The hands of ghosts

I love this game, and I love the easy accessibility of it. I love the fact that I can interrogate the database, or study a book, and get any game played in the history of top level chess. That is a fabulous gift, and we chess players are uniquely privileged to have such a treasure trove.

However, we are missing something. Chess is not just played within the confines of a board, and we can sometimes get carried away with the wonder of a particularly brilliant piece of tactics (17…Be6!! Byrne vs Fischer 1956, for example). The vast database has no place for psychology. It has no place for time control. And it inadequately portrays the vastness of talent of a Morphy, Capablanca, Fischer or Kasparov. If I might use an analogy, the aforementioned champions are like the greatest concert pianists in History. If I played the piano as well as I played chess, I would know some single handed tunes and the odd chord, and yet this difference is not visible (or audible, as the case may be), and must be inferred.

Perhaps the greatest feat of a chess master, or at least the one that most closely resembles magic, is the ability to play ‘Blindfold’. This is a truly remarkable ability of the human brain. I remember stories of Alekhine and a master companion, when in jail in Germany, playing endless ‘blindfold’ games, as a simple expedient due to there not being a board available. Chess is raised to a level of a mental abstraction, utterly closed within two great minds, invisible and near telepathic.

One of my non playing friends once asked me if I would ever be a grandmaster. I pithily, and rather unfairly, asked him if he would ever be a concert pianist. But such is the magnificence of the great players. Some have questioned the value of the Grandmaster title, there being something like a thousand grandmasters in the world, and the informal ‘SuperGM’ has been born as an attempt to differentiate the very best from the rest. This in itself cheapens the title of GM, the inference being that a GM outside the top twenty is an ‘ordinary’ GM. I wonder, if seeing a pianist play who was amongst the top one thousand pianists in the world, one would describe him as an ‘ordinary’ pianist. I think not.

The gift that we have is that the great players of history can guide our hands. I can set up my board and the ghosts of the great sit by my side, guiding my hand, posthumously imparting their wisdom.

Very nicely said. loved your comparisons.

Your words give an impression to value our beloved game of chess.

Long live Chess/شطرنج/Ajederez/Shachmat/Schach !