In the last few months me and my boyfriend started to play chess, or to re-play it. Initially we improved at about the same rate, but he is now much better than me, having taken a more strategic approach to learning. He is consistent in the completion of chess puzzles, of reading up on tactics, on trying out new openings until he’s mastered them. This is how you get better at chess, and if I also applied some dedication I would likely get better too. But I mainly like carelessly playing teenagers on my phone who swear at me and somehow I expect to eventually just get better from that, the airy kind of magical thinking that characterises much of my interaction with the world.
Though my approach is haphazard sometimes I can still beat him, perhaps due to this very haphazardness, or perhaps due to just knowing him and the moves he’s likely to make. Both of us have particular strengths. Mine, in a way, is unpredictability; sometimes I move a piece and even if we’re playing virtually, I can imagine him muttering “why?” at his phone. I’m careless with most of the pieces, sacrificing and swapping in ways that are more aligned to my own internal logic than to general chess theory, but sometimes this recklessness bears out.
My primary strategy is always to obsessively focus on stealing the other person’s queen, whilst guarding my own, to the detriment of all else. This often means throwing good money after bad, sinking cost after cost, but still I remain hyper-focussed, setting elaborate traps, gleefully seizing on any lapse in concentration. Also, I’m generally underestimated, especially by teenagers on Chess.com who are lulled by the profile photo of a smiling woman (25 friend requests currently pending) – however not so much by my boyfriend (no profile photo, no friend requests, not here to fuck around). He knows how dedicated I am to the annihilation of the opponent’s queen and how much satisfaction I particularly get in stealing his, he knows to keeps his wits about him, but his approach is to play a much more equitable, measured, game. In particular he has a knack for manipulating his pawns until they become deadly, impenetrable. The queen is only slightly venerated in the hierarchy, not worth losing all the other pieces over, often even offered up as a swap. He doesn’t pander to her, but I can’t stop myself. She can go anywhere! Invincible. He can easily win without one, whereas I am lost, adrift, when she’s stolen from me.
We play on a board together, when we can be bothered, which is nicer than playing on our phones, though it can feel like a different game altogether when you’ve been playing on a screen for a while. When we play in person, we’re raucous and hooting. Pawns become “prawns”, knights become “horsies”, bishops are “bishes”, rooks become “piggies”, because we are united in our delight for a position called “Pigs on 7th”, where both the rooks are on the seventh rank and totally clear a row, consuming everything in their path. Oh, the satisfaction of the bulldozering rook pair, the grudging admiration for the player utilising it! I’ve grown to love my little piglets, and will guard them most assiduously after my queen. I’ve developed other chess habits too, like getting irrationally annoyed if someone gets their queen out too early (Immature! I’m just going to make you retreat!), hating the Grob opening (oh, so you think you’re special? Trying to wrong-foot me?) and gloating over what I call the “strop resign” (usually when I have taken someone’s queen, and they just give up then and there, but it’s quite unsportsmanlike if there’s even something still to play for.)
Not being good at something you do for fun sometimes feels character-building, even at times noble, like there’s a purity to it – doing it solely because it feels good. Otherwise it can feel pathetic in a way I do not tend to embrace in my hobbies. Children are good at chess, even! I’m not a child. The last time I beat a 12 year old, in person, they were annoyed, and I was more triumphant than I had any right to be. In my defence, they go to chess club. Sometimes I’ve not wanted to play even my boyfriend because I’ve not been in the mood for losing at something, not willing to stake even a tiny bit of theoretical dignity on a game I probably have about 25% of chance of winning, odds which are not terrible. How fragile and sulky I can be when enmeshed in the weird intimacy of a game, as if the insides of my brain are turned out onto the board for the other to see: my impulsivity and inability to think more than two steps ahead made manifest, damning, there in the formal dance of prawn eating horse.
Recently my boyfriend was very sick with a fever, telling me in the morning about how he had wrestled all night with an endless chess problem, knowing if he could only solve it the fever would break. In the novella Chess by Stefan Zweig a prisoner in solitary confinement initially finds comfort in a chess book, compulsively playing game after game against himself until he’s mastered the game beyond all human mastery, but in the process loses grip on his sanity. And of course in the Queen’s Gambit the main character develops her skills through a nightly journey into a kind of drugged chess otherworld. Chess becomes mystical and hallucinatory in these stories, not just pieces on a board but moving into a realm loosened from spatial confines, a realm beyond a game, where the sheer possibilities on offer become enormous and terrifying. They become dangerous. There are so many ways to turn, so many wrong moves to make. Sometimes in my sleep I dream of chess, even though I’m not that dedicated. Sometimes I have played my best games during intense emotional turmoil, escaping the noise of myself to dissolve into the immediate problem of where to move a piece, how to solve this one thing, here in front of me.
What would it mean, to finally become good at chess? What would I prove to myself about the kind of person I am; what kind of fever would break? I would like to be a person who could think logically, coolly, resist the juicy traps an opponent sets, study my puzzles and apply myself. But I’m not really that person. Sometimes I watch famous game replays and marvel at the initial familiarity, how they start in a dance I recognise but slip, gracefully, into one that I wouldn’t have dreamed of. One beyond the plane I think on. The slip, when it comes, can be hard to recognise, but suddenly I’m not speaking the language. I’m just watching, marvelling, at a board transcended.
Your writing is so crisp and so evocative. Love it every time. 🤍 (This also makes me wanna try chess again..)