An ode to chess

It’s sort of like my spiritual practice

First of all, I understand that a chess article while the world burns is like a Met Gala while bombs are being dropped. There are agonizing horrors happening right now, cries for justice rising up and going unanswered. I don’t want to minimize that, but still I think we need self-care, we need recreation, we need small ways to find and claim and clutch joy.

For me, one of those ways is chess. So perhaps to convert you to chess life, or perhaps just to entertain you with a display of nerdiness, I wanted to share with you this love letter to the game of chess. There will even be a nugget or two about faith or spirituality waiting to be mined.

O chess, why do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

Three. There are three reasons:

The scope of chess defies human capacity
There is an interesting fact in the field of game theory that you might not know: any game with well-defined rules and “perfect information” can be played in such a way (i.e. with flawless strategy) to guarantee a win (or, in games with ties, at least a tie). Perfect information boils down to players knowing every factor in the game at all times. Poker doesn’t include perfect information because you can’t see the other players’ hands. Settlers of Catan and Monopoly don’t because you have no idea what the dice rolls will be. In fact, most games do not provide perfect information precisely because elements of luck and mystery make games more exciting and unpredictable.

But some games do—and a great example is tic tac toe. It’s a great example because in tic tac toe, the game theory fact above is clearly true. If you are the first player and play with perfect strategy, you will never lose. (It also turns out that if you are the second player and play with perfect strategy, you also will never lose.)

This is true because tic tac toe has well-defined rules and provides perfect information. All games like this have winning (or non-losing) strategies for at least one of the players. That includes checkers, Chinese checkers, Mancala, Reversi/Othello/Go… and chess.

So what? Why does this make me love the game (and God??!). Well, games with perfect information are rare because they’re so easy to master. Once you memorize all the possible branches a game can take, as one can quickly do in tic tac toe, it is boring to simply follow those branches to a tie or victory.

Then how has chess stood the test of time, if it is just a more complicated version of tic tac toe? The answer is that it’s much more complicated. It’s true that if you could just memorize all the possible branches of moves, you would never lose. But you can’t do it. Because there are billions and billions and billions of possible games of chess!

So, perhaps more than any other game, chess brings us up against our human limitations. A game that gives us everything we could ask for—perfect information—but then branches into so many gazillions of combinations that we can’t possibly remember what to do in each of them. So we have to shift from rote memorization to strategy, tactics, and improvisation. This is just so human. We can’t memorize enough. We can’t guarantee good outcomes because of our own limitations. So we have to do our best in the moment.

Chess teaches us more when we lose
One of the cool things about playing chess is that right after a game (an online game), you can consult a chess engine that will analyze the game. It will tell you all the other moves you could have made on every turn and how strong each one would have been. If you want to improve as a player, it’s a good idea to analyze every game you play. Though the temptation is to rush right into another one!

And here is what any player will tell you: you learn more from your losses than your wins. The engine will show you exactly where the game slipped away, what you could have done differently.

Even though I’m a fairly competitive person, this learning-from-losses has made me so much more fun-loving in my chess play. If I lose, so what? It is quite literally an opportunity to learn from my mistakes. If only I (and we all) could translate this into other parts of life! If we could bypass the part where we beat ourselves up or make excuses or vow future success and just get to the learning.

We actually can improve
I only started playing chess a few years ago. I was a little late to the party of The Queen’s Gambit, but when I got there I was hooked. I immediately started playing, and I was bad. I knew how the pieces move, but I didn’t know anything else.

Soon YouTube became my classroom. Online chess content creators like GothamChess taught me just about everything I know about the game. And make no mistake—I’m not a grandmaster or anything. Not even close. But I have gotten much better over my several years with the game.

And this is a hallmark of most faith systems: people can change. They can change for the better. (You might say that God changes us, or even that God changes.)

It’s hard to believe sometimes. When a loved one remains stuck in their ways, or changes for the worse by delving into conspiracy theories or toxic political affiliations, it can feel like people are doomed to be stuck forever—or worse. But if I can get better at chess, I can get better at empathy. At listening. At loving. With practice, patience, self-compassion, and a good teacher named after Batman’s city, we can be better.

If I ever stop believing that, I will just look around Harbor. We are people who have changed, for the better. And we’re still changing.