Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, occasionally takes up his pen and instead of lashing liberal causes writes about one of his passions: chess.

Krauthammer, in a recent interview, said he had written many columns on chess, including one each year for 20 years in Time magazine. When he was nominated for the Pulitzer in 1986, he said one of the 10 columns submitted to the judges was about one of the world championship matches between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. (He did not win the Pulitzer until the following year, when all of the submitted columns were political commentary.)

Krauthammer became hooked on the game when he was 20  he is now 60  and visited a friend in Cambridge, Mass. He found his friend’s roommate sitting with a chess set and an unfamiliar device.

“I said, ‘What is that?’ ” Krauthammer recalled, “And he said, ‘That is a chess clock.’ I had just come in from the plane. It was 10 o’clock at night, and I sat down to play and didn’t get up until 5 in the morning. I had found something that I loved, and I was in deep trouble.”