Chess and the City of Light - An Essay Post

Hi everyone! For those who only know me by personality and my chess.com handle, my "real" given name name is Adam Foltin, and I am a student at NYU. I tell you this not because I want to seem obtuse and thick but just the opposite, I am being completely transparent about myself, my opinions, who I am, and what I am looking to accomplish by writing this essay-post.

And what is that you may wonder? Well I want to analyze chess. I want to bludgeon your view of chess and posit mine. Joan Didion calls writing an aggressive and inflammatory act. I think she's correct here, as that's kind of what I'm trying to do (but only in the sneakiest of fashions you see, as is evident by my expository paragraph on it). 

I was born on January 26th 1996. That makes me 19 years old, and I will soon be turning twenty. It also makes me an Aquarius; hence the name. In addition to being born at 2:35 AM, I was also born in a blizzard, though I am not sure what this portends for my future. I have an raw IQ of 156 but I don't particularly believe that IQ really matters. It's a good test of people's minds working a certain way, a way built around creativity in the face of insurmountable problems, but not much else. I guess IQ portends somewhat to chess, but even there, it mostly pertains to "mechanical" aspects of chess like memory and base calculation skills. It has little to do with the most important parts of chess, which in my opinion must be acquired personally over time. Moreover it has absolutely nothing to do with the irrational side of chess, the emotions and intuition, which do not think in any comprehensible way, and yet still can procure masterpieces "by chance". 

The way one of my teachers talked about IQ was that he knew a kid who had a D average and could disassemble a car in 15 minutes. It wasn't that this kid was stupid, he just wasn't cut out for the kind of thought they have you do in school. There are different types of intelligence, and each person is unique, and the same holds true for chess, since it is a reflection of the Self and life. There are also parts of chess that are applicable everywhere, and this is part of its deception. It seems as if Chess is a vacuum. As if it is not related to anything tangible and that Chess Players all are mad geniuses, and savants. This couldn't be further from the truth, as Chess is a reflection of life but with a strict goal added in. Capture the opponent's king. Perhaps a better measure of chess success is, as Kasparov says, one's synergy with the nature of thought as it stands in the now. The way I see it, we are slowly moving into an age where science alone cannot handle our needs, where soon enough, we will have to understand non-material planes of existence, such as emotions and the realm of the abstract, more deeply than ever before, in order to make our society "better"; in order to evolve.

But enough blabbering. I have a very concrete goal and if I talk too much I will lose your support you see. I have wanted to do this kind of post for a while, but I have never had the chutzpah to even try. One must muster a lot of courage to tell others(especially on this forum) what they truly think, and I am not brave enough to do that. So I will keep writing until I am. 

Sometimes you wonder about these things.

I actually did not learn to play chess until I was fifteen. Fifteeen! I learned it when I was eight, but I did not learn to PLAY it until I was a mid-teenager. How did this happen you may wonder? Well, the year I entered my high school, the old principle had left, and a new one had been elected. In this way, an old grudge my future chess instructor(Who was also the math and global history teacher) decided to reinstate the chess program, which he had stopped doing due to a grudge against the former principal's husband. I think the whole thing petty, but my teacher and I have very different playing styles, so I cannot really fault him when he says, for example, that he distrusts the Benoni and all but four gambits.It really is not my place to change his views, but our conversations are always deep and meaningful, and surprisingly, often centered around emotions, rather than intellect. Because that is just it: when we play chess, we want to include our emotions. But we often don’t, you see? Actually, we tend to be worried about suppressing them, and that’s not good at all. In chess, the heart and the mind must work as one. The chess mind is conscious, the chess heart is intuitive, you see. One must listen to both. If the chess heart is scared, one may play poor chess, fear is often felt without realizing it. If the chess mind feels slighted, one may, of course, play poor chess. This is what is called an emotional tilt, and it affects your intuition as well.

When I learned how to play chess, I immediately started dreaming big. It is not odd at all because I tend to do this. I have a lot of ambition, and it has made me into the player I am today. I do not tend to worry about superficial measurements like rating. One may as well worry about scrotum size and facial features when finding a mate, they may find you a spouse, but not the right one. In this way, rating should not be a source of ego or pride for anyone but you. And if you want to do that, do not shut out others because you perceive them as inferior. I have crushed a lot of people because their focus is on the world of appearances, such as rating. My own rating has a pretty good justification for being consistently low. I’m not ready! If I knew enough and was balanced enough to have a high rating I would have one. I’m an incredibly strong player sometimes, yes, but across the board, I need to have more finesse in my chess. Sometimes I’ll play at times when I’ll definitely lose, we all do, but the best players know how to play when their blinkers are on. And they don’t get worried about when they lose when those blinkers are not. I know I can be very strong one day, I already am. It has nothing to do with rating, it has to do with my emotional issues and intellectual demons and all the things I have to sort out in the life I was given.

I’ll tell you one last story, for this essay is running on. When I was a child, I was so ambitious as well: and I was taking a test to get into this public middle school. I took the test and totally screwed it up: I had correctly answered all the hardest questions and had left the easy questions blank! Can you even imagine what kind of youth I was? I was and am crazy, then and now. I think my uniqueness is nothing to laugh at: I think it's a gift. Perhaps from God.