The Chessplayer's Mind

How does chess influence your life away from the board?

I get your point.  Like, the board is safe, there are rules...

I frequently find myself moving the way the knight moves if I'm on a checkered floor.

Away?  From the board?  lol.   Life is chess. 

not to mention balance and variety.

You're all on to somethine here....hernia, yeah, chess can be a form of bowel obstruction.   Or, people can see chess imagery in odd places, like the guy in Nabokov's book, The Defense.  Main character, a chess master, jumps off a building and on the way down sees the window panes as squares on the board.  How often have we been forked on the horns of a dilemma, or scewered by the sharp tongue of a critic.  Have any of us awakened in the mid-game of life and found ourselves a pawn down without a mating attack?  Above all, watch out for the surprise move!

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Recently I was trying to mate the lone enemy King with a Knight and Bishop.  (It's tricky but you can do it.)  In this case it was totally infuriating, because his King kept escaping from the mating web by making a series of illegal moves! It happened over and over again.  I would carefully maneuver my pieces for twenty moves and finally get him cornered.  And then he would just hop over my Knight into the middle of the open board!!  And nobody else seemed to notice that this was AGAINST THE RULES and TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!!!

Suddenly I looked up from the board and realized that I wasn't playing chess at all.  I was actually in a Chinese restaurant, trying to eat slippery noodles with chopsticks. 

...which is better, balance or excentricity?...isn't genius extreme?...Fischer was not balanced, and the jury is out on Morphy, Alexhine, and a few more.  "I would give God knight odds and still win," sounds like megalomania to me.  Could chess become such an obsession as to overshadow reality?  Does reality conform to the cold logic of chess in modern physics or is it simply a child's pastime on a distant planet?  Why does the logic of the Talmud seem to favor chess masters?  Is chess an argument where one side says "such and such," and the other side counters with "this and that."?  Are traps hard-wired into chess as they are in life?  Do you feel as if you were born a backward pawn on an open file and every more is to achieve equality?  How different is the admonishment to see every moment, every day, any different to look at the position anew after every move?  How similar it is for us to go through every day, moving automatically, without considering all options or even realizing we could change the game with originality.  You could lose.  So what?  At least you tried to express your individual freedom.

No not at all I disagree with this and I will tell you why-

oh hang on its my mate bishop who needs a check to go off to the pawn shop before the night comes in - a bit of a rook he is not very good at that game - if he wasn't such a queen he would be a king mate and his life would be more black and white.

Now where was I ....

I always get checkmated because I forgot that in real life, all pawns are queens.

 We drinks a bit in bloody ol' England, dunt we?

 Once I pulled off a Grand Fork. The enemy promptly moved all three forked pieces simultaneously and destroyed my knight. Cheaters.

What I am "talking about" is cognition, problem solving, confined systems, rule based algorithms, logic and how these ways of thinking (finite, structured) are in contrast with reality.

Chess is not mathematical, as is commonly thought, but much more sequential and mechinical (like putting together a car transmission or assembling something from IKEA). 

I suppose (theorize) there is a mathematician out there using non-euclidian geometry and Fourier analysis to prove the perfect game of chess, but that has not, in my experience, been worthwhile.  Practically, all the math you need is the ability to count to four, maybe five, to decide how many times a piece or a square is attacted or defended.

What I am "talking about" are the kinds of "if/then" situations we encounter over the board and in life.  For example, "...if you break break our agreement, then I will break your neck," or "...if you don't play by my rules, then I am going to find somebody else who will."

What I am "talking about" are consequences and how being a chess player changes the way deal with conflicts and relationships in our life.  Or whatever.