the time.  About a month ago, I discovered that both the iMac and Vista came with Chess games.  Once I showed Jackson they were on there, he would cycle between playing chess, Webkins, and Nick Jr.  Of course, I moved the settings down to "George Bush" level so that he was able to win a large portion of the time.

So my sister stopped by last night to see the kids and, of course, Jackson wanted to play a game of chess.  She agreed, but she stipulated that they had to play a real game of chess, not one with the cards.  I was in the other room when they started and I could her my sister try to give him pointers.  I told her to quit it and just let him lose if he makes a mistake.  Then I started hearing him say 'I got you' when he'd take a piece of hers.  "Whoops, I didn't see that" was uttered from her lips a couple of times.  About 10 minutes later, I hear that although he forgot to say 'Check', he had in fact gotten her in Checkmate.  She was none too happy about the situation and readily agreed to a rematch.  This time he let her be white, but started trash talking almost from the get go.  At one point, he got her looking at one part of the board and sneakily captured her queen, almost shouting 'I took your Queen!'.  Although he never got her in checkmate, she was down to 2 pieces and finally had to surrender.  Very Humbling!

Jackson went from not knowing anything about the game of chess to being able to beat my sister, who has been playing regularly with my dad, in a span of about 8 weeks.  Sure, maybe he got lucky and she was off her game from the constant taunting by a kindergartner.  Colette said that he was saying all kinds of not nice things to the iMac this weekend due to the fact that I had increased the skill level without him knowing.  He didn't like the fact that he wasn't able to e asily beat the computer every time.

What's really going to be interesting is to see how my dad reacts when Jackson beats him for the first time.  My dad is not the most gracious loser in the world, especially when it comes to games of strategy.