Posts Tagged ‘chess’
“But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game?”*…
Mardean Isaac, in The Republic of Letters, on chess and what it can– and can’t– teach us. He begins by recounting his personal history with the Royal Game, culminating in an intense period of play…
… Soon after I started my spree, I could already feel subtle cognitive re-wiring beginning to take place. The shape of those changes seemed to align with the objective lessons chess imparts; as if contemplating the findings on a psychedelic drug trip, the issue then becomes whether this is really the case.
People read themselves into interpretations of the greater significance of the game. For Vladimir Nabokov, like the sentence, chess reaches its most elevated form in the perfect rendering of problems into compositions. Stanley Kubrick, who used to put in 12 hour days playing in Washington Square Park, had a stab at life lesson stuff in an old Playboy interview: “Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you’re in trouble.” A 1966 profile of the director in the New Yorker reveals the grubbier material underneath that prudence. At the end of the piece, Kubrick sees the reporter eyeing what he perceives as a killer move, and breaks out in agony to encourage him to make it. But it turned out to be a trap; the move opened a pathway for Kubrick to win. The game’s laws are objective, and can be understood by analysing the outcomes of actions and potential actions. But while players are necessarily guided by explicit rules, they often gain their edge from covert ones. The edge-seeking on display there, rooted in an absence of institutional cushioning, would never leave Kubrick, as he strove to reach the apex of the most logistically burdensome and patronage dependent of art forms.
Chess is primarily a strategic, not a cultural, phenomenon. That is the key to its longevity: where culture changes and evolves, strategy survives and persists—merely as itself. Chess reveals the chiselled edges of strategic veracity: the failures that ensue from not registering your adversary; the complacency that sets in when seemingly comfortably in control; not recognising that risk is a constant, meaning that a good move, coming at the expense of a great one, can also harm you.
The logic of chess exists outside of us; and yet every move feels so personal. Is there an illustration of personal limits more acutely painful than making a truly dumb move, or not spotting a killer one? Not seeing things objectively is not only a guarantor of psychic torment—it often also leads to a kind of self-defeat anyway, because it shuts off routes to our own self-advancement, even if the solipsistic voice in your head might tell us otherwise.This is where zugzwang (“move compulsion” in German) comes in. This strategic concept refers to a situation in which you have no choice but to make a move that will worsen your position. For example: you are in check, and have to protect your king by moving over a piece that will certainly be taken, reducing your pool of available pieces to the point where victory is made more difficult or impossible. (The only way out of zugzwang—resignation—is no way out at all: a fact which carries a dark metaphorical valence.) It seems to reach into the ultimate dynamic: biology set against time. The problem is: the onus is always on you—you who are always either preparing, or executing, the move you must make. The issue of needing to make a move; there being no such thing as stasis; and each one either advancing or worsening, is a kind of approximation of our biological existence. It’s a reminder that everything is advancing or hurting your cause. Whether or not you are creating the conditions for zugzwang boils down to the accumulated consequences of your own actions. It affirms that you are always responsible for advancing yourself—even, and especially, into oblivion. Worst of all, it affirms that you were responsible for creating the objective conditions that brought about your own drive towards defeat.
I can’t hang onto this moment any longer. It is up to me to decide whether I’ve played too many games for that, or too few. I can either accept that I now have to drive on into the endless forest of chess—or step back altogether, leaving this essay as the only footprint of my ramble across its periphery. As I contemplate the problems with either position, I realise I have already entered my own personal zugzwang…
Perhaps we’d do well to sort the “games” we play into those like chess worth playing, win or lose, and those that are not… Of those latter– especially of those the present themselves not so much as games, but as “the way things are”– as “Joshua / WOPR,” the computer in War Games, observes to “David Lightman” (Matthew Broderick) after thermonuclear annihilation is narrowly avoided: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
A love affair with chess: “My Personal Zugzwang.”
More on zugzwang: “Advantage! What is advantage?“
* Stefan Zweig, Chess Story
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As we make a move, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Addams Family premiered on ABC. Based on a series of single-paneled cartoons by cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker magazine that began in 1938, the series took the unnamed characters in the single-panel gag cartoons and gave them names, backstories, and a household setting. The main cast was: Gomez (John Astin), Morticia (Carolyn Jones), Lurch (Ted Cassidy), Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax), and Wednesday (Lisa Loring).
The show went off the air in 1966, but The Addams Family’s popularity never really died. Since that time, Hanna-Barbera created two different cartoon series based on the show, three feature films were released in 1991, 1993, and 1998 plus a direct-to-video movie in 1998. In 2019, MGM released a brand new full-length animated film which was pretty good followed by a sequel two years later which wasn’t. In 2022, Jenna Ortega starred in a Netflix show centering on the character of Wednesday Addams, but all of the Addams have supporting roles for the series Wednesday including Luis Guzman (Gomez), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Morticia) and Isaac Ordonez (Pugsley).
“It is impossible to win gracefully at chess. No man has yet said “Mate!” in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious.”*…
… but perhaps the offense is muted if the call is remote.
Electronic gaming is huge– and growing, As Rolling Stone reports…
The gaming industry, fueled by platforms like Twitch and YouTube, has surged into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse, projected to exceed $207 billion in 2026. These platforms do more than showcase gameplay—they cultivate vibrant, interactive communities where fans engage in real time, from live chats to virtual watch parties. Games like League of Legends, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike and Fortnite have become a cultural phenomenon, drawing in over 2.6 billion gamers globally, a number that continues to climb each year. Mobile gaming, accounting for over 60% of global gaming revenue, plays a significant role in this growth, making gaming accessible to a broader audience than ever before…
But as Danny Robb explains, using tecnology to play games remotely has a long history…
In 1897, the United States House of Representatives held a series of chess matches to find their most skilled players. The five winners were pitted against counterparts in the British House of Commons. But while the Americans sat down to play in Washington, D.C., their opponents sat in London. The players received moves by telegraph, and sent responses back over wires that crossed the Atlantic.
By this point, “cable chess” had been slowly evolving for decades. Historian Simone Müller-Pohl argues that this form of long-distance chess play offers insight into the cultural and political currents of the industrial era.
By the mid-nineteenth century, she explains, there was a growing sports culture in Europe and the US. Industrial technologies enabled more people to attend games and follow along from a distance. A growing middle class fostered this sporting culture, which came to include chess.
“Weekly,” Müller-Pohl explains, “the liberal and intellectual elites of the time assembled around chess boards in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, and London.” Interest in the game spread, and chess clubs emerged. As clubs arranged tournaments and standardized chess rules, Müller-Pohl argues that chess “was gradually turned into a sport.”
Correspondence chess grew along with the game, in part thanks to cheap and efficient postal services. When the telegraph emerged on the scene, the application to chess was almost immediate.
“It was telegraphy’s fathers who pulled the strings behind the first schemes for cable chess,” Müller-Pohl explains. In 1844, inventor Samuel Morse arranged chess matches on a new telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “All of the 686 moves necessary for the seven games played were transmitted without mistake or interruption,” Müller-Pohl writes.
Not long after, in 1845, inventor Charles Wheatstone attended a demonstration in London. Chess legend Howard Staunton played against his rival George Walker over the South Western Railway line between Portsmouth and London. Müller-Pohl describes how witnesses found the match “rather tedious,” but it received a lot of press. This was partly the point—the matches demonstrated and advertised the capabilities and accuracy of the invention.
The Staunton match had another interesting aspect. Müller-Pohl points out that “the lines were still used for ordinary traffic during the games, allowing a group of chess players from Southampton to have every move telegraphed to them.” A bit like modern e-sports, spectators could observe the virtual match…
The early history of e-gaming– when telegraph cables let chess clubs stage matches across continents, linking players and spectators in a new kind of long-distance competition: “The First E-Sports? Chess by Telegraph,” from @inverting-vision.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* A. A. Milne
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As we note that what’s old is new again, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” was released. It peaked at number two on the Hot R&B Sides chart and number eight on its pre-Billboard Hot 100 chart. Considered “the first rock & roll hit about rock & roll stardom”, it has been covered by many, many other artists and has received many, many honors and accolades, among them being ranked 33rd and 7th, respectively, on Rolling Stone’s 2021 and 2004 lists of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It was also included as one of the 27 songs on the Voyager Golden Record (a collection of music, images, and sounds designed to serve as an introduction and record of global humanity’s achievements, innovations and culture, to alien/otherworldly inhabitants).
Apropos the piece above, it was released by Chess Records.
“Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts”*…
In Amritsar, at India’s oldest and largest chess manufacturing company, artisans have hand-carved the most complicated pieces in the game for generations. Roxanne Hoorn reports…
In the bustling streets of Amritsar, India, the markets are lined with shops full of colorful tapestries and sweet treats like warm local chai served in clay mugs. But the real treasures are kept behind closed doors. Beyond stacks of gnarled logs, inside unsuspecting brick buildings off the main streets, generations of master craftsmen carefully carve, sand, and polish intricate chess pieces, carrying on a long legacy in the country where the earliest versions of chess were played over 1,500 years ago.
These are no basic sets. The pieces make up elaborate professional and collector’s chess sets that sell for up to $4,000 U.S. dollars on the international market. That price is well deserved. Each set is a collective labor of love, with every component handcrafted by a man who specializes in one type of chess piece. (Traditionally, women are not chess carvers.) There are pawn makers, queen craftsmen, and the most coveted—the knight carvers.
“The knight carvers are only knight carvers,” says Rishi Sharma, CEO of the Chess Empire, India’s oldest and largest chess manufacturing company, which was founded in 1962. “The person who is making the queen, we don’t give him the pawn. Otherwise, he’s going to ruin it.”
Of all the chessmen, knights are considered the most difficult and require the most skill to carve. While pawns and other pieces can be shaped under lathes, the knights—resembling horse heads usually with wild flowing manes—are carved completely by hand. A chess carver won’t graduate from pawn to knight or any easier piece to harder ones, but instead will learn his craft from the start of his career, usually from their father or a mentor from one of the well-established chess companies. Surinder Pal, a knight carver at the Chess Empire, learned from his father at 18 years old. Now, he has been working on the craft for over 35 years. With his advanced and highly specialized skill, he can make up to 30 simple knights a day, or spend up to three days on a single ornate knight.
Today, chess pieces are carved from local species like boxwood or imported trees like rose and dogwood. But they were once made of a far more elusive and illicit material. Amritsar was originally known for its ivory carvers, who produced everything from hair combs and jewelry to furniture and sculptures. And of course, chess sets. After the international trade of ivory was banned in the 1990s, the craftsman turned to the similarly smooth but far more accessible medium.
With raw materials readily available, it’s the demand for these fine chess sets that determines how many are produced. And demand has fluctuated in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic left many people secluded in their homes, leading to a boost in demand for many indoor games, says Sharma. In October 2020, that enthusiasm for chess was compounded by the release of The Queen’s Gambit, a series about a fictional American chess prodigy. “The Queen’s Gambit had a very big role in spreading awareness of chess,” Sharma says. “And after that, we see a big boom.” Despite the show’s creator stating they have no plans for a second season, Sharma stays hopeful. “We hope the next season comes as soon as possible.”…
Equipping the Royal Game: “Masters of the Knight: The Art of Chess Carving in India,” from @atlasobscura.com.
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As we prize the pieces, we might recall thatt it was on this date in 1996 that then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov and an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue played game four the first of their two six-game chess matches. They played to a draw. Kasparov won the match– but by a margin of only 4-2 (two draws and a loss to the computer). They met for a rematch the following year, and Big Blue beat Kasparov (3 1/2- 2 1/2).
“Advantage! What is advantage?”*…
Pradeep Mutalik unpacks the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first…
Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play. This results in a built-in asymmetry, and the question arises: Should you go first or second?
Most people instinctively want to go first, and this intuition is usually borne out. In common two-player games, such as chess or tennis, it is a real, if modest, advantage to “win the toss” and go first. But sometimes it’s to your advantage to let your opponent make the first play.
In our February Insights puzzle, we presented four disparate situations in which, counterintuitively, the obligation to move is a serious and often decisive disadvantage. In chess, this is known as zugzwang — a German word meaning “move compulsion.”…
Four fascinating examples: “The Secrets of Zugzwang in Chess, Math and Pizzas,” from @PradeepMutalik.
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
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As we play to win, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that scientists involved in the OPERA experiment (a collaboration between CERN and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso) mistakenly observed neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light. OPERA scientists announced the results with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast; accounting for these two sources of error eliminated the faster-than-light results. But even before the sources of the error were discovered, the result was considered anomalous because speeds higher than that of light in a vacuum are generally thought to violate special relativity, a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics for over a century.
“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up”*…
A supposed “crisis in masculinity” is much in the public discourse these days. But as Jules Evans points out, we’ve been here before…
Last month Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson released a TV series called The End of Men, warning that American men were becoming effete, flabby and sterile. Civilization is descending into chaos, the series suggests, but that’s OK, because ‘hard times produce strong men’. It also featured a man tanning his testicles to the tune of Thus Spake Zarathustra (you can watch the trailer here).
With that Nietzschean image in mind, now seems like a good time to tell the story of President Theodore Roosevelt and his cult of manliness. Teddy Roosevelt preached a life-philosophy of vigour, and embodied this in his own romantic life. His words and deeds made him an icon to the online ‘manosphere’. Indeed, the popular website ‘Art of Manliness’ sells inspirational posters of him, and calls him ‘the patron saint of manliness’.
And yet there is a darker side to his life-philosophy. It included Social Darwinian attitudes that might makes right, only the strong deserve to survive, there are fitter and less fit races, and the white race has a right to conquer other races, while itself needing to be strengthened through eugenics. It’s a story that helps us explore some of the ways that wellness, men’s fitness, the human potential movement and ecological conservation can lead to ‘spiritual eugenics’…
The history– and the dark downside– of the “cult of masculinity,” “Teddy Roosevelt and the End of Men,” from @JulesEvans11.
C.f. also: Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin.
* Ronald Wright
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As we parse power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that software running on Deep Blue (an IBM supercomputer) became the first computer program to defeat a world champion in a match under tournament regulations.
The year before, Garry Kasparov had defeated Deep Blue (4-2). In the rematch, Kasparov won the first game but lost the second. The the next three games were draws. And the sixth game lasted only a little over an hour after just 19 moves.
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