Falling Back In Love With Chess

Chess is an amazing way to play with your brain.

It reflects who you are.

When I was younger chess was a fun, easy game. I was just smart enough to "get it" more than my friends, with none of us having lessons, and my experience was something like being Paul Morphy and just effortlessly winning everywhere.

I was definitely a prodigy in the making until somebody broke my heart with the brutal Fool's Mate, and then the more subtle traps like Queen's Gambit Declined Elephant Trap and pretty soon I was hopeless.

Chess frustrated me because I wanted to memorize and brute force my way into winning. Any decent chess player tells you this is a pointless strategy. You can't memorize, you have to use creativity to explore complicated positions.

Even now, the greatest player in the world is Magnus Carlsen, known for his creative and non-memorization focused approach.

Zen-Like Focus

As a youngster I may have been too impatient and focused on winning. Now I find my experience with chess to be more joyful and reflective of my current mindset.

It's about the long game. I don't even think about winning material early in the game. Instead I'm positioning my pieces to be in a good spot for later on. In my youth I could barely make it to move 5 without trying to take a pawn or a knight or something. Now I can be on move 30 with a pawn or two up and still be in purely positional mindset.

It reminds me of real life. The more you succeed, the more easily you can come crashing down. In chess, the moment that you lose your concentration is the moment you may slip up. A blunder can turn a won game into a lost one in a single moment.

Training for Joy

Most importantly, the practice of chess makes the game more fun.

As a beginner most games are won and lost due to blunders. Whoever gives up a major piece first, such as moving a rook into the bishop's attach zone, will lose. Sometimes easy traps are deployed to get quick wins on turn 5 -7.

Now though I understand that by focusing and practicing, by analyzing my games a little bit after they're done, I can get much better -- and when games are no longer determined by blunders, they are determined by strategy. It's like solving a puzzle competitively in real time. Even at home on my laptop, just listening to some music and playing on a 2-D chess board against a stranger, I find it thrilling.

It's the opposite of addiction-engine games like Hearthstone and Magic which are perpetually unsatisfying by design.

Here's an illustration of how fragile chess can be. I was playing the black side, up by about 10 points based on computer analysis, in other words a "won game," and then I made a crucial mistake.

The arrow is where I should move... instead, look at my blunder:

Now because I moved my king in the wrong direction, his rook can go to the bottom left corner and my pawn is dead. The very same pawn that would become a queen and win me the game, if only I did not blunder.

Luckily this guy blundered it right back, and the game was mine.

Dank.

I ran my rook up to g1 to protect the pawn, he captured, I promoted to a queen with the re-capture, and then my opponent resigned soon thereafter.

Any other chess enthusiasts on Steemit? I haven't posted much about it before, but I love it!!

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