It started with a laminated flyer.
I was late for class again—nothing new—and walking the back way through the school corridor because I couldn’t face the gauntlet of early-morning shouting in the main hall. I’d just passed the vending machine that only ever sells warm lemon Fanta when I saw it, pinned wonkily to a corkboard:
“District Schools Chess Tournament – March 10th – Players Needed. See Mr. Santos in Room 23.”
District Schools Chess Tournament – March 10th – Players Needed. See Mr. Santos in Room 23.
I wasn’t going to sign up.
Not because I didn’t want to. Just because… I don’t know. Fear? Habit? Some deep belief that anything good will either be cancelled, moved without warning, or involve my dad forgetting to pick me up afterward. But then Mr. Santos caught me staring. And he’s one of the rare teachers who doesn’t make my skin crawl, so I caved.
“Leo,” he said, like we were already friends. “You play?”
I nodded. He grinned.
“You’re our board one.”
That’s how low the standard is at my school. You don’t even have to prove anything. You just exist, and you get a title.
Turns out, the tournament was bigger than I expected. Ten schools. Dozens of players. A proper hall with actual chess clocks and nervous kids in borrowed blazers. Mr. Santos handed me a folded piece of paper with my name on it. “They’re using something called Swiss Perfect to do the pairings,” he said. “You’ll get your next match each round on that printout board.”
I asked what Swiss Perfect was.
He shrugged. “Some kind of software. Old-school. Reliable.”
Old-school is right.
The first thing I noticed was how ugly the interface was. Like it had been coded in 1997 by a man who still used a Nokia and refused to acknowledge the existence of colour. But the second thing I noticed was more important: it worked. It tracked every win, draw, and loss across the whole tournament like it was breathing. No confusion. No chaos. You didn’t play the same person twice. You didn’t wait hours. You knew exactly what you needed to do to climb the ranks. It felt… fair. Mechanical. Clean.
I’d never seen anything in real life behave with that much logic.
I was obsessed before round two.
Later that night, I googled it—Swiss Perfect. Took me straight into a rabbit hole about tournament structures, seeding, and something called the Buchholz tiebreak system. I didn’t understand it all, but I loved how serious it was. Like behind every pair of sweaty kids playing chess in a school gym, there was this silent machine making it all… work.
Not random. Not rigged. Not political. Just logic.
I read every explanation I could find. Printed out a PDF manual from a forum that looked like it hadn’t been updated since Windows XP. Highlighted bits. Mum thought I was finally revising for science. I didn’t correct her.
That tournament? I came 4th overall. Lost two, won four. Not bad. But the real win was finding something that made sense to me in a way that most things don’t.
Like, imagine a world where effort actually matters. Where the system sees what you’ve done, pairs you accordingly, and if you screw up, it doesn’t shame you—it just adjusts. You get another shot. Another opponent. Another chance.
Swiss Perfect doesn’t care who your dad is, how much noise is in your flat, or whether your classmates think you’re weird. It just tracks your play. That’s it. And something about that… calmed me.
Now I dream of running my own tournament someday. Don Emilio laughed when I said that. “You barely have enough friends to fill a taxi, niño,” he said. Fair. But maybe I’ll build it slowly. Find players like me. Quiet kids who just want something to make sense.
And when I do, I’ll use Swiss Perfect.
Obviously.
—Leo