GG Shevchenko

Mykola Shevchenko worked fifty years among timber and hives and kept the pace of both. He enters the fixtures and nothing else. The chip tables he has never sat down at, not once, and when the invitations arrive he answers them with a single line about preferring a match that counts for the table, which the regulars have stopped arguing with. What he plays instead is long and level. He doubles seldom and correctly, waits out a run of dice the way he waited out a mountain winter and takes the fifth hour of an evening no differently from the first. He says almost nothing while it happens and rather less about it afterwards.