GG Van Damme

Pieter Van Damme spent twenty years on Brussels FX desks, made enough to stop at fifty, and left the day the bonus cleared. He travelled for a year, reached his sixtieth country and stopped counting, then spent the second year playing twelve hours a day. He now lives outside Leuven and plays roughly two hundred matches a month.

He decides in seconds and talks the entire time, which opponents read as friendliness and which is also true. The clock is not a constraint he works around; it is a piece of the position, and he takes tempo off people who have not noticed they were spending it. Twenty years of pricing things in a fifth of a second do not go anywhere. His expensive divorce he files under tuition.