Séamas O’Reilly: YouTube chess – enough content to fill every waking hour of the day

“Good luck!” I say, my voice dripping with derision, as Levy Rozman takes on Magnus Carlsen in a blitz game. “I wouldn’t start like that, you’re playing to his strengths!” This from a man who has only played chess against his own six-year-old son, to whom he loses 60% of the time.

There’s shrapnel from his interests all over my algorithm, but few of them have the same appeal. Lego-building masterclasses are only diverting for a while and the Minecraft videos I can dismiss out of hand, as no amount of clever or pernicious coding can make me care too much about that pixellated world. I am, however, entranced by another of his favourite genres: numbers. Videos about pi and fractions, and any-or-all content in the form of “How many stars are there in the universe?” or “How many grains of sand there are on Earth?” These I watch avidly, realising my son’s obsession with them may well come from a stock within myself.

It’s tempting to say he loves maths, but that’s not quite right. He loves numbers. In every form, in every format. He loves adding and subtracting them, but he also just loves hearing about numbers, of discovering ever larger numbers of numbers, from light-years and googols and googolplexes to the gnawing, cosmic horror of infinity itself.

He loves the song Seasons of Love from Rent, simply because its lyrics lay out the exact number of minutes there are in a year: “525,600 minutes” has become something like a mantra to him, not in its original sense as a comment on the fleetingness of time or of life, but because it’s cool that you can subdivide one year into so many smaller, constituent parts. When Jonathan Larson penned that musical’s heart-pulling evocation of youth, love and art amid the HIV crisis, I’d like to think he had number-crazed six-year-olds in mind.

So, in place of YouTube, we got him a book of daily maths puzzles in the hopes of creating an analogue alternative to his digital endorphin port and he’s been working his way through it in quiet bliss, mumbling sums to himself as if he’s a Russian hermit in line to win a Fields Medal. Every 10 minutes or so, he’ll pop his head out and ask me one.

“What’s 5,000 plus 100,000 plus 20,000 plus another 100,000?”

“Two hundred and twenty-five thou…” I’ll say, before his mum shoots me a glance, reminding me this is meant to be meant to be a learning exercise for him, not me. I can’t deny I chafe against this. A lifetime of instinctively needing to show off all the wonderful things I know has made me a well-rounded and agreeable type of person. A fun guy to be around, I’d imagine. So the idea that I’m not allowed to demonstrate my genius to my son is hard to take.

I swallow every urge in my body and ask him what he thinks it is. He gives me the correct answer and I am chastened. The sums grow fiddlier still, reaching long division and square roots that far outpace the maths he’s learning in school. Now might be the time for me to chime in with some constructive help, but I can no longer hear him. I can tell his lips are moving, but I have turned my gaze to YouTube. I’d intended to play some music, but it turns out GothamChess is showcasing a one-minute Ponziani opening that can set a trap for any master. I have no idea what any of those words mean, but I am enthralled.

Photograph by Jordan Lye/Getty Images