The Grandmaster

He was about to lose third game in a row. It was insulting; he was losing to a kid who could not even name the chess pieces correctly.

‘What’s wrong with me? It’s as if I have forgotten to play chess?  Every move I makes turns out to be a blunder,’ he kept muttering silently.

He was a Grandmaster and two times runner-up in World Chess Championship. True he had fallen both in his life and in his ranking and had failed to win any tournaments for last five years but he was still a great player.

It was then that he noticed the little girl who was intently staring at him.

She smiled and said, ‘Aren’t you too anxious to win?’

He was dumbstruck; she had spoken the truth that he had been refusing to accept it.

******

A post for Magpie Tales on a photo prompt.