on chess & other games of strategy

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Lately I’ve been thinking about chess. In part, because I’m reading Intermezzo, which is a story that centers the game of chess and presents the characters as pieces in the narrative game. And, in part, because it seems a recurring motif in my life, from frequent sightings of antique sets sold in vintage shops in my neighborhood, to the fact that nearly every park in this city has a table with a chessboard embossed onto its surface, to the game I observed last night at a cafe I frequent. I like to track synchronicities in hopes that they reveal a meaningful connection.

I didn’t grow up with chess. I only learned how to play a few years ago, when a friend needed a playing partner (read: someone to boost their rating). I was not, and still am not, very good. Chess involves strategy and forward-thinking. I have never particularly excelled at the subjects that require analytical thinking, and when preparing for law school, undertook much effort to learn the logic games. Chess requires that you look at each piece and its position, calculating all the possibilities and moves that you and your opponent can make. Each move changes the course of the game so that you are constantly recalculating, adjusting your strategy correspondly. I had a classmate in middle and high school who was so skilled at chess that she semi-regularly missed school to attend tournaments. She has a Wikipedia page that tells me she has a Woman International Master title. From what I can gather, she’s now a SWE at one of the biggest investment banks. Coding too, requires an analytical approach.

I tried, initially, to understand chess through reading, as I tend to do. I read articles, forums, and even game books (starting, of course, with Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess). There are opening moves, sequences which set up the game in a way to give players control of the center of the board while developing their pieces. Once established, players can begin engaging in a negotiation, swapping pieces in exchange for desired positionality. This is usually the point at which I rapidly accelerate toward inevitable loss. My signature move is to sacrifice my knights, expecting it to yield an equal trade off, through a bishop (3 points) or another knight, or even better, to better threaten the king. However, I rarely succeed, and so typically I lose both essential pieces, whose L-shaped movement drives a lot of the game, given the knight’s unique ability to pass through other pieces.

I learned early on of the concept of castling. This move allows a king and rook to perform a sort of position swap, the only such move in chess that allows two pieces to move in one turn, enabling the rook to protect the king. It feels very noble that the rook can do this, defending the king in a way that other pieces cannot. It is a move that is legal only when the king and rook haven’t moved yet, and was introduced to the game of chess to reduce the king’s vulnerability. I like to castle when an opponent approaches, demonstrating that I understand this one technique.

Chess is a sport with little room for pretense. There are no hidden cards or unequal distributions. Both players start out with the exact same pieces and are able to see the board at all times, aware (barring obliviousness) of their place in the game — that is to say, who is winning. In the movies, games seem tense, each brush of a finger against a piece potentially a Most Critical Move. In real life, games can take much longer and with far less bated breath. In 1989, a game between Ivan Nikolic and Goran Arsovic was recorded at 269 moves and ended in a draw. The game lasted 20 hours. As a person with a naturally uncompetitive spirit and very little interest in games on principle, I prefer matches against the computer, where you can set the difficulty level and die a quick death. I repeat my mistakes and play the same losing moves again and again, in a Sisyphean way. At the end of the day, I’m just not patient enough.

The main objective of chess, during the game, is to achieve checkmate, typically in as few moves as necessary. The endgame is the phase during which the outcome becomes more apparent, perhaps to one player more than the other, and few moves remain to prolong the game until checkmate. To arrive at the end, with your opponent in a position to lose or forfeit, is the great task of chess.

I think a lot about the endgame. I think a lot about the strategy. It’s hard not to analogize chess to life, assigning plays and moves to the pieces that surround me. Patterns abound. People behave and respond in learned ways. A person can analyze and watch recorded matches of the greats, like Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen, and practice, which in all things, makes improvement. But there are the unaccountable things too. The game is not finite. Each move opens up more moves, so much so that the total number of moves is greater than the number of particles in the visible universe. And if we eventually reach the Shannon number, that’s still only the lower-bound on the game-tree complexity of chess.

I don’t fear the fact that computers can outplay humans at chess. I like the humanity of organic cognition, the earnest strife that leads to greatness. I am reminded of this: There is no known complete solution for chess, and it’s not expected that chess will be solved in the near future.

I like this implication that there are countless variations in the gameplay of chess and there is no formulaic way to optimize moves (solve) so that the game itself will come to an end. I imagine I’m contributing meaningfully to the possible games played as I attempt to develop strategy and build endurance for the things that do not come easily to me.