The link to the vast 'C' - Chess chemistry

"My most frequently played treasures are the Sicilian and the Scotch, or anything that closely resembles the two."

The first move

Today I'll be touching on a subject in which I'm still admittedly inexperienced in, but nonetheless adequate. The opening, ladies and gentlemen. I like to experiment with a lot of various openings, ones that suite my mood at the time, interesting and fun. My most frequently played treasures are the Sicilian and the Scotch, or anything that closely resembles the two. And my new endeavors, as well as my pick for the month, are the King's gambit - Bishop's gambit, and the Scandinavian - Main line.

"Bear with me here, people." - ...

Now, we've all heard of the famous opening principle; develop your pieces early. Get your pieces out and into the game. It works perfectly. However though, I've seen some of my opponents, even those rated much higher than myself, follow this guideline so strictly that they lose sight of the game unfolding before them. Boom! It blows up in their face. Why? Chemistry.

There's so much chemistry in chess, so many reactions; from two players sitting across from each other, going at it (mmh...), exchanging not only the abstract thought, but physical efforts as well. The excitement, the stress, the strain, the anger, the whole damm cyclone lasting not only a few hours but also the trip home and the nightmares in bed. From all that to a single player partitioning his/her self to sustain a debate of ideas, and the audience sharing in the adrenaline shots of it all, here's for the 'C' in both chess and chemistry, chess chemistry. It's also for the wild clicks that emanate from a blitz 'lab'.

In fact, I like to think of the game as a little world of its own, and the pieces, the board, the rules, and so on, being the 'chemical' constituents of the chess world.

...Okay, maybe I don't. But the point is -- physics, so to speak. And before we lose track of the flow here much like a variation gone wild, the point of the matter was and is Cause and Effect.

The environment. The piece exists in an environment. It reacts with and to the environment. It is a piece of and a dependant of the enviroment, and therefore it is the environment, and the environment itself is no plain black and white photo, no. It's the most colourful existence there is, the environment is none other than the world we live in, the earth, and yet again the universe that encompasses it, serving also as an environment. The recursive nature of life reminds me of oh so many things and the chess piece is one of them.

Indeed, a chess piece goes beyond just the board, because the players themselves are beyond the board. Though only 64 squares and 32 pieces, the position is much deeper than the layout.

Why all of this focus on the environment? What happened to the chess?

Give me a moment while I fold this handkerchief.

Okay. The answer is simple -- what does it mean to develop your pieces? To give purpose to each piece, winning purpose at that. And purpose acts upon an environment, just as an adventurer needs a mountain or some forest to get lost in 😑.

So what this essentially means is that -- developing your pieces early is about just that, 'developing' them, just like a photo, let it be seen what it has in store, what the artist has intended for that photo in the works.

It's not about necessarily moving your piece, but about setting the stage in such a way that the piece has and holds good purpose.

So yes, a bishop might be sitting on the 1st rank, seemingly untouched, but yet still be fully developed in that specific game/opening/position/strategy/etc. Because -- why? Because chemistry.

End game

The science of this sole principle has barely been uncovered in this blog, I know, but one important concept was, and at times one is all we need to send us spiraling into the world beyond the known.

It seems that even in chess we cannot ignore the laws of relativity, and therefore we should yield some significant amount of attention to the thought -- development is relative to the environment, the position.

That's it, thank you for reading my +1 on the principle of developing your pieces. I hope you enjoyed this blog, and that you find it somewhat helpful to your chess journey.