click here to return to the Calico Cat homepage

The $100 chess set I bought online

I started getting interested in chess a few weeks ago, as you know if you’ve been reading my blog. I’ve been playing strictly on the computer—either against live opponents or computer opponents. But it occurred to me that having a real physical chess set would be helpful. Especially for following along with chess books (not the world’s most exciting books, but more about that in a future post).

I could have bought a cheap $5 chess set, but I wanted something that would fit in better with my lifestyle. A genuine wooden chess set was what I wanted. In days past, I would have picked up the yellow pages and looked up “chess” or “games,” but in the age of the internet it never even occurred to me. Instead I went searching for chess sets online.

The internet has probably been especially harmful to specialty retailers like a chess store. A metropolitan area can probably only support a single store devoted to something like chess. Who would want to drive an hour there and an hour back just to buy a chess set when you can buy one online? Assuming such a store even exists—the yellow pages for northern Virginia doesn’t list a single store that seems likely to stock a large selection of chess sets. Maybe such a store once existed, but it closed down because of internet competition?

Although there are seem to be no chess stores in the Washington, DC area, there are several online stores entirely devoted to selling chess sets. The age of internet retailing allows the existence of super-specialty stores that never could have been profitable as bricks and mortar retailers.

Buying something like a chess set online, convenient as it may be, is also confusing. It’s nearly impossible to judge the quality of a chess set from looking at a picture on the internet. After spending two or three hours looking around, I was even more confused. All the stores seemed to have similar if not identical items, and the prices seemed to be equivalent. One store advertised that it offered “wholesale” prices, which sounded good, but I didn’t see any evidence that it was any less expensive than other online chess stores.

Adding to the confusion, chess sets are sold ala carte. The board and the pieces are sold separately. How do you know which pieces to mate with which board? This is probably the reason I wound up buying a chess set from a place called TheChessStore.com. This retailer offered package deals with both a board and pieces, making it easier. I picked out their least expensive set, with a 3 1/4” high king and 2” squares. Now it turns out that this is slightly smaller than official tournament size which calls for 2 1/4” squares and the king being between 3 3/8” and 4 1/2”. But using a tape measure, it seemed that such a huge tournament sized board just wouldn’t fit anywhere in my tiny apartment.

So that’s the set I ordered, for $89 plus $11 shipping, for a total price of $100. There was no sales tax, which partially made up for the expensive shipping. To TheChessStore.com’s credit, they shipped it to me day after the evening I ordered it.

Was the chess set worth $100 or was I ripped off? That’s really hard to say. It’s genuine wood, but the quality isn’t as high as one could possibly imagine. One of the black bishops seems to be stained lighter than the other black pieces. The edges of the board are too sharp, making me wonder if perhaps some wood might splinter off. The pieces could be weighted heavier. And the pieces are too small for the board! According to some internet sources, the size of a square should be equal to the diameter of the base of the king divided by 0.78, or up to 1/8” bigger than that. But the base of my king is only 1 1/4”, which according to the formula can only support a maximum square size of 1 5/8”. So the poor little pieces look lost on such big squares.

I should also point out that my chess set is priced at the low end of wood chess sets. I could have easily ordered a set that cost three times as much.

Probably the reason why chess sets seem so expensive is because they aren’t manufactured in China like most of the stuff that we buy. My chess set was made in Spain. Spain isn’t the richest country in Europe, but I’m sure that Spanish workers get paid many times over what a Chinese worker gets paid. Probably if the same chess set was made in China, it would have only cost $29 instead of $89.

* * *

This post is probably the most boring thing I’ve ever written in my blog, but perhaps someone shopping for chess sets might find it worth reading.

So when am I going to get back to writing about politics? I will eventually.

posted Sunday, December 26, 2004