Our own Shannon Appelcline (not to pick on him in particular as I quite enjoy his writing and analysis) has said that Chess is: "A boring abstract game that requires too much thought and too much reliance on memorizing specific moves." I'm never going to change Shannon's mind, I suspect. I would, however, like to challenge the opinions of some BGGers who seem to believe that chess is a flawed and horrible game that we ought to be very snooty towards (as we are enlightened gamers) -- a game about three steps or so away from the gold-standard of awful, monopoly.

I am not a good chess player. In fact, I might be a horrible chess player. But I really enjoy it. Furthermore, only in the last few years, (well after my encounter with the broader world of boardgames) have I become seriously interested in the game. Yes, I played chess as a child and played a tournament or two in grade school -- but, aside from looking at one of my father's opening manuals in confusion and flipping through "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess" while sick, I never really got into the game... although I often wished that I was a better player.

I have divided my thoughts on why I think chess is interesting/unfairly maligned into a series of short statements. My hope is to provoke an interesting discussion of this classic game.

Analysis Paralysis

Sure, it's a game without hidden information and analysis is the heart of the game. But in years of playing chess, I can't recall playing a game that took more than a couple hours and hundreds that took less than half an hour. I suppose it is possible to spend days playing a single game, but I have never encountered it, and in the real world of chess, the game is played with a clock, which adds a very exciting element to the game. When you are winning on the board but losing on the clock, you really start to sweat. And there are several variants of how to treat the clock, each with their own particular feel. Yes, analysis paralysis is possible, but it is more manageable than in many games.

Openings and Endings

I've heard some complain that too much of the game is merely memorization of the openings and endings of the game, and as such, the interesting portion is a tiny series of moves in the middle game.

I want to respond to this charge in two parts. First, openings are acquired gradually as you play. If you begin your chess career by memorizing openings, you will lose. If you spend your energy reading books of ending, you will lose (although perhaps less horribly than those reading the opening books). Opening, at the level played by most players (i.e. 2 or 3 moves deep), are mostly common sense. In Settlers, don't put a settlement on a desert to start unless you have a very good plan. In chess, don't move you 'a' pawn as your first move unless you have a very good plan. Yes -- correspondence and master level chess (and good club) players know many variations of the Caro-Kann and Sicilian and King's Indian and whatever else to ten or more moves. The average player need not.

Nor are the openings set in stone and the only way to play -- in actual fact, openings are continually revised and overthrown over time. A major opening manual is the 14th edition of Modern Chess Openings (MCO-14), published in 1999. I have read some players lament the fact that it is already out of date. Probably something so set in stone and necessary to grasp wouldn't go out of date so quickly.

As a short aside, for those that absolutely refuse to play because openings are so scary, I suggest trying Fischer Random -- a chess variant where the pieces are placed in a random order. There are numerous website that will generate a Fischer Random setup for you.

As for endings, these will probably help you more, but endgames are still complicated and many of them are mostly outside of the grasp of us humans (Ken Thompson of Unix fame is responsible for solving many, many endgames via computer). Knowing about them will make you a better player, but I suspect most people who have played chess would be shocked to learn that such books even existed.

I think this leads into a second point for me -- don't blame a game for its players. Yes, Chess is a game that you can spend your entire life studying... or you can play it over a beer at a friend's house. That some people have learned a vast array of openings doesn't change the game. The rules are the same... some people just play it differently.

A parallel that I can think of is the computer game Diablo II by Blizzard. When you play online, you discover that some people treat the game as an RPG that they can spend a couple hours on here and there and be done with it while others treat the game like a MMORPG and play it in a very obsessive fashion. It strikes me as a sign of strength in a design that these two extremes are possible and completely valid within a single game.

Complexity and Imbalance

On this thread, a common complaint is that the game is uneven -- new players are easily defeated by better players and so on until we reach the olympian heights situated by those most powerful of creatures, the Grand Masters. And as such, some less acute gamers have listed the game as broken1.

If this makes a game broken, I would hope that you have the good nature to declare other games of this nature broken. I have very little hope of blocking shots from Lebron James, little hope of out driving Schumacher, hitting against Shilling, or tackling TO. To me, this indicates the raw potential for competition that exists in these games, not some failure due to it. To paraphrase something that Frank Lantz, an academic with an interest in games, once wrote: just because Pete Sampras hits the ball so hard you can't return it, don't think that the game is broken. When you play Sampras in tennis, the game begins when you can hit the ball really hard.

Tennis is still great to go out and play against a friend -- even if neither of you can ace each other or have terrible backhands. Maybe you even take lessons and play in a local league -- that's great. The fact that Sampras could blow you out of the water if he so chose shouldn't make you throw your racket away in disgust. He probably isn't very good at whatever you do for a living.

I will grant that its possible that this divide is more extreme in chess. From Martin Amis' celebrated article on the 1985 Karpov and Kasparov world championship match:

"Nowhere in sport, perhaps nowhere in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical. Oh, I have thrown 180 at darts -- twice in a lifetime. On the snooker table I brought off violent pots that would have jerked them to their feet in the Sheffield Crucible. As for tennis, I need hardly hype my crosscourt backhand 'dink', which is so widely feared in the parks of North Kensington. But my chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a typewriter producing King Lear."

While it might not be quite so dire as that, I do feel quite confident that I will never produce any game that will appear in a book...unless I am the defeated party.

1. I would contend that the opposite of this is generally what makes a game broken. Consider Tic-Tac-Toe.


Brilliancies

In what other boardgame (aside from the usual contenders, such as Go and now, possibly, Poker), are the great players' games analyzed and viewed with such precision and interest? Or, in most cases, recorded at all? Countless chess games are fascinating to read and reread because the ideas expressed are so challenging and exciting. I cannot imagine being excited reading out of some tome a brilliant series of trades in Settlers that garnered a win. Or at most, maybe, I can imagine a single such record being interesting. But volumes? I have a book of games by the brilliant and innovative David Bronstein and there are games in there that I think are a valuable contribution to our collective human achievements -- maybe an individual game is not on par with a Schoenberg symphony, but I find it hard to deny the artistry in his murder of M20 (see http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1238081 ), a russian computer.

The more your understand about the game, the more the great players' personalities become apparent. Tal is about endless calculational energy and dramatic attacks, Karpov is a series of increasingly devastating quiet moves, Rubstein sees the endgame from the opening and pushes towards it.... some players you enjoy and some you don't. The very fact that it is possible to enjoy the games of the great players strikes me as showing something very deep about the possibilities that exist in such a game. The rules are simple, the board is small and starts half full of pieces, but there is still an abundance of room to express yourself.

Computers

So, sometime soon, no human will ever be able to beat a top level computer in a game of chess again. There has been a lot of whining over the years that this spells the end of the game. I see no reason why this should be the case. To me, this proves that computers are better at raw calculation than we are, something, if you've use a spread-sheet to do taxes, you ought to know. It is also a tribute to the idea that perhaps the years of AI research that went into chess haven't been a complete waste of time -- we made computers that are able to create interesting games. Maybe it's time to let them play each other exclusively, and let the GMs go back to creating brilliancies against each other.

Summary and Final Musings

I think what I want to say is that yes, Chess is a good game, and no, you might not enjoy it if you play it against someone way better than you. In this regard, chess looks much more like a sport than most boardgames (excluding again Go, Poker, etc). I really love RA, for instance, but I can't imagine that the gap between me (which I will casually label as an "average" player) and the best Ra player is as great as the difference between between me and one of the higher rated players on the Free Internet Chess Server ( http://www.freechess.org/ ). That doesn't make Ra a bad game anymore than it makes Chess a bad game... just different kinds of boardgames. Furthermore, I think it's much more acceptable in a 2 player game to allow really deep competition than in a game with a lot of players.

Chess strikes me on a different level than almost any other game. I can't imagine sitting down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and turning to the puzzle page of the paper to do the weekly Modern Art puzzle. Chess, like any other game, either appeals to you or it doesn't. More than most games, you can choose a degree to which you wish to know about the game. After a dozen games of Settlers, you probably basically understand it. It's still an amazing game, but there isn't much strategy left to learn (although many things to try and play with). In Chess very few people really understand the game to the same degree after a dozen years of play. Maybe this is what I find most exciting -- this is a game I'm not good at. While not trying to sound egotistical, I think of myself as a pretty good gamer. I can read the strategies and figure out what needs to be done and often pull off a win in many games. In the games that I'm not as good at, I still usually play respectably. With Chess, I know I will never be great but I can always be better. In this regard, it fits into my life more like some other activities I enjoy, like running or skiing. I'm never going to win a marathon, but when I get a little faster and go a little further, I feel an enormous sense of accomplishment.