GG AlKetbi

Saeed Al Ketbi went to sea at eleven as a haul boy and captained a pearling dhow before the trade ended, working water his family had worked for six generations. The game came from the nakhoda he served under, a hard man who taught him the tide, the rope and the board in that order, and who has been dead since 1983. He still plays the openings that man played, including two he suspects are wrong, because unlearning them would be a kind of contradiction. He reads a position the way he once read wind against current, sees the move at once and then sits with it, and treats a long match as a crossing on familiar water.