In the story, Bunnish, one of the members of the chess team, (I think it was a high school chess team) becomes rich and seclusive, and invites the other members of the team to his mansion to replay a game that he (Bunnish) lost in high school.
In the end of the story, it is revealed that Bunnish has invented a time machine, which allows the traveler to go back in time and create a new timeline, causing the traveler to "die" in the original timeline the moment that he activates the machine.
Bunnish has been using the time machine in a sort of infinite loop to repeatedly go back in time to the middle of the game that he lost. (Of course, he always loses.)
The story was in an anthology of science fiction short stories about chess.