It was 1982, I was in fourth grade, and at my school they had decided to teach us chess for a few months. So it turned out that every Wednesday after lunch a special teacher would come to teach us how to play and make interesting moves.

Towards the end of this little chess course, we organized a mini tournament.

My friend Ramiro was about a year younger than the whole class and exactly one year younger than me, since we had birthdays on the same day.

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Probabilistic parenthesis: Although at the time I thought that coincidence was completely out of the ordinary, many years later the magic ended and I learned to calculate that this probability, in a group of 23 people, is just over 0.5, and in a group of 70 it reaches 0.99.

)

Ramiro was one of my great friends, but due to that meanness that children have, and since Ramiro was a year younger, we considered him less intelligent. When we got angry with him we would tell him he had to go to a lower grade.

The thing is that the tournament started, my friend Mariano and I were kind of the favorites. We really liked chess. I even had an electronic chess set, a Chess Challenger, and I used it regularly.

Ramiro also played very well and liked it a lot, but we hadn’t realized it, probably because of this idea we had that being a year younger made him inferior to us.

Mariano got the first match against Ramiro, I remember him saying, “Against Ramiro? He’s a pushover.” And to everyone’s surprise, he lost. Mariano felt humiliated and couldn’t believe what had happened to him. I remember his expression, grabbing his head and repeating: “I lost to Ramiro, I lost to Ramiro…”

I won my first match without problems, and my second match was against Ramiro. I started very well, but halfway through the game things started to turn around, and he ended up beating me. I was like Mariano, and I couldn’t believe it either.

After winning a couple more matches without major difficulties, Ramiro was crowned chess champion of the class.

Our friendship in that endless and happy childhood continued wonderfully, and the best part is that we never again called Ramiro less intelligent, nor told him he had to go to another grade.