Getting Back in With Chess

617 words

Learning Chess

You don't really stop learning chess, it's a game that is quite easy to play, but really hard to play well. In theory, each piece moves in a certain way with minor exceptions, and you just need to build on those to make strategies and plays to trap, outsmart and beat your opponent. I learned how to play chess when I was about 6 or 7 at a chess club at school. My best friend and I would go every week and play against each other and our friends, and we thought we were great because we had to think really hard to beat each other.

Obviously, we weren't both prodigies, but we did help each other improve. It can be really good to compete with a friend who is also a novice so you drive each other forwards, sharing things, enjoying each other's strengths, and outsmarting them because you just worked something new out and wanted to try it out.

Once for a chess club event at university, we had some refugees from Syria come in and we taught them how to play chess. That was easier said than done because their English wasn't great and my Arabic was non-existent, but we managed to get the concepts across and I refereed a match between two people, occasionally having to explain that the pawn moves forward but takes diagonally, you can't move your king into check etc, so that was fun.

The thing I hadn't really taken into account though, is that these people doing chess for the first time just didn't know what they were doing. Obviously, they weren't stupid, but it struck me that it is actually quite a complicated game, and you can't really teach a whole group the absolute basics with no common language in half an hour like you might be able to do with noughts and crosses.

Boom and bust

For a lot of things in my life, I tend to fixate on something for a while and then move on to something else and come back to it later on. I've done it with guitar, gym, a fair few games, books and more. It's great because I get deep into things and it only takes a bit of warming up to be back to how you were before.

I'm not an excellent chess player, my problem is that I don't end up thinking too hard and using my full concentration on the game, but I do end up learning new skills, tactics and more when I come back to it. I have a few friends who I play with occasionally so it's always nice to connect and play some chess.

Sticking with something can be hard, but the reward is the continued improvement you get in it. I realised that having gone to the gym consistently for a few months I am stronger, fitter, and find life in general easier to deal with. Playing chess is like a gym for the brain. I know that the chip in my phone can absolutely destroy any living person at chess but a lot of the concepts that apply to chess can apply to real life. Are you an aggressive player, impatient or a risk-taker? Do you prefer to build a strong defence? Do you enjoy games with predictable moves more than one with a wildcard?

The lessons

If you can concentrate hard on a chess game, you can concentrate hard on most logical problems. Funnily enough, as a programmer, I get a fair few hard logical problems, so hopefully there's a bit of overlap where I can think further ahead with coding and find interesting procedures in chess games that I can learn from.

Maybe, who knows