Play to Learn: Chess
Hi, welcome to the “Play to Learn” blog series! This is a series where I go through games that I have played and explore life lessons that can be taken from them. The previous post was on card games, check it out here.
Intro
Chess is a game with a long history… which I'm not going to get into, haha. Instead, I'll get into my own history with chess. Once upon-a-time, when I was in elementary school, my dad taught me how to play chess. We had this wooden chess board that you can fold like a hollow book to store the chess pieces inside. I was intrigued by the game for about few days, then after that I didn't really paid attention to it. I knew how the pieces move, what is a check, and what is a checkmate, and that was about it.
Fast forward to my high school years, I started playing chess again on my phone. In between breaks in cram school, I would play with a friend on one phone, passing the phone between us. I don't remember how well we played, how many times we beat each other, or anything like that. It was really just to pass some time.
Fast forward again to my current job, I started playing chess again because our CEO was really into chess. We would have chess games during lunch time, which can actually be quite competitive at times. We used a proper chess clock and we also analysed the games afterwards. I learned a lot about chess by playing, spectating, and analysing the games. I even learned one opening, the London System. As a beginner at chess, it was a big step forward.
Around the same time, chess grew huge on the internet. Hikaru Nakamura, a grandmaster from the US, streamed online chess games on Twitch. Not only that he is extremely good at chess, he is also great at articulating his fast and accurate calculations, which produced many viral clips. Other Twitch streamers started playing chess, even beginners, and it started the rise of chess in the online video game community.
On top of that, around the same time, Netflix released a series called The Queen's Gambit, which tells a story of an amazing chess player that ends up in the highest level of chess. I don't want to spoil anything for people who haven't seen it, but it was a really engaging show! It continued the momentum of chess' popularity.
From there, other than playing some games at the office, I also started playing online games on lichess.com. I quite enjoy playing the faster time controls, like 2 minutes with 1 second increments (written as 2+1). The increment here means that each player gets 1 extra second every turn. It's a very speedy type of chess. As I am a low level beginner, the games would go very chaotic with many mistakes from both me and my opponent. I must say that while I enjoy it, perhaps it's not the best way to learn chess. However, it actually helped me learn the time management aspect of chess. More on that later.
Being a game that requires deep thinking and has lots of small nuances, I believe there are many life lessons that we can take from playing chess. In this post, I want to share a few that I've noticed and experienced. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's a list of the ones that I found interesting. Disclaimer, since I'm a beginner, it is probably skewed to the way beginners look at the game. With that in mind, let's dive into it!
Chess takes a lot of stamina
As I played more chess games, I realised how it can be quite intense. Racking my brain to try to find the best moves takes a lot of stamina. It is not only mentally taxing, I physically sweat as well. I said this while ever played chess in the classical time format where games can lasto I can only imagine the tenacity needed to stay vigilant in those games.
During multi-day tournaments, grandmasters can burn around 6000 calories per day, just by playing chess without any other physical activity. The brain heavily depend on glucose to think, which causes the calorie burn. The grandmasters reportedly would experience significant weight loss after the tournaments. Stamina is so important in chess to point that before tournaments, players need to physically train and prepare their bodies.¹
This is really interesting to me. When I thought about high energy activities, I wouldn’t think about “thinking”. The fact that it can induce weight loss is baffling. Of course, I’m not suggesting swapping going to the gym with chess sessions. However, I would certainly keep this in mind when managing my energy when scheduling activities for myself. Moreover, I would take this into account when interacting with people that just finished a mentally taxing task.
Good moves are good enough
When I first played chess at the office, I took a long time to think in between moves at every stage of the game. I didn’t know the basic principles or know any openings, so I just spent a lot of time thinking from the start. The main contributor is that I wanted to make every move perfect. With my limited chess knowledge, I tried to compare all the different options to come up with the best one. In a timed chess game, running out of time means losing the game. I ended up losing a lot by using up my time, not that I would win if there was unlimited time, but I couldn’t possibly win if I didn’t improve my time management.
After spectating more matches, listening to post-game analysis, and learning more fundamentals, I realised that chess is not a game where I needed to make perfect moves all the time, it’s a game where I needed to be okay with playing “just” good moves. This is especially true in the short time formats that we play at the office which is the 15+2 time format (15 minutes with 2 seconds increments). When I play online, I like to play an even shorter time format at 2+1. Apparently, it is not recommended to learn chess in a fast format, but I think it helped me loosen up and not be fixated with playing perfect moves. The fast time format short circuited my thought process, forcing me to make moves quickly. after playing lots of 2+1, 15+2 felt like a breeze time-wise.
Moreover, aiming to play perfect moves caused me to not really like any of the moves that I ended up playing. I would have doubts if the move was indeed the best option. I would be trying too hard to compensate for the things that I do not know about (which is a lot since I’m a beginner) by overthinking about one move. On the other hand, playing good enough moves means that I purposely focus the information and knowledge that I do have while disregarding (and not worry about) the things that I do not know about.
After this, my games were definitely higher quality, both according to computer analysis and the way it feels when I make the moves.
Learning openings allowed me to focus on the mid-game
Even when only focusing on “just” good moves, the start of a chess game can still be really daunting. The possible moves are really hard to compare to each other, since it’s not obvious which ones are better, especially to a beginner like me. When I started playing chess, I knew the rules (how the pieces move and how a player wins), however I didn’t realise there are so many nuances involving “improving a position”. There are concepts such as “developing pieces”, meaning moving your powerful pieces (generally non-pawns) to a square where the piece is “active”, meaning it’s attacking or defending more squares than it did not before. At the beginning of a chess game, the general goal is to develop the pieces to get ready for the mid-game.
A chess game generally has 3 phases, the early game, the mid game, and the end game. In the early game, as explained before, the goal is to develop pieces. In the mid game, the goal is to get an advantage over your opponent, typically there will be trades and captures in this phase. The end game is where there are typically less pieces on the board and the players are attempting to checkmate each other.
There are known pattern of moves in chess that are effective in achieving the goal of each game phase, especially the early game. Due to the sheer amount of games, the popularity of chess, and the advancement of the computer chess engine, these patterns can be analysed with great detail. Learning openings take advantage of all that. That being said, new players should keep it mind that it’s easy to fall into the trap of just memorising the moves without knowing why there are good, which can lead to getting countered and not knowing how to fight back.
Overall, learning an opening allowed me to execute the early moves quickly, moving the game along to the mid-game phase where I can then use more time to think about the moves.
Life lessons
Alright, those are the lessons that I observed while playing chess. Now, let’s see how we can translate that to more general life lessons!
Mental exertions uses a lot more energy than I thought! It means that when I’m considering how I’m physically feeling, I should take into account mentally taxing activities. Of course I already do feel tired after a long day at work, but I didn’t realise just how much energy “thinking” uses. This also is good reminder that I can’t expect myself to continually do highly mentally challenging activities, even if what I’ve been doing is just “sitting and thinking”.
Doing good enough is enough, perfect is not only unnecessary but can even be detrimental. Good enough actions are enough to achieve goals. In fact, it might be the only way to achieve it, because otherwise I would be paralysed trying to do the perfect thing before I even start. Or, like in a game of chess, attempting to be perfect might just cost a lot of time that could cause me to miss opportunities.
Learning to streamline some of my common activities can let me focus on the more difficult or important ones. I can combine activities like a string (akin to chess openings), making some useful activities feel almost automatic, resulting in more mental room for the ones that need more conscious effort.
Outro
Chess is a classic game with a lot of history that recently gained popularity. It has a deep gameplay with relatively simple rules. Playing it has taught me lessons in the obvious aspects like strategy and tactics, but it has taught me more general life lessons as well. I haven’t been playing much in awhile and writing this blog post has reignited my interest in it! As I said, I play online on lichess.com, so if you happen to play there as well, we might just bump into each other. Check, mate!