JOHN MARTIN'S TALES

I couldn’t be the only chess player with a connection to the old Metropole Hotel in Launceston. Could I?

This establishment stood in Brisbane Street for nearly 100 years before being demolished in 1976.

It opened in the early 1880s as the Launceston Coffee Palace, and my instincts tell me this was exactly the sort of era that would have produced plenty of chess connections.

Take it from a lapsed competitive player: wood-pushers like their coffee.

How else do you think they stay awake staring at those 64 squares through one drawn-out game? Three hours. Four hours. Then some more.

I played in the Australian Junior Chess Championships in Hobart in 1973, and most of the talented kids (among them two future grandmasters) spent the time between games studying, analysing and playing variants of chess in spare rooms. They were chess junkies — prime candidates for something to stimulate their central nervous systems.

I vaguely remember trying one variant at those titles: Kriegspiel, in which White and Black played in separate rooms while an umpire trudged between them carrying a pocket chess set that he guarded closely.

The umpire told each player only whether a move was legal and gave limited information such as “check”, “capture” or “illegal move”.

Players had to infer where their opponent’s pieces were from these sparse clues.

It did my head in, and was probably responsible for the coffee addiction I have today.

I was only there to make up the numbers, so it’s no surprise I was out of my depth.

I finished 42nd in the tournament — stone motherless last.

I’d like to think my connection with the Metropole proved more successful than my performance at the championships.

By 1915 it was trading as the Metropole Hotel rather than the Launceston Coffee Palace. In the years that followed it even added a butchery, something that never really caught on in the bar trade.

From 1947, the hotel received a proper spruce-up under its new owner, Reg Ansett.

At its peak it had 100 rooms.

Fast-forward to 1973. I was 16, and the hotel was run-down and just three years away from demolition.

But it wasn’t far out of the way for two high-school boys heading to the Launceston Chess Club, which met at the teachers’ college in Charles Street.

My mate was 16, like me, but he could pass for 18. He used to duck into the Metropole and buy a couple of cans.

We’d sit on a bench in Prince’s Square, quietly disposing of the evidence while chewing extra-strong peppermints, then wander off to chess club looking, we imagined, like two model citizens.

If the powers-that-be ever decide the Metropole deserves a plaque, might I be considered for a dishonourable mention?