What is Chess?

Can we have a thoughtful discussion on the topic “What is Chess”. I would like to hear members thoughts on the value of chess, joy of chess, and place of Chess in society. I would really like no limits - except as much as possible, lets leave Chess Politics completely out of the discussion.

Historically, what has been said about chess? What are your original thoughts on chess? I’ll stop for now and see if this goes anywhere. I would really like to hear from some of you thinkers out there.

Wrong forum. Try “All Things Chess.”

This is a topic for the All Things Chess forum. The overall topic of this forum is “USCF Issues”.

I have no real problem with this, although one could believe that a deeper understanding of “What is Chess” might be a USCF ISSUE. An understanding or misunderstanding of this “truth” might be the root cause of “issues” and of what some consider important or irrelevant. Just a thought? If a MOD believes this more appropriate to “All things Chess”, So Be It.

BTW… Candidates, it might really be interesting to hear your thoughts on this, at least to me, it might be interesting.

Agree that it belongs in All Things Chess but also agree that it might be a refreshing change from hearing candidates’ and others’ views on discovery motions.

Many people dismiss Chess as just another board game. But it is among a select few “board games” that does not have the element of chance in it. It is most definitely a game of skill, logic, reasoning, problem-solving, and a host of other terms. Question to all you players: Do you usually feel like your brain is “sharper” after a serious chess game? I have noticed that generally, unless very fatigued, that I seem to be more aware of my surroundings and things happening around me, like after having a double shot of espresso or gingko or something. My focus sharpens in general. Anyone else experience something like that?

Chess is the Game of Kings, that Paupers are allowed by the “powers” that be, to play. It is a Gentle person’s game, but all that play it are not gentle persons. If you have the truest spirit of the game, you will learn more from a loss than a win. It “should” always relax, and be a source of enjoyment.
And if not careful, it could drive you to some stage of insanity. Just my take on it.

All very true. And I make a new friend after a tough game, win, lose, or draw.

I know that it can be a great icebreaker between people of dissimilar backgrounds (“Oh, I see that you play…”).

However, it also seems that amongst a broad swath of the population here in the U.S. that you practically have to be ‘in the closet’ about playing the game or you could become the butt of jokes, since there is the ‘nerdy’ reputation of the game. Thankfully, nowadays I’m past the age of worrying too much about that sort of thing.

Besides being a pleasant game in and of itself, chess also helps to grease my thinking in other completely unrelated areas by providing a way of assessing a situation and asking questions.

There’s my 1/2 cent’s worth.

To me, chess has many meanings, and allows me to enjoy it at many levels. It reminds me of Christmas, and my father, who showed my brother and me the moves just before he headed back to Vietnam. The winter days and nights revolved around my brother and I constantly battling each other. It was a game that was cheap, and a new set came our way every year, and often with mixed pieces from our littlest brother, who liked to chew them. As we moved country to country, it was the odd local set, and then the collector sets. It was an early MCO, like a later day spell book, to memorize lines to spring our friends and family. It was being able to play a game in a foreign country, not speaking much of the language, but able to still play together. It was a babysitter, in the white outs in the northern most tip of Hokkaido, unable to go outside or even to school, with only 3 hours of TV a day, and boy did we need a clock back then. To me it let me be a part of a new school, where the German Language club was the chess and strategy game club, and a diversion from the Panzer Blitz, Stalingrad and similar games that were disturbing to me spending 4 years in Berlin, and seeing actual concentration camps, that disturb me to this day. It brought me some of my closest friends, who I met on a chance visit to the library on a day they met. I returned to the game, became active, and a tournament director and organizer. It gave me solace when my Dad passed away and again when I went through a divorce. It let me help children at risk, who were far from home in a strange city, and let me help them see there was a better way. It let me help seniors and their grandchildren, with both chess lessons to both, and then with the help of my daughters and their friends help with school work. Most of all, it taught me the right way to compete, and as a former football player, it brought about a better perspective on both winning and losing, and help others on proper behavior. It gave me a better idea on planning, implementing a plan, and structured studying, which I admit helps me more away from chess than my actual playing reflects. It helps me give back when I have been truly blessed, and it keeps me humble, of which I am reminded every time I play in a tournament.

Definitely not. Are you sure it’s chess you’ve been playing?

When I was young I used to hallucinate after a tough day of chess. My brain adapted so that doesn’t happen anymore, but now my body is giving out. Recently after only the 2nd round of a g/20 tournament, I had to take 5 and walk up and down the hall, trying to get my heartrate back to normal. Lots of adults are made woozy by a tough slow game, two games a day is just brutal, and you can observe it as they walk in a daze out of the tournament hall. I have a friend who was pulled over once for driving erratically. He had a real hard time convincing the officer that he was only under the influence of a chess tournament.

Well that’s the fatigue factor. Two tough games a day was tolerable, 3 wore me out, even in my younger days. But often times, after a single good game on a Friday evening at our monthly chess league, driving home I felt unusually focused and aware. Sometimes that feeling would spill over into the next day.

To approach the question scientifically, the first step would be to group things into Chess and NotChess. Then we find the common features of the Chess group to come up with a first approximation. Later, refinement of the answer might lead us to remove something from the initial list. For example, I remember learning in school that a Panda was not a bear, but a cousin of the raccoon. That’s not the view today.

I tend to take a very broad view, and consider all these things as Chess:
Go (Weiqi)
Chinese Chess (Xiangqi)
Western Chess (Chess)
Japanese Chess (Shogi)
Checkers (Draughts)
Gomoku
Tic-Tac-Toe

Since I include Tic-Tac-Toe in the list, there would obviously be many other things that I would include. These are just the ones that I could list off the top of my head. To make the list non-controversial (!) I picked only board games.

Here is what I find they have in common:
Two player.
Zero sum.
Turn-based.
Finite.
No random element in the turn.
Abstract positional objective.

That last one is interesting. Maybe it’s just my own delusion. Go definitely has an abstract positional objective (control of space), as does Tic-Tac-Toe. At first I wanted to say that Checkers does not (and thus remove it from the list), because the primary objective, capture of all the enemy men, is not abstract at all but just an extension of the capture of a single man. Well, the same argument could apply to Western Chess, that checkmate is a very weak abstraction of check. It would be puzzling indeed to say that Go and Tic-Tac-Toe are Chess, while Western Chess is NotChess. (I actually don’t know enough about Chinese or Japanese Chess to say where they fit here. As I said, this list was off the top of my head.) Upon further reflection, though, I think Checkers is saved by its second objective, taking away all the enemy’s moves. And I think Western Chess is saved by the notion of stalemate.

Suppose you (not me) consider that Tic-Tac-Toe, Gomoku and Go don’t belong in the Chess group, but are NotChess. Fine. Now you might add to the list of common elements:
Fixed starting array.
Adding Fischer-Random or 960 to the group might change the list again. Or maybe you consider it important that some of the Chess-pieces have different movements. And so on. Start with the broad features and make it more exact, until you have a pretty good working definition of Chess.

Anyway, all this is just preliminary to what I consider a much more interesting question. Why is Western Chess the best form of Chess? (You might pose the question differently: Why is Chess better than those other NotChess games?) I consider Western Chess best not because I like it best, which is probably just accidental, but because so many other people on the planet like it best. Which may also be accidental, but somehow I think not. The wisdom of crowds.

I think it builds a world community, and the resources needed are very small to enjoy. It is the learning of the game, and for most a challenge to master. It recognizes the hard work and talent of those that succeed, and also values the effort of those that lose.

All true! However, I don’t believe any of that will explain why a kindergartner takes to chess so readily.

I think that it is about complexity (of course, I studied Computer Science, so I
would say that :slight_smile: ).

Here’s what is attractive about the game of chess:

  • The rules are simple to learn, so anyone can play
  • But these simple rules lead to a game that is so complex that no one can
    master it completely (not even the supercomputers, at least not yet)
  • It is a competitive struggle between the two players, so it appeals to our
    fighting instincts.

The game of Go also has these attributes, and the rules for Go are even
simpler, although they are strangely ill-defined. Chess and Go also both
seem to appeal to our sense of space.

Jim

Chess is life.
It can help us answer the deepest questions that we have about our existence and its meaning, if we let it.
By that I mean, in every player’s life, save but for a very few, there comes a time when he or she realizes that they do not have the talent to be a world champion. Or a grandmaster. Or a master. Or maybe even an expert.
Then they have to confront the question that each of us must answer every day when we get up in the morning:
why play?
Why indeed bother? If, in the end, the game, like life, brings with it that impassable barrier beyond which we cannot cross, why do we bother to try?
We must find our own meaning for playing, for getting up, for doing whatever we choose to do.
And that’s the thing:
We are the masters of how we approach any situation. We have total control of our reactions, and to a large extent, we are the masters of our destinies. To be sure, life can circumscribe these choices, much as the chessboard’s 64 squares limits our options. But we can choose to play for space, for initiative, for piece activity; or we can choose to play a more cautious game. It’s all up to us: we can play a la Tal or Nezhmetdinov; we can approach life like all great artists do, or we can settle in for the long siege haunted, in our mind’s eye, by that secret despair that admits itself to no one.
For no matter how our game, or our life, ends, whether it be a slow positional squeeze or a shot from nowhere, we somehow retain and enhance our worth as human beings by simply trying to surpass that which we have done before.
At the end of the day, we learn that our strongest opponent, as well as our greatest source of strength, is ourselves.
We do not have to become the master we had hoped we would be. We do not have to play wish chess, or live life in a fantasy-land, to play well and live well.
We simply have to acknowledge to ourselves that we have no time to waste being anything other than the best we can be at whatever we are being at each singular moment.
And somehow, that resolution makes us better players, and better people; and we can feel fulfilled in each role that we have undertaken as the shadows lengthen and the board grows dim. Our game, like our life, has proven its intrinsic worth; and we can face the setting sun with strength and pride.

I’m with you Brenan, Zen Chess :smiley:

It’s a way to pass the hours.

Chess is fun.