About Chess...

People respond to problems. 

What people naturally respond to is a limited topic set. People respond to:

• food
• sex 
• indulgence   
• threats 
• and problems  
• Oh, and the sound of a baby crying

 Each of these motivators are vague enough to cover a great deal of ground. Problems include: puzzles, queries, riddles, optical illusions, anagrams, codes… all the way out to chess— which is a heady brewing of aggressive puzzle solving inside a challenging adversarial environment. 

Solving problems is one of the body’s dopamine dispensers. Dopamine dispensers are motivators with their hand on a jolt when you’re ready to celebrate. In fact, each of the motivators listed above have their hand on the dopamine dispenser. That’s why they grab our attention so readily. We have little resistance when these horseman come around. 

The game of chess attracts our attention. When a game is set up, all the pieces in their place, standing in rows at attention, we notice. The game board might be sitting on a table, or a counter. The pieces might have the sheen of metal, or the soft glow of marble, or the comfort of wood.  We might even pause to look around, to see if someone else notices. Maybe they will notice us noticing. We enjoy every aspect of the game, it is perfect for our design from cellular level all the way up the echelons of higher function and personality. 

The presence of the game set nudges us with alarming skill. It is as if the architect(s) of the structure and nuance of the game were fully versed in the topics of psychological behavior, individual needs and identification, and sociological governance — what brings people together — because that is a requirement for the game if it is to weave its fabric; other people. 

Yes, you can play a solitaire game. You can also amuse yourself with puzzles and walking through books of annotations. I have (literally) hundreds of thousands of both at my finger tips. And yes, they amuse, instruct and expound my understanding. However, those aren’t chess. Those are ‘about’ chess. 

Chess is a two player game. There can be others in the room; spectators, well-wishers, other adversaries waiting their designated turns. But for a real game of chess, those others — near and far — are silent witnesses. As Benjamin Franklin said in his Morals of Chess:

All talking to the players lessens or diverts their attention [from the game], and is therefore unpleasing. Nor should you give the least hint to either party, by any kind of noise or motion. If you do, you are unworthy to be a spectator. If you have a mind to exercise or show your judgment, do it in playing your own game, when you have an opportunity, not in criticizing, or meddling with, or counseling the play of others.

Variants and adaptions exist, yes. But they are not chess either. 

Chess is a question. It is a question with answers, but not an answer. It is a riddle with fresh punchlines on each telling. It is a manicured field of challenge, pristine on each rise of action. It is a worthy medium. It is a battle for the ages. The experience of chess is both profoundly personal and publicly transparent —  In this way, chess allows and supports honest self appraisal.

Multifaceted and artfully layered the game brings in logic, knowledge, experience, intuition, inside a mixing of challenge— both in the sense of solving the problem and the sense of being challenged to a duel.  Within its throes, enhanced by visualizations shifting with each convulsion of the boards positions, there is also the lure of power — in the sense that power is the ability to enact change. A power offered to us to use at every turn.

Each, and any chess game is capable of marking us deep. There are the heady marks of brilliance which travels across the skin sending chills and bristling our neck hair. We feel the frisson across our scalp, and lightening across our teeth. 

And there are those moment which will surface with a rush of cringe — normally in the shower for some odd reason, but with such violent recollection that they might incite a shout and a shudder to banish them.

It is the state of master players which causes notice to the game — what calls our attention. The question then is, “what are they doing over there?” 

Witness sees that they are concentrating, but you’ve seen people concentrate before. Scrutiny assures us there is a difference. We may be unable to express the variation, but there is one. A subtle difference. 

Most will not divine the difference because it is outside of most experiences. It is truly a challenge to grasp what is outside of our experience. The human mind is a pattern recognition engine, at its base. If approached with the proper charms and presentation it has awe inspiring abilities to connect, retain, and utilize experience. If approached poorly it has the ability to blank the whole event out — like it never happened. 

It is unlikely that we will grasp the whole of what we see happening between those two players, but we are just as likely not to forget the event — or the word ‘chess’ if someone nearby answered our question. 

The game itself is a master-stroke of brilliance. It has changed and evolved over the centuries of play. It use to be, before the middle ages, that to win the board must be cleared of each of the opponent’s pieces. No pawn must stand. But years of play and human growth decided that victory should not require genocide. The checkmating of the king would be enough. Soon after that, the mating of the king became required, dropping the genocide option completely. 

The Queen as well has changed, beginning her rein as the weakest piece on the board (only able to move one space at a time and only on the diagonals) maturing into the battle-matron she is today, around the same time checkmating was shifting.

it is a sport that challenges us on multiple levels all at once, while our opponent attempts to attack the middle and capture our king. 

Visual perception skills are important for the cognitive processes of understanding and remembering information. These skills give people the ability to select, organize, and interpret external stimuli to better understand the world around them. Chess’ play invites — seduces — one of our favorite beliefs as a species… we believe we recognize patterns far better than we do naturally. 

This is a frustrating problem for everyone. We all do this. We see something, and we feel that we have actually come away from the experience with an awareness, a gnosis of the thing. As if our sight was enough to glean an enlightened perspective. Even when experience tells us that this belief is debunked, we continue to operate as if we can’t hear ourselves. This happens because we operate and function on our ability to recognize patterns we have seen before. They are the basis of our memory. It is the means of our personality. We recognize others by the way they walk, the cadence of their speech, the timbre of their voice.

Patterns affect us. They alter our ability to concentrate, our mood and our physical state. Some patterns of music cause us to focus on the song rather than the game. Some patterns tell us of alarm and danger. We respond to patterns in art, such as the Golden Ratio. We respond to patterns in nature, such as the Fibonacci Sequence. 

Chess teases us with this paradox. It is a pattern rich game. Pattern Recognition is touted as a primary skill requirement.  But we as humans suffer from apophenia as well. We see puppies in clouds an faces in spilled soda. Know as Pareidolia, it is a challenge for us. As is Clustering illusions, the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns). Also Illusory correlations, a tendency to inaccurately perceive a relationship between two unrelated events often plagues us. 

These faux pattern sources are challenged by chess. They are directly attacked and their fangs often pulled, by mastery of the game — and good coaching and training partners who help us along.

  Let’s Play!