Ad Majorem Caissa Gloriam?

Even the most skeptical of all the chessplayers has some rituals where it comes to play a serious tournament game. We know the 99 percent of the chess game it has nothing to do with luck, but we can see a player who wears the same shirt until a defeat, or the same pen, even makes religious promisses or walk the same weird  path to the place where the tournament is held… we can not make a number of all rituals for the same reason we don’t know how many chessplayers there are in the world. It’s human nature.

In my late adolescence I read “Ivanhoe” for the first time, that novel of knights and templars which fame has overcome the dust of centuries. The story and the characters bewitched me, but I don’t know why it caught my attention a phrase in Latin printed in the christian troops’ flag (it could be as well when the knights held tournaments…) The sentence was “Ad Majorem Deum Gloriam“, For The Greater Glory Of God. They believed protected with that invocation.

I made a change in the phrase, and it became “Ad Majorem Caissa Gloriam“. Also I started to write it down in the scoresheet, in some white space, and became a habit. Of course I didn’t feel “protected”, but in that way I was remembering all the time that I should play the game the better as I could, avoiding stupid blunders. Now, I use it like a slogan to remember myself that all the work I’m doing is to spread this wonderful game so dear to many millions around the world… or translated to the ancient language: Ad Majorem Caissa Gloriam.