In Which I Try to Explain the Beauty of Chess Without Totally Alienating and Boring the Reader
I played chess almost every day in high school.
I lost just about every game.
Most of my childhood was spent in the vicinity of Lubbock, Texas — an arid quilt of cotton fields, their almost-surreal flatness punctuated only by isolated houses, oil derricks and irrigation pumps.
One might speculate on that environment’s influence on my interest in chess-playing; on whether I developed an unconsciously nurtured fascination with Cartesian reasoning in tightly constrained two-dimensional grids. I would dispute that thesis for two reasons: one, that I fled West Texas as soon as I finished high school, and two, that I have never had any natural aptitude, whatsoever, for chess.
In high school I studied pawn structures and gambits and openings, to very little avail. I challenged my friends every day in the lunch cafeteria. We sat hunched over our plastic pieces, frowning and brow-furrowing like men brokering a delicate Middle-Eastern peace talk, muttering aspirationally erudite commentary over embarrassingly bad moves. One Christmas I received a hand-carved Lord of the Rings chess set; displayed it proudly, then lost the first game I played on it, packed it up in the closet and never played with it again.
My retrospective diagnosis is that, while I was very in love with the idea of chess — and, more to the point, with the archetype of the Great Chess Player — I had very little interest in the brass-tacks solving of chess problems, or of understanding the game’s mechanics, beyond memorizing techniques that gave me a slight edge over my friends for a week or so. In other words, I didn’t enjoy playing chess; I enjoyed winning — which (in an irony that is in no way lost on me) I very rarely managed to do.
For most of my adolescence, I preferred things that could be “won” by memorizing how to win them, so they could be won consistently with minimal risk of humiliation. For example, I loved history class, because I could score an A+ on every test just by memorizing lists of facts, then replaying them, like a human tape recorder, onto the test paper. I hated math, by contrast, because instead of questions, math posed problems: puzzles whose answers had to be (audible “ughhh”) worked out afresh on every single assignment. Chess frustrated me for the same reason: every game had to be solved, one careful move at a time.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized this is not only not a bug, but is in fact the entire point of a game like chess. It took me more than a decade to rediscover the game in a qualitatively new way— not as a test to be passed, but as a phenomenon to be appreciated: an ever-evolving puzzle box in which each piece’s tiniest movements reshape patterns across the board in ways too subtle to describe here — though I will do my best later in this piece.
But even as I learned to appreciate the game in this new sense, I discovered that words tended to fail me when I tried to explain (to people who don’t play a lot of chess) what I find it so beautiful about it. As a person who considers himself at least relatively articulate, my failure to communicate my feelings about chess has presented a new and frustrating puzzle. I am, however, working on appreciating puzzles more these days. So let’s give this one our best shot.
Why is it so hard to talk about beauty in chess?
Let’s start, by way of contrast, by considering a famous painting: Picasso’s Guernica. Even if you’re not an art snob, it’s easy to look at Guernica for a few seconds and decide, in your gut, whether you like it or not. Sure, an art theorist can explain certain aspects of the painting that might enhance your appreciation of it — but what you’re responding to, before and beyond all that explanation, is your instinctual sense of whether the painting “looks good.”
To a person who is not semi-obsessed with chess, any given arrangement of pieces on the board looks about as “good,” visually, as any other. One might notice certain layout symmetries, sure— but unfortunately, these are rarely what a chess commentator means when they describe a game as “symmetrical.” Instead, they’re describing symmetries in tactics, positions and strengths of play, which tend to be less than obvious.
Another way to say this is that beautiful chess moves are beautiful on a much more abstract level than (say) a painting is typically beautiful. This distance of abstraction presents a significant challenge for your hardworking chess-obsessed correspondent, because it is almost impossible to talk about beautiful chess without referencing the abstract patterns represented by certain move-sequences and piece-configurations— or more specifically, by the implications of certain moves in regard to other patterns on the board.
What I’m getting at here is that chess moves signify meaning only in relation to other chess moves. This makes it frustratingly hard to talk about chess-as-aesthetic-pursuit with people who don’t play a lot of chess, because the aesthetics of chess moves don’t readily translate into subjective phenomenal qualia that the normal non-chess-obsessed person has experienced, like “major-key harmony” or “redness.”
Chess moves can, and do, feel “fearless” and “enraged” and “dissonant” and just about every other way a work of art can qualitatively feel. The problem is that, even if I can make you understand what makes these moves fit into those qualitative categories, no amount of description can make you feel the qualia of rage and dissonance in a chess move, any more than a verbal description of redness can make an eyeless person see the color red. Just as the subjective “redness” of red arises through the interaction between an energy-pattern and the brain’s visual system, the qualitative “dissonance” of a chess move can be experienced only through an interaction between a chessboard-pattern and the brain’s chess system. Or something like that.
This distance of abstraction makes it difficult to describe (literally) game-changing chess movements and schools, such as Romanticism and Hypermodernism, in ways that non-obsessed players can react to on the kind of visceral-instinct level that artistic movements generally aim to hit. I can easily evoke a mental image of Cubism, with all its attendant emotional implications, just by invoking Picasso’s name — but I doubt it evokes much of a gut response when I tell you the Hypermodernist school of chess “emphasized the importance of… striving for ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’ bishops in positions with locked pawn structures.”
Further complexifying this already-not-insignificant abstraction challenge is the fact that chess experts record moves using a (your correspondent sometimes suspects deliberately) obscure quasi-mathematical form of notation — a code that you already have to be at least semi-obsessed with the game to even bother trying to make sense of.
It’s unreasonable, I think, to expect a non-chess-obsessed reader to appreciate (or even to invest time in trying to parse) a sentence like, “Fischer plays knight to a4, tearing open the center and overturning white’s entire offensive.”
Here’s that move, by the way, in all its glory — warning, explicit content:
Are you not astonished? Not gasping with delight? Well, if you don’t play a lot of chess, that’s understandable. Maybe it sounds to you like these froth-lipped commentators are taking just the tiniest bit of poetic license when they describe what’s visibly happening on the board… which seems to be that a little piece has moved to a different square, which is pretty much what happens every move.
Nothing appears to be “torn open” in the above image. Nothing is obviously “threatening” about it, either, to a non-chess-obsessed person, who may not even know, or care to check, which square a4 is — much less think five moves ahead to see how this single move transforms the entire game.
But it does. Transform the game, I mean. So utterly and ruthlessly that “a murmur ran through the tournament room” the instant 10-year-old Bobby Fischer played it, in 1956's famous “Game of the Century.” And if you played a lot of chess, you could (I promise) easily picture how and why this move tears open the center, in much the same way you can picture how Van Gogh’s Starry Night would look radically different if the moon was torn out.
The difference, I would venture to guess, is that a Starry Night with no moon would signify something very different to you. That single visually minor change would alter the painting’s whole balance; its underlying pattern. You would feel this change not only in an abstract sense, but would experience the change viscerally and tangibly.
That’s the sense in which obsessed chess players feel — yes, quite viscerally feel — moves like Kta4 on the board above. They’re not seeing individual pieces, so much as sensing changes in implications, just as emotionally as you would respond to a suddenly moonless Starry Night.
Now that I’ve given you some sense of the sensory-emotional gap to be bridged here, I’m going to do my best to describe the beauty I see in chess, without trying to make you “see” implications of moves that can take months of study to learn. Instead, I’m going to describe what excites me about the game, in ways that I hope will make you want to play and experience these feelings for yourself.
What exactly do I find so beautiful about chess?
Imagine if there was a perfect language — one in which miscommunication was logically impossible. Philosophers have always dreamed of such a system. The 17th-century thinker Leibniz, for example, set out to convert all known concepts into mathematical symbols, with the aim of ending disagreements that boiled down to interpretation problems. Instead of arguing over the nuances of all those sticky, gooey words, Leibniz dreamed that the super-evolved intellects of the future would meet peaceably over pen and paper, saying simply, “Come — let us calculate together.”
And while Leibniz never realized his Vulcan ideal of purely logical communication, a chessboard isn’t a bad approximation of his dream. The game’s rules of play are always the same, for every game — and have always been the same, for all the centuries of modern (and even premodern) chess. Pawns don’t suddenly gain the ability to move ten squares when a new president gets elected. The conditions of checkmate don’t change when a country goes to war. Every chessboard is, in a sense, the same chessboard as every other. Gambits that worked in the 1600s are still regularly played today. Players still win and lose according to the same rules they always have.
And yet, those rules set the boundaries on a world of nearly infinite variability. Chess is the only system I can think of that is so simple, and yet so complex, that it enables a 10-year-old Nigerian schoolgirl and a 70-year-old Kyrgyzstani herdsman to meet on equal intellectual footing; to interact with one another’s logic and understanding in meaningful, interesting ways — without the need for words, or shared cultural paradigms, or any common expertise at all, really, beyond knowledge of a rule-set so simple that any kindergartner can learn it in an afternoon.
In fact, memorizing too much theory confers less of an advantage than simply being interested in the game, approaching it as a delightful series of interlocking puzzles. I’ve noticed that non-chess-obsessed people tend to assume Grandmaster-level play is all about “theory” moves with flamboyant names like “The Calabrese Countergambit” and “The Tarrasch Defense, Prague Variation.” This is only true to a very limited extent.
While many players do memorize a lot of opening theory, the really great ones (like the famous Bobby Fischer, and the current world champion Magnus Carlsen) have always been more interested in getting past the opening, into the pure chess of the middlegame: a labyrinth of configurations that have rarely (if ever) been seen before —that test both players’ ability to maneuver the laws of abstract geometric logic to their own advantage.
Now here’s the point where most writers begin to rhapsodize: chess is a meeting of minds on a higher Platonic plane; it’s the closest that non-mathematicians will ever get to the frisson of a perfect equation; the nearest most mortals will ever come to grasping the capital-I Infinite; and oh Lord have mercy, can you believe that mad genius Fischer played bishop to e6?!
Look at this board and see if you can see physically believe this Picasso brushstroke of a move:
No? It’s probably my fault — or, more precisely, the fault of my choosing to use words to show you a kind of beauty that words are very poorly suited to convey. Words can’t really make you feel the beauty of Be6 in that position, any more than they can make you feel each minuscule movement of Mohammed Ali as he feints left at the last instant, absorbing just enough of the opponent’s right hook to land the final K.O. uppercut. The uppercut is easy to appreciate, for its own sake. The micro-adjustments that set it up, on the other hand… those have to be felt, in sinew and bone, the way a painter feels (without really thinking about) every brushstroke in the night sky.
And this, I think, is the point where verbal communication about chess finally, inevitably breaks down. The only way to show you the beating heart of what I feel is through the chessboard itself: the sole medium capable of encoding the message I’m trying so hard to transmit through these words.
Spend time at the chessboard, and these arcane cyphers will begin to yield up their secrets. Through countless repetitions of the same positions, you (the nascently obsessed player) will begin to feel what makes certain variations work. Certain moves will start to feel better than others. More beautiful. You will, in time, begin to feel what they mean.
And then one day, you will checkmate a 1200-ranked player out of the absolute blue with a juggernaut knight-bishop combo, and you will physically stand up and cheer — not because you won, but because you created something extraordinary. You will click back through the moves and replay them again and again, smiling and perhaps even audibly squealing with delight as your pieces float like butterflies and sting like bees.
You will yearn to share this beautiful creation with the people you love, as you’d want to share a painting or song you’d brought into the world. But when you try to translate the thing into words, all you’ll be able to do is rave, “Knight to c7, then king to c6!” — as if you’ve contracted some exotic strain of Tourette’s — and you will realize with despair, that no, they can’t see. They will never see, because when they gaze upon the work over which you’ve sweated and bled and wept these past weeks, all they see is this:
So you’ll go back to the board, and you’ll start up a new match with a 70-year-old stranger from Kyrgyzstan. He will understand. He will see the beauty.
And without a word, you’ll say, “Come — let us calculate together.”
