Nicholas Higgins 29/06/2020

On Chess

‘Life is like a game of chess: we draw up a plan; this plan, however, is conditional on what - in chess, our opponent - in life, our fate - will choose to do’, Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

As the ‘game of kings’ chess is trumpeted as the most scholarly of games. But what is this but the opportunity for intellectual posturing amongst the bookworms and nerds that play it? As George Bernard Shaw put it, ‘chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time’. As a game of profound concentration and almost Trappist silence, it’s also glaringly anti-social.

To believe these arguments would be a grave mistake. Picture for a moment that your life, from birth to adulthood to death, is the size of those 64 black and white squares. Everything you do, from the relationships you begin, to the jobs you take, are a move on the board. A good move overcomes the opposition -  our competitors and adversaries, our struggles and strifes, our trials and tribulations. A bad move allows these things to defeat us. Chess, like life, is a Darwinian struggle for survival.

Chess teaches us how to win the struggle, and it is not by luck, muscular strength or brute force. Rather it is by thinking deeply about every move you make. No other game relies as much on thinking; to succeed every move must be calculated and carefully considered. You must weigh up in your mind every possible outcome, effect and consequence of that move. What’s going to happen if I do this? Will it expose my King? Will I lose a piece? Will it set me up for an attack later on in the game?

Likewise, every decision in life is going to have a consequence. While a bad move in chess might lead to a lost piece, a thoughtless move in life can lead to intractable suffering. Chess teaches us to think long and hard about the decisions we make off the board. It hones our foresight, anticipation and prediction like no other game.

Asked what use chess was, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz replied that it provided ‘practice in the ability to innovate’. Indeed, the best moves are not only calculated, they’re made with intuition. If you wait around for someone else to make decision for you, they will…and you probably won’t like how it turns out. What separates the great from the good chess players is their ability to create opportunities rather than wait for their opponent to make a mistake. They use their strategy to make the opponent dance to their tune and fall into the opportunity they’ve created for them. This is the Sun Tszu ideal, ‘let your plans be dark and impenetrable as the night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt’. In life too, you don’t wait for that perfect moment to show your potential because it may never come. You get down and create one and then let your skills do the talking. You seize the day.

The resourceful player also knows the meaning of sacrifice. He realises that offering up a knight or bishop as a sacrificial lamb, is most often the stepping stone to victory. Sometimes you have to lose a couple pieces, even your Queen, to ultimately corner and checkmate your opponent. Just as in life, sometimes the greatest material sacrifices can result in a winning position later on. Like quitting a crap job to start up a successful business, or getting out of a toxic relationship to free your spirit. Sacrifice is when breakthrough occurs.

But what happens when the breakthrough from your sacrifice doesn’t come? Here chess teaches you dogged determination. As Edmar Mednis said, ‘after a bad opening there is hope for the middle game. After a bad middle game, there is hope for the endgame’. Every phase of chess is important, opening, middle and end. There are no foregone conclusions in chess.  I’ve played many a game where I’d thought id blown it at the beginning but have gone on on to win. It’s about making the most of each phase and not getting disheartened if some phase doesn’t turn out good. You can make the next phase good. So too does life have its opening chapters, childhood and student life; its intermediary stage, career, mortgage and family; and finally its end, retirement, old age and death. There are countless testimonies of people who’ve achieved great things in life because they did not let some earlier stage, like an abusive childhood, hold them back.

More often than not, these are people who have chosen to take responsibility for their actions. The ethos of entitlement and the syndrome of blaming others for setbacks are both alien to the game of chess. Rather, it prizes personal enterprise and self-reliance. The only thing that can be blamed for a loss is your own personal tactical inferiority, which is what makes chess so intensely satisfying or frustrating, depending on which side you fall.

If you measure a sport by its ‘wider application’ or transferability, chess surely comes out on top. It’s no accident that individuals as varied as Beethoven, Albert Einstein and Napoleon Bonaparte were avid players of the game. They understood that chess mimicked great game of life. It’s no accident that they were also the most resolutely determined of men, who prized thought and reason, who innovated, who sacrificed and who owned their actions.

If we seek to emulate our heroes, might we start with their hobbies.