by Sasha Chapin
“Sounds like the Picture of Dorian fuckin’ Gray,” he said, and left the room.
I won the rest of my games, and collected my prize money.
HAVE LESS FUN
Afraid of the crime, about which I’d been cautioned by roughly every resident of St. Louis I’d talked to, I hung around outside the chess club for most of every day. It’s situated in one of the safest pockets of the downtown. This doesn’t mean that it’s totally crime-free—a few weeks after I left, ten people were robbed at gunpoint by the metro station a couple of blocks away. But it’s generally okay. The worst thing that happens, if you hang around the building all day, is you end up developing a habit of playing blitz with the local street chess players.
There’s no precise definition of street chess. Most street chess happens outdoors, in parks around the world, but not all outdoor chess is street chess. It’s sort of a matter of style and attitude. Street players generally play a beautiful kind of nonsense. If they can’t play an aggressive move, they’ll play an absurd move, so you’re always on the run or trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. It’s the kind of foofaraw that grandmasters find laughable but that can terrify and confuse intermediate players. And while this style doesn’t work in serious long games, it’s surprisingly effective in blitz, where verve matters as much as correctness.
They also hone their trash-talking skills as much as their chess. Sometimes these aptitudes can clinch the game, as in my game with Robert, one of the more competent members of the local brigade. I was crushing him, and then he started singing, “Why can’t we be friends? Why can’t we be friends?” in a surprisingly arresting tenor. He sang it over and over again, louder and less tunefully each time, making unbroken eye contact, until he was essentially shouting at me about my insufficient friendliness. Distracted, I lost all my pieces.
But this kind of warfare doesn’t always work out. Another player, Art, told me that he was so named because of the artistic nature of his play, whose intricacies I would never grasp—he could tell, he said, at length, that I was a crude person who would never understand the philosophy that underpinned his moves. Dazzled by the logic of his own pontification, he didn’t notice what I was up to. “Yeah, I guess I just don’t get it,” I said, as I delivered checkmate.
Finegold, who was always coming and going, and who noticed everything, observed that I was having a lot of fun, and that it was translating into my play as a whole. I was becoming sillier and more reckless, both in rated games I played around the club, and in casual games between the two of us. He disapproved.
“Take a look at those guys over there,” he said, during a lesson, pointing to an array of portraits of great players that hung on the far wall.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” I said.
“Tell me who looks like he’s never had fun in his life.”
“Um, Kasparov.”
Garry Kasparov was the top-ranked player in the world for nineteen years, except for a three-month-long slump. And he was famous for his boundless, masochistic work ethic. “Chess is mental torture,” he said. After he won a brilliant game, he’d take his scoresheet home and castigate himself for his inconsequential mistakes.
“Yeah, Kasparov never had any fun. Now, tell me who looks like he’s furious all the time.”
“Bobby Fischer.”
It’s occasionally speculated that Bobby Fischer died a virgin, or remained one well into his adult life. There was nothing on earth for him except chess. As a youth, fatherless and alone, he hunkered down by an old radio, whose music only served as a blanketing noise, a cocoon in which Fischer could curl around chess completely. That picture remained the same as he got older. After winning the World Championship, he departed the chess world, became a raving lunatic, and died in isolation and obscurity in Iceland.
“Yeah, Fischer. That guy didn’t have a lot of fun.”
What he was saying was true. Slow tournament chess, played well, is like violent meditation. The mind is wrenched by an evolving series of parenthetical thoughts, during which the limits of human cognition are directly assaulted. When it’s beautiful, its beauty is deep and austere, and when you’re playing badly, it’s like slowly making out with a cold steel wall. Street chess, meanwhile, is hilarious. It’s junk food. Even when you lose, it’s funny.
“Now,” Finegold said, “you can have fun with blitz games all you want. There are lots of those on the Internet. But you came down here to see me and become a serious student. You flew all the way down from Canada. You didn’t come here to have fun, did you?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you want to learn how to beat good players?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay, good,” Finegold said, “now let’s play some chess, so I can yell at you.”
We played for a half an hour. While telling me how he was about to checkmate me, he texted his wife. Even though he told me what was coming, I couldn’t stop it.
MARRIAGE IS OKAY
In the fitful emptiness that is downtown St. Louis, I was terribly in love with Katherine. Her immediacy in my mind was such that I constantly expected her appearance. When I saw a lengthening shadow, rounding a corner, my pulse momentarily multiplied. And when the shadow’s owner appeared, I became angry, because it was never my girlfriend.
Before I had left town, we had been talking about getting married. As an abstract principle, marriage wasn’t something I had wanted, because, well, there are lots of attractive people in the world, and I haven’t seen them all naked yet. Also, though, losing Katherine was unimaginable, and she was going to marry someone, whether it was me or not. Much as I didn’t want to get married, I also didn’t want her to marry anyone else.
My level of confusion was such that it was affecting my chess. So I asked Finegold, during one of our lessons, whether he enjoyed being married. He and his wife, Karen, were extremely cute together. They balanced each other perfectly. She was a lovely, slow-talking Southern belle, whose genteel manner civilized any room she was in, whereas Finegold was apt to transform any situation into another absurd episode of The Finegold Show. Seeing them apart, it was difficult to picture them together, but when you witnessed their marriage happening in real time, it was weirdly logical. Sometimes Karen and I played blitz while Finegold heckled us. Their happiness captivated me when I was at the club, and when I looked at Facebook every night, I’d usually find a winning selfie they’d posted during the evening.
“It’s okay, it’s better than the alternative,” he said.
“So you would recommend it?”
“Probably, yeah. I mean, I’m the kind of guy who needs a woman, and I think you are, too. Like, I don’t know what I’d do without my wife. Kill people, probably.”
“But what if it doesn’t work out?”
“Then you get divorced.”
“Is it worth it?”
“Well, my current wife is the least annoying of all of my wives. So, I don’t know, I guess it worked out.”
I decided that maybe I should marry Katherine, eventually.
YOU‘RE EXACTLY AS GOOD AS YOU ARE
There’s one important, basic attribute of chess that I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s something I’ve always found exciting, but that also has frightening implications for the aspiring player. It’s that chess is what they call a perfect information game. At every moment, you are informed of everything taking place, unlike in a game like, say, poker, where you’re always at the mercy of an improbable card.
That notion might not immediately tantalize you. It might do the opposite, given that much of our entertainment is buoyed by cheap mystery. We’re willing to watch hours of reality television to find out which of twenty-six people we don’t care about is selected as a mate by another person we’re equally unconcerned with. But before you dismiss the idea that perfect information can be an alluring quality, consider all the imperfect information games you play all the time. I don’t only mean games like poker. I mean like t
he exhausting vagaries of interacting with anyone at all.
Let me give you an example. One day, in the rain, when I was in university, I offered a soaking person the shelter of my umbrella. As she said yes, I discovered that she was gorgeous. Her blue eyes met mine in pretty little moments as we went down the narrow street together, talking about very little but finding it somehow very funny. Being a more romantic person when I was nineteen, my imagination immediately overwhelmed me. Involuntarily, I was filled with theories about what kind of smile she’d smile on my pillow. All down the street, I heard in my head the words I knew she’d say after I suggested we might get married, playing out in parallel with our conversation. That afternoon’s rain was a sunny one—her face shone in the orange early evening light. The air was sweetly musty, the kind of air I could happily breathe forever. Though it wasn’t clear that my life needed saving, or what that would entail, I knew that she would do it.
So I gave her my number. She took it. She seemed enthusiastic about contacting me. Later that night, her boyfriend phoned me up. He was wondering whether I’d like to receive violence through a gun or a knife.
As cartoonish an anecdote as that is, I feel it’s representative of a lot of human experience. Our lives are dominated by unknown elements—whether a stranger in the rain has a boyfriend, or who else has applied for your dream job, or how volatile the stock market is. And we try to make the best decisions we can, based on the information we know, but it often turns out that we know approximately fuck-all. Everything is dominated by randomness, and by accumulations of unseen factors. Like the dinosaurs, we rule our little kingdoms until a meteor shows up and unseats us.
Look beyond your daily routine and you’ll find many frightening, unanswerable questions. Do you think your friends truly love you? What would happen if you took a right turn at the end of the road? If you had kids, would they be ugly? Would they treasure you, as you grew elderly, your skin taking on the texture of an old balloon? What will you die of? Is there anything capable of filling that tiny gap in life?
Much of the human world presents vast swathes of ignorance briefly penetrated by tiny hopeful suspicions. Chess, on the other hand, is a perfect information game. To me, those three words sound like a prayer. The only mystery is how artfully you can process the clear sober facts that are easily ascertained in one sweep of the eyes. While it’s impossible to figure out how your life decomposed to its current state, it’s very easy, in retrospect, to see how a chess game went wrong.
So, what are the frightening implications? Well, the perfect information of chess means you can’t blame anything for your failure other than you. You had all the data required to make great moves. And then you did what you did, which is, in my case, usually not so great. That means you have to accept who you are, on the chessboard—you can’t blame chance or circumstance.
But as Finegold told me in one of my first lessons, almost nobody engages in this self-acceptance.
“Everyone thinks they’re better than they are. Everyone thinks they’re underrated. Every game, they think they played badly because they were just in a bad mood, or their opponent got lucky and picked the right move. But it’s not true. If your rating is 1200, that’s probably where you belong. And you’ll only improve when you stop making excuses. If your mood is really the problem, then it’s not a good excuse—it just means you need to improve your mood. When you realize how bad a player you are, you can focus on the real problems in how you’re playing. Being a winner starts when you realize what a loser you are.”
WHAT CHESS IS NOT
There was a child I hated, and I was playing him in one round of a weekly Wednesday tournament. I didn’t hate him for any good reason. He seemed nice enough. But I felt a true and prismatic contempt, in which every one of his visible characteristics disgusted me. He was somehow the avatar of every struggle I’d ever faced in my life—both the trivial inconveniences and the sorrow like acid spilled under my skin.
He was playing boring chess. So was I, and the board was all locked up by opposing pawns smushed together. It was a pile of gluey slop. My rage intensified when he refused to be courteous and lose the game immediately even though he had a much lower rating than I did. This is not a good mindset with which to approach the game of chess. I gave up a pawn, and then transitioned into a losing endgame, which I lost.
At my next lesson, I explained my emotional turmoil to Finegold. He was having none of it.
“Your emotions are irrelevant,” he said. “You can’t stop protecting your pawns because you’re sad. Chess isn’t one of those crazy stories that you sell to a magazine. You’re not a hero; your opponent isn’t the villain.”
“It’s hard for me to not think like that. It’s kind of who I am,” I said.
“Well, then don’t be yourself.”
NEVER SACRIFICE
Nothing thrills the chess player like the opportunity to play a sacrifice. The prospect makes grown people giggle and drool like toddlers. It renews the weary heart and makes life seem worthwhile. A sacrifice, in case you’ve forgotten, is when you give away a piece, either for another, less powerful piece, or for no pieces at all. It’s usually done to launch an attack—maybe you rip open the pawns in front of the enemy king by slicing one away with a bishop.
Sacrifices are so appealing because they’re as close as you get, on the chessboard, to putting on a gasoline-soaked bear suit, climbing on a motorcycle, and jumping it through a ring of fire while ten thousand people are watching. Sacrifices are always a provocative stunt. After you sacrifice, either you achieve a brilliant victory or your bravery is proven silly. But beyond simply being provocative, the sacrifice exemplifies one of the loveliest truths of the chessboard: that it’s a big world in there. Since there are so many possible chess games, there are many in which the most elementary principles of chess have been inverted, such that a humble pawn could be worth more than a usually superior queen, or even two or three queens.
You may have gotten a sense of chess’s immensity by this point, but it’s probably more immense than you think. It’s a mathematically proven fact that there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. In fact, many more. If you add up every sequence of moves that could legally be played on a chessboard, you could assign a couple of billion chess games to every single atom. Admittedly, though, this number would then include lots of silly moves that no sane player would ever make. If you restricted the count to reasonable games of chess, according to the estimate of mathematician James Grimes, you would end up with a mere 10^40—enough that it would take the entire population of earth trillions of years to play them all, if we all paired off and played a game a day each. Of course, in a couple of those, a sacrifice makes sense.
Not all sacrifices are made equal. Some sacrifices, called “unsound sacrifices,” merely create a superficial chaos that can be dispelled by prudent play. But sometimes unsound sacrifices work, too, if you can navigate your way out of the complexities they create better than your opponent can. This was the go-to tactic of former World Champion Mikhail Tal, also known as the Magician from Riga, who just couldn’t stop giving his pieces away. That was his whole style—he was always looking for an opportunity to sow chaos by removing one of his own pieces from the board. He once said, “You must take your opponent into a deep, dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.” Every chess player loves Tal for his daring, and tries, at some point, to imitate his venturesome style.
“Tal was good,” Finegold said. “Tal could sacrifice. But you can’t. You’re not good enough.”
“Probably not.”
“Definitely not. When you sacrifice, you lose. Never sacrifice.”
NEVER PLAY F3
Most of the time, it’s not a good move.
EVERYBODY HAS A PLAN UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE FACE
“What did I tell you last lesson?”
“Never play f3.”
“And what did yo
u do yesterday?”
“Um.”
“You fucking played f3!”
I’d played f3 in a tournament the day before, against Aleksey Kazakevich, a far superior opponent, rated about 1900. It was one of my best games. The whole thing resembled a drawn sumo match—we fell all over each other, creating one violent, sloshy hug, canceling each other’s aggression. The game ended in a draw. After the game, his son confronted him at the board.
“Why did you play for a draw, Dad?”
“I didn’t play for a draw. He just made no mistakes.”
Hearing this made me feel good about myself. But Finegold was not stunned by my game.
“Sure, you played good,” he said, “but your position was better than his, and maybe you could’ve won. And then you fucking played f3!”
“Yeah.”
“But, okay, you didn’t lose your pieces. Good job. Very good. Let’s talk about the next game, with Matt Barrett. I saw that game. I was disappointed, because you had a decent position, and then what did you do?”
“I played a sacrifice.”
“You played a fucking sacrifice! What was my rule?”
“Never sacrifice.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you lost.”
“Yes.”
“This is my life. People pay me to tell them things, and then I tell them, and they don’t listen. Even my wife. Every game she gets into time trouble. And I’m like, play faster! And she’s like, okay. And then she sits there, staring at her pieces.”
He sighed loudly and talked about his wife for a little while, and then started talking about me again.
“Look. I’m an idiot, too, okay? It’s hard. Before the game, you have this idea about how you’re a great player. And then you get in there, and you’re a sweaty mess, and you’re nervous, and you forget everything you know. You know what Mike Tyson said?”