Good day, and thank you for stopping by. My name is Frederick Boehm. I am eighty-six years old, and I was a tool-and-die maker in Milwaukee for forty-one years before I retired. I have played chess by mail since the spring of 1946, when I came home from the Army and found that my evenings were quiet and my old club had closed.

Last Christmas my grandson Joel set up a computer for me in the room where my wife used to sew, and he showed me how to make this page. He says that people who have never heard of postal chess might like to read about it. I am not certain he is right, but I have never been able to refuse that boy anything, and so here it is.

In fifty-three years I have completed a little over nine hundred games, against opponents in nineteen countries. I have won more than I have lost, though not by as much as I would like. I have never been a master and I never shall be. I have simply been patient, and I have kept very good records.

Postal chess is ordinary chess, played very slowly. Instead of sitting across a board from your opponent, you each keep a board at home, and you send your moves to one another on postcards. A game that would last three hours at a club may last a year or two by mail, and you will usually have a dozen or more games going at once with different people. I have twelve going at present, which is fewer than I once had.

The card. I use plain postcards with my name and address printed at the top. On each card I write the game number, the date I received my opponent's move, the date I am sending mine, and the number of days I took. Then I repeat his last move, so that he knows I have read it correctly, and then I write my reply. If there is any confusion, it is caught on the next card. I keep a carbon of every card I have ever sent, in shoe boxes, by year. My daughter would like the shoe boxes to go somewhere else.

The postmark. The postmark is the clock. You do not count the days a card spends in the mail, only the days it sits on your kitchen table. The days between the postmark on his card and the date I received it belong to the post office. The days between my receiving it and the postmark on my reply belong to me. In most of the events I have played, the rule has been thirty days of thinking time for every ten moves, which sounds like a great deal until you have fourteen games and the flu.

Days per move. A card to Chicago comes back in four or five days. A card to Europe takes a week or more each way, and to Argentina or Japan it can take two or three. A game against a man in Buenos Aires can run longer than some marriages. I have had one game last nearly six years, though there was a postal strike in the middle of it.

Conditional moves. To save time, you may send what we call a conditional move, or an "if" move. I might write: If 18...Rd8, then 19.Qe2. If my opponent then plays 18...Rd8, my reply 19.Qe2 has already been made, and he may answer it at once without waiting for another card. A conditional move is binding. If you send one, you must be sure of it, because you will not get it back. I have lost two games in my life to conditional moves that were sound when I wrote them and unsound when they arrived, and I remember both of them with great clarity.

A mailed move is a made move. At the club, a piece you touch is a piece you must move. In postal chess, the mailbox is the touch. Once the card has gone down the slot, it is played. I learned in 1947 never to mail a move at night. Think of it at night, by all means. Mail it in the morning, after breakfast, when you have looked at it once more.

When I began, Americans wrote their moves in what we called descriptive notation: P-K4, N-KB3, and so on. A German writes the knight as S, for Springer, and the bishop as L, for Läufer. A Spaniard calls the bishop an alfil. You can imagine the confusion when a card crosses an ocean. The answer, for international play, is the numeric notation, which uses no letters at all.

Each file of the board, from White's left to White's right, is given a number from 1 to 8, so the a-file is 1 and the h-file is 8. The ranks are numbered 1 to 8 as usual, from White's side. Every square is then a number of two digits, file first and rank second. A move is written as four digits: the square the piece leaves, then the square it goes to. The piece itself is never named, since only one piece can be standing on the square it leaves.

A few examples:

The opening of my 1958 game on the games page went 5254 5755, 7163 2836, 6125 1716. On the cards, that is all there is. It looks like a page from the telephone book, but after a few months you read it as easily as English, and you will never again mistake a bishop for a knight because someone's handwriting was poor.

On the games page I give the scores in the ordinary algebraic notation, since that is what most players read today. I have made my peace with it. It took me until about 1980.

1. Write every move twice. Once on the card and once in your own record, and compare them before you mail it. More postal games have been lost to a slip of the pen than to any opening.

2. Set the position up fresh. When a card comes, play the whole game through from the start on a board, rather than trusting the board you left set up last week. Cats and grandchildren have been known to move pieces.

3. Take your time, but use it. Thirty days for ten moves is a gift. A man who mails his reply the same afternoon has wasted it. A man who waits until day twenty-nine to look at the position has wasted it too.

4. You are writing to a person. Put a line or two on the card besides the move. Ask about his weather. Tell him about yours. Most of the friends I have in this world, I met this way.

5. Lose gracefully and quickly. When the position is lost, resign, and write a kind note with it. Nobody wants to spend a year of postage on a game that ended in March.

6. A slow game is not a dull one. I have waited three weeks for a card with my heart in my mouth, wondering whether a man in Sweden had seen what I had seen. Some evenings that was the best thing in my week.

You need a board and men, a score book, a supply of postcards, and stamps. If you need the first two, Knight Moves Chess Supply sells sturdy sets, boards and score books by mail, and the proprietor packs every order himself. That is my kind of business: Knight Moves Chess Supply.

If you would rather play quickly and have a computer, my grandson tells me there is a club of grown-ups who play on the Internet on Thursday nights after the children are in bed, called The Late Knights. I have looked at their page. They seem to be a courteous group, and they ask that you finish the games you start, which is the first rule of postal chess as well.

If you would like a postal game with me, write to me at the address below and tell me something about yourself. I take on one new opponent at a time, as old games finish. You will need to be patient. So will I.