Discovering the beauty of chess Part 1

                                                                     White to play and draw

This might just be the position that did it for me. The position that convinced me that chess was more than just a game. 

OK a little context is in order. Once I had learnt to play chess I rapidly become immersed, no consumed by it. I needed to find out more. Luckily, our local library had a small, but interesting chess section.  The book shown below became a favorite of mine.

The World of Chess by Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing

I must have taken it out dozens of times. If you haven't read it, I recommend you do. It's full of stories about the history of the game, wonderful chess and shines a light on the more human side. But I digress. Back to the diagram.

For those of you not familiar with it (and every chess player needs to be), it is a study by Richard Reti. My young mind couldn't make sense of it. White to play and draw??? How? The black king is close to white's pawn and can easily stop it queening. White's king on the other hand seems too far away to support his own pawn and can hardly expect to catch the black one. Obviously white is losing.

But wait...perhaps you want a little time to think about the position yourself.

Have you found the solution (or perhaps remembered it and smiled). No? Well, it goes like this.

Let us imagine white chases after the h-pawn. Obviously Kh7, Kh6 etc. will never succeed in catching it. But what if he moves along the diagonal? After 1. Kg7 h4 2. Kf6 black finds himself with the move in the following position:

He is in a bit of a quandary. If he carries on running with the h-pawn, white's king is able to support his own pawn queening. On the other hand if he now tries to stop white's pawn, a miracle occurs. For example: 2.   Kb6 3. Ke5 

Now if black captures white's pawn, the white king has gained enough time to reach the h-pawn. To quote Lessing and Saidy, "The black pawn is like a comet slowed down by the gravitational pull of a distant body". A wonderful simile.

Even as a child I could see that this wasn't like an action movie, which required suspended disbelief. No, this was altogether more mysterious. Somehow the rules of logic and common sense had been subverted. 

I don't think that I tried to understand where I might have gone wrong in my initial reasoning. I just reveled in the cleverness of the puzzle. Now I might explain it as follows: whilst it is true that the black king is close to white's pawn, it is equally true that it is much further away from his own than white's king is from his pawn. Consequently the white king is able to multi-task! This is also made possible by the curious geometry of a chess board. The diagonal is just as long as the file - quite unlike our (almost) Euclidean world where the hypotenuse would take much longer to traverse.

Chess seems to be a game where rationality rules, but the unexpected subversion of the obvious is a source of delight. This is one place where it's beauty resides. One place, but not the only place...