Despite chess being associated with the intellectual elite, and people trying to convince me that I was one, I don’t actually play chess. I know the rules, but it has been about twenty-five years since I last played. The problem is a conflict between priorities and required effort.
Subjectively, when I play, my decision making process is something like:
- Look at some valid moves
- Have no logical/algorithmic way to rank them
- Have no understanding of what my opponent will do anyway
- Pick something based on gut feeling
(And try not to lose the queen; that’s the best piece!)
I can’t “see three moves ahead” because of the combinatorial explosion of moves that are possible over that space. I don’t have the training or experience to winnow that back down to likely sequences of moves, that could be considered within working memory. I don’t know why I would play move X over move Y, and that’s the same lack of discernment that prevents me from understanding why my opponent might choose C over A and B.
xkcd 232, “Chess Enlightenment”🌎;
used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5🌎 license
I played against family members when I was young, just to pass the time, but I don’t actually know if they were strong players or not. Our favorite openings were to make a kind of inverted-V shape with the pawns, which (in hindsight) was mostly good at clogging up the board. My main strategy for checkmates was to have two rooks (or one rook/one queen) left, on a board that was clear enough to use the two lanes they could threaten, to push the opposing king🌎 to the edge of the board.
Of course, my dad might have also played badly on purpose, to give me a chance.
Until attending just a couple of chess club meetings in high school, I had no idea there were things like openings, counters, and even timers. When the teacher that headed the club won a game against a friend of mine in something like 10 moves, I realized I knew basically nothing about strategy. How does one compete with that as a baby player?
One does a lot of work to learn all this stuff, and one plays a lot of games to build experience.
The thing is, at that point in my life, everyone seemed to think “talent” was required to be good at things, and that people had a certain set of fixed talents within them. I wasn’t talented at chess—based on that chess club experience—so I bowed out. There were things I thought I was good at already, like programming, and I continued to focus on those instead.
The last thing I might have done with chess as a concept is the programming lab work on solving the 8 Queens Puzzle🌎. I don’t remember the exact solution we arrived at, but I have to assume it was one with a queen in the corner. The first entry into the “try to place another queen” logic would try the first square, and (since there are valid solutions to be found from there) never try to roll that placement back.