GG Karlsen

Ole Karlsen worked North Sea platforms for forty years, two weeks on and two ashore, and retired last spring with a handshake, a bad shoulder and no idea what to do with an uninterrupted month. He learned the game in rig rec-rooms where the loser fetched coffee for the whole shift. He plays fast and reads a position by rhythm rather than calculation, and then he asks. Not rhetorically: he will tell you his own number was poor and ask you to show him the route, and he will ask a weaker player as readily as a stronger one, and he thanks them either way. He lives alone by the harbour in Haugesund and reports, dryly, that the sea looks better from land. He never married. There were women, and by his account each of them left with a piece of him, which he brings up about as often as he brings up the shoulder.