The Pawn's Gambit

Well, I may have mentioned my recent obsession with chess. I used to play post-collegiately a fair amount, but this is a whole different bag.

Chess is not a game. It is a profound mediation, the workings of which encapsulate many if not all aspects of life.

Most important is how utterly humbling it is. I lose all the time. Repeatedly. Daily. Sometimes in catastrophic ways. I can be bitchy and petulant. But I also conquer. I can play with creativity and elegance. I can be a bulldozer. I can be a math nerd. Every aspect of my personality is ultimately revealed, for good or ill.

The deeper you go, the less you know. Which is the main reason the game is so immersive, the levels never end. The knowledge is never complete. The distinctions, variations, and subtlety only become more abstract. The profundity of thought, strategy, concentration, creation, and deep foresight are equivalent to art, music, and sex.

I can tell a lot about a person, playing anonymously online, just by their style of movement, by the strategies they employ, by the obviousness of their tricks, by the perceptivity of their attack.
There is no luck in chess. High-level poker requires incredible skill and math, but perfect play can always be met by a suckout on the river. There is no river in chess, there are only 32 pieces and 64 squares and the geometry of the board and the algebraic interrelationships in their totality.

Chess is not necessarily about intelligence, although it helps--it's about spatial relationships, seeing in dimensions, where nuance meets precision, where aggression and defense are equally valuable, but in the end is an exercise in pure, brute logic. I have been wiped off the board by people who, based on surface appearance, seemed most likely to spend the next ten years sniffing glue. Station, age, gender, appearance, economic strata, ethnicity, and size are irrelevant.

"Can your logic hold up to mine?" is really the only question.

There is no room to hide.

And Brute Logic, which is to say the complete, arid, and devastating lack of it, is why this country is such an absurd and tragicomic mess.

America once respected chess. Bobby Fischer was Michael Jordan. America now makes its living justifying disrespect.

There should be no Senate confirmation hearings for any potential judges or cabinet members. They should have to face the leader of the opposite party in chess.

At the beginning of play, there are 20 possible opening moves for White and 20 for Black, resulting in 400 potential positions. Within three moves, there are over 9 million possibilities. That is not an opinion, or commentary, or a press release - it's pure, irrefutable math.

A few weeks ago I was at a street fair and a guy had a table and a board and a sign that said "$5/Game". It was a warm and busy day, strollers and dogs and food truck eaters streaming about, but no one was playing.

So I walked over and played him. Soon, there was a crowd surrounding us, including three massive cops. It's funny how much people enjoy watching a chess match outdoors, regardless of their relative level of understanding, as long as they don't feel any insistence to play themselves.

It's a very voyeuristic pursuit. And with it comes, at least for me, an intense pressure.

I’ve evolved a lot through middle age, but I’m still not about being dogged in public, yo.

There are a lot of tricks in Street Chess, mainly because it's a hustle like any other hustle, but they all center on distraction. Dudes get performative. Ask unnecessary questions, slam pieces down, talk smack, call out to passersby.

This guy kept up a pretty good patter, but tired after a while when I completely ignored him.

There were feints and parries and bravado, and then there comes a moment in the game, like in every game, when the balance shifts. Logic meets logic, ram’s horns crack together in the Alpine air, and one beast loses its footing, begins to give way.

I assume you're assuming that the only reason I'm typing this is because I walked home with $5.

I did not walk home with $5.

But only because he seemed so embarrassed that I told him to keep it.

It's a tedious cliché, but my heart was pounding all the way home. I tried to be blasé while casually telling my wife, but couldn't, and more and more excitedly described the fateful moves.

Everyone needs a wife who smiles and nods and goes back to what she was doing, having heard all your bullshit before, still loving you for it, but deeply uninterested in contests in any metaphorical ring and having long given up on pretending that not to be the case.

And just like in a game of chess, which contains all of striving humanity, a yawn at individual glory is humbling.

And just like with this species and this country, we all regularly require it.


"Kings & Queens, Boards & Pieces"
Mixed Media on Heavy Linen
44" x 60"