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CHESS IS A WONDERFUL GAME, BUT IT'S NO LIFE COACH
Stephen Moss
Spain is making chess compulsory in schools but even as an avid player,
I can't quite endorse the lofty claims made for it Eight-year-old
David Ayrapetyan plays a game of chess at school in Yerevan, Armenia,
after the country made chess mandatory in schools.
Photograph: Tigran Mehrabyan/AP
Contact author
@StephenMossGdn
Tuesday 17 February 2015 11.27 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 17 February
2015 11.50 GMT
Chess is to be made a compulsory subject in Spanish schools. There is
cross-party agreement that the move is a good one, with the Socialist
party MP who proposed it claiming the game "improves memory and
strategic capacity, teaches students to make decisions under high
pressure and develops concentration".
Spain will not be the first country to build chess into the
curriculum. Armenia long ago made it a core subject, with startling
results for its national chess strength - they have won three of the
past five Olympiads, an amazing result for so small a nation pitted
against the might of chess superpowers such as Russia, China and
the US.
Former world champion Garry Kasparov wrote a book, How Life Imitates
Chess, arguing that chess is an "ideal instrument" for developing
effective decision-making. "What am I lacking? What are my strengths?
What types of challenges do I tend to avoid and why?" These are the
questions you have to answer in life, as in chess, he insisted. We
will for the moment ignore the fact that Kasparov has largely failed
to transfer his chess genius to the greater (and far more dangerous)
game of Russian politics.
Jonathan Rowson, the former British champion and an immensely
thoughtful writer on chess (and much else besides), has gone even
further than Kasparov, describing chess as the rock on which he
founded his early life. "I don't want to pour out too much of my soul,"
he wrote in his column (now sadly defunct) in the Herald newspaper,
"but things happened in my childhood that I was too young to make
sense of at the time, and recently it has become clear to me just
how essential chess was to my survival. Sublimation is the technical
psychological term. Chess gave me a way to channel difficult emotions
into something creative and constructive."
The forerunner of all this chess-for-life thinking was the 18th-century
American writer, inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin, a keen
(though by all accounts not very capable) player, who in his essay The
Morals of Chess argued that the game was good for the soul. "Chess
is not merely an idle amusement," he wrote. "Several very valuable
qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to
be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on
all occasions. For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often
points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and
in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are,
in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it."
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anatoly Karpov, left, defending world chess
champion, and challenger Garry Kasparov, both of the Soviet Union,
at the World Chess finals in Moscow, 1984. Photograph: Anonymous/AP
Plenty of distinguished observers have, however, reached the opposite
conclusion, contending that chess, a quietly vicious game in which you
are trying to obliterate your opponent, can produce monsters. Mostly,
they were thinking about Bobby Fischer, the American genius who quit
school at 16 to concentrate on chess and became world champion at 29.
"Chess is war over the board," said Fischer. "The object is to crush
the opponent's mind. I like the moment when I break a man's ego."
These are not pleasant lessons, yet they created a player who has
claims to be called the greatest of all time.
Arthur Koestler, who admitted he was a "passionate duffer" where
chess was concerned, reported for the Sunday Times on the great match
between Fischer and the then reigning world champion Boris Spassky
in Reykjavik in 1972. He was struck by the double-sidedness of chess,
calling it the "perfect paradigm for both the glory and the bloodiness
of the human mind".
George Steiner was in Reykjavik, too, covering the match for the
New Yorker. His verdict was even less generous than Koestler's. Not
content merely to conclude that chess was ultimately pointless, he
argued that devoting one's formidable mental attributes to a pastime
was almost guaranteed to lead to insanity. "A chess genius is a human
being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labours on
an ultimately trivial human enterprise," he wrote. "Almost inevitably,
this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and
unreality." The irascible, unpredictable, at times out-of-control
Fischer was of course uppermost in his mind.
I have been studying chess (and chess players) for the past three
years, for a book to be published in 2016. I can see both points of
view. The game does force you to think, analyse, rationalise, apply
logic. But it also drives you a little bit crazy. The deeper you go
into it, the more you realise your limitations. The "truth", as chess
players like to term it, of a position is all too often elusive. After
playing a game (especially if I lose), I will sometimes lie awake in
bed for hours playing through the game in my head. The pain of chess
generally outweighs the pleasure.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bobby Fischer at the US chess championship
tournament in New York in 1965. Photograph: JK/AP
Many claims are made for chess - that it is art, science and sport all
rolled into one. Well, maybe. We players who devote thousands of hours
to it have to believe we are engaged in some higher endeavour. But
again I'm not sure it's really true. I like it mainly because it's
a glorious waste of time, a way of cocking a snook at the workaday
world. Some chess professionals in the UK get by on £12,000 a year
- grandmasters earning less for creating beautiful games than they
would make stacking shelves. But they reason that they are beating
the system. Many chess players are loners, outsiders, rebels. The
board is their world; the place they are most at home.
For me the Dutch grandmaster and chess columnist Hein Donner -
the model for the character of Onno Quist in Harry Mulisch's novel
The Discovery of Heaven - came closest to getting to the essence
(or perhaps non-essence) of chess. He addressed the art v game,
profound endeavour v complete waste of time question in a column
published in 1959. "A chess player produces nothing, creates nothing,"
Donner concluded in his usual emphatic style. "He only has one aim:
the destruction of his opponent."
Chess, Donner insisted, is a struggle, a fight to the death. "When
one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can
at last begin to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the
moment when, among masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is
not art. No, chess cannot be compared with anything. Many things can
be compared with chess, but chess is only chess." A wonderful game,
but a most peculiar preparation for life, whatever Benjamin Franklin,
Garry Kasparov and Spanish parliamentarians might tell you.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/chess-wonderful-game-peculiar-life-spain-schools
Stephen Moss
Spain is making chess compulsory in schools but even as an avid player,
I can't quite endorse the lofty claims made for it Eight-year-old
David Ayrapetyan plays a game of chess at school in Yerevan, Armenia,
after the country made chess mandatory in schools.
Photograph: Tigran Mehrabyan/AP
Contact author
@StephenMossGdn
Tuesday 17 February 2015 11.27 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 17 February
2015 11.50 GMT
Chess is to be made a compulsory subject in Spanish schools. There is
cross-party agreement that the move is a good one, with the Socialist
party MP who proposed it claiming the game "improves memory and
strategic capacity, teaches students to make decisions under high
pressure and develops concentration".
Spain will not be the first country to build chess into the
curriculum. Armenia long ago made it a core subject, with startling
results for its national chess strength - they have won three of the
past five Olympiads, an amazing result for so small a nation pitted
against the might of chess superpowers such as Russia, China and
the US.
Former world champion Garry Kasparov wrote a book, How Life Imitates
Chess, arguing that chess is an "ideal instrument" for developing
effective decision-making. "What am I lacking? What are my strengths?
What types of challenges do I tend to avoid and why?" These are the
questions you have to answer in life, as in chess, he insisted. We
will for the moment ignore the fact that Kasparov has largely failed
to transfer his chess genius to the greater (and far more dangerous)
game of Russian politics.
Jonathan Rowson, the former British champion and an immensely
thoughtful writer on chess (and much else besides), has gone even
further than Kasparov, describing chess as the rock on which he
founded his early life. "I don't want to pour out too much of my soul,"
he wrote in his column (now sadly defunct) in the Herald newspaper,
"but things happened in my childhood that I was too young to make
sense of at the time, and recently it has become clear to me just
how essential chess was to my survival. Sublimation is the technical
psychological term. Chess gave me a way to channel difficult emotions
into something creative and constructive."
The forerunner of all this chess-for-life thinking was the 18th-century
American writer, inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin, a keen
(though by all accounts not very capable) player, who in his essay The
Morals of Chess argued that the game was good for the soul. "Chess
is not merely an idle amusement," he wrote. "Several very valuable
qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to
be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on
all occasions. For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often
points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and
in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are,
in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it."
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anatoly Karpov, left, defending world chess
champion, and challenger Garry Kasparov, both of the Soviet Union,
at the World Chess finals in Moscow, 1984. Photograph: Anonymous/AP
Plenty of distinguished observers have, however, reached the opposite
conclusion, contending that chess, a quietly vicious game in which you
are trying to obliterate your opponent, can produce monsters. Mostly,
they were thinking about Bobby Fischer, the American genius who quit
school at 16 to concentrate on chess and became world champion at 29.
"Chess is war over the board," said Fischer. "The object is to crush
the opponent's mind. I like the moment when I break a man's ego."
These are not pleasant lessons, yet they created a player who has
claims to be called the greatest of all time.
Arthur Koestler, who admitted he was a "passionate duffer" where
chess was concerned, reported for the Sunday Times on the great match
between Fischer and the then reigning world champion Boris Spassky
in Reykjavik in 1972. He was struck by the double-sidedness of chess,
calling it the "perfect paradigm for both the glory and the bloodiness
of the human mind".
George Steiner was in Reykjavik, too, covering the match for the
New Yorker. His verdict was even less generous than Koestler's. Not
content merely to conclude that chess was ultimately pointless, he
argued that devoting one's formidable mental attributes to a pastime
was almost guaranteed to lead to insanity. "A chess genius is a human
being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labours on
an ultimately trivial human enterprise," he wrote. "Almost inevitably,
this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and
unreality." The irascible, unpredictable, at times out-of-control
Fischer was of course uppermost in his mind.
I have been studying chess (and chess players) for the past three
years, for a book to be published in 2016. I can see both points of
view. The game does force you to think, analyse, rationalise, apply
logic. But it also drives you a little bit crazy. The deeper you go
into it, the more you realise your limitations. The "truth", as chess
players like to term it, of a position is all too often elusive. After
playing a game (especially if I lose), I will sometimes lie awake in
bed for hours playing through the game in my head. The pain of chess
generally outweighs the pleasure.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bobby Fischer at the US chess championship
tournament in New York in 1965. Photograph: JK/AP
Many claims are made for chess - that it is art, science and sport all
rolled into one. Well, maybe. We players who devote thousands of hours
to it have to believe we are engaged in some higher endeavour. But
again I'm not sure it's really true. I like it mainly because it's
a glorious waste of time, a way of cocking a snook at the workaday
world. Some chess professionals in the UK get by on £12,000 a year
- grandmasters earning less for creating beautiful games than they
would make stacking shelves. But they reason that they are beating
the system. Many chess players are loners, outsiders, rebels. The
board is their world; the place they are most at home.
For me the Dutch grandmaster and chess columnist Hein Donner -
the model for the character of Onno Quist in Harry Mulisch's novel
The Discovery of Heaven - came closest to getting to the essence
(or perhaps non-essence) of chess. He addressed the art v game,
profound endeavour v complete waste of time question in a column
published in 1959. "A chess player produces nothing, creates nothing,"
Donner concluded in his usual emphatic style. "He only has one aim:
the destruction of his opponent."
Chess, Donner insisted, is a struggle, a fight to the death. "When
one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can
at last begin to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the
moment when, among masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is
not art. No, chess cannot be compared with anything. Many things can
be compared with chess, but chess is only chess." A wonderful game,
but a most peculiar preparation for life, whatever Benjamin Franklin,
Garry Kasparov and Spanish parliamentarians might tell you.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/chess-wonderful-game-peculiar-life-spain-schools