I have played chess for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is of playing chess, and I literally can’t recall a time before it was a part of my life. Although I discontinued learning around the age of 9-10, I picked it up again during the recent chess boom.
But chess has been a constant part of my life. I played a tournament after 6 years yesterday and I was surprised. Let’s talk about it.
I was born in 2006, the same year as Gukesh D, who is set to play Ding Liren for the Chess World Championship this November. We both started playing chess at a young age and had similar ratings around 1500 at age 9. However, our paths diverged from there. Gukesh, far more talented, became a grandmaster, continuing his chess training while I stopped competitive play at age 10. Gukesh can defeat Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player of all time. I blunder my queen once in 10 games.
And I believe it all stems from him continuing with training and me not continuing with it.
One might ask: not having a coach or not playing tournaments can’t make so much difference, right? Chess is a battle of mind, isn’t it?
Contrary to popular belief, chess isn't really a battle of wits. Many assume it requires no training and is just about making good moves and calculating strategies. But chess is much more about pattern recognition than sheer intellect. Let me illustrate:
Here's an experiment repeated in every introductory psychology class in the world: I'm going to give you three ordered sets of ten words to remember. Which do you think is easier?
wixpot furskl zanqer blorp mivtol gralun xibro pletch vaspir juhnek
apple car mountain lamp river balloon guitar coffee bridge ocean.
Books are windows to new worlds and ideas that enrich our minds and souls.
Number three, right? And as a twist, I used 15 words in the third list, yet it's still easier to remember.
It's obvious why: because the first list is a pure memorization task; the words don't mean anything. The second is a little easier, because the words mean something, although they don't hang together in an obvious way. (Obviously, lists of unrelated words are common tasks in memory contests, and tricks exist to remember them.)
The third list, despite having more words, conveys a single idea. Our brain is not remembering the list, but the idea. The same applies to chess.
In 1973, there was a revolutionary paper published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology titled ‘Perception in Chess’. The paper revolved around an experiment. They took three groups of people. The first group consisted of people who barely knew chess. The second group was amateur chess players. The third group was chess grandmasters.
They were shown a position from a real game on a board and were asked to recreate it. They could peek at the shown position, and the peeks would be counted. The GMs were much better than the amateurs who performed better than the first group.
In the second round, they were shown an absolutely impossible chess position which was random and made no sense. The GMs, amateurs and the no-chess people performed almost similarly.
When the videotapes were analyzed, the authors found that the GMs were memorizing the tactical motifs of the game rather than the piece position. For example, in the below position:
This description might seem harder to remember than the position but for most chess players, this makes perfect sense. Especially, for players who play Kings pawn systems from white, or modern from black; they have probably seen played positions. (Source: A Chess-Position Memory Test (from Adriaan de Groot) from Blindfold Chess blog)
Such methods fail in impossible positions such as this one as it makes no sense in chess vocabulary to begin with.
In the celebrated chess training book, The Woodpecker Method, we are presented with the fact that 55% of grandmaster matches end due to tactical ideas. This percentage is even higher at lower levels of play.
This all was to show that chess is not much about wits or planning. It is about pattern recognition. Chess players have given names to common patterns: pins, skewers, decoys, discoveries, deflections, promotions etc. What good players do is that they look at a position and figure out if one of these is on the board or if there is a set of moves which can cause them to appear eventually.
This requires training. You can get the smartest person alive and if untrained at this particular form of pattern recognition, they will not be able to hold themselves for long.
And this pattern recognition has long-term rewards. For example, recognizing patterns is the basis of a lot of science. Art forgeries are sniffed up by experts who recognize patterns in art and the lack of them. Even the common person uses pattern recognition to distinguish fake and real news. The use cases of pattern recognition are endless in a world constantly bombarding us with information. And training it in one sphere, sure helps in the other.
I came third in the tournament I played. This was surprising to me as I haven’t played active chess for years and a lot of the other players were playing chess in their college and university teams. The reason I was able to win all but one match was because I played on pattern recognition. About a week before the tourney, I started solving 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners.
As it turned out, the solving paid off. I found this book on the recommendation of Alessia Santeramo through her YouTube channel. This seems to counter to my point that one requires training. Well, it is not.
My point is that one requires correct training. YouTube is not the best place for that. Popular Youtubers tend to make content for the algorithm. What will get more clicks? What will get more views?
In a society obsessed with winning and shortcuts, people want simple openings which will allow them to win quickly. For example, here are two videos from 3 years back from Gotham Chess aka Levy Rozman’s YouTube channel. One is about Fried Liver Attack, an objectively bad opening, which can win against weak players in 8 moves. The other is about Vidit Gujrathi’s, India's No. 2 and world top 20, immortal game against Magnus Carlson and what we can learn from it. Levy got 16 times the views on the former.
While Levy is a great player and an even better coach, he makes most of his money on YouTube. So to the business part of his brain, what does this view breakdown suggest? Should he spend a lot of time analyzing and breaking down world-class games for the common folk to understand and learn from? or does he get a higher return on investment by making videos on opening traps which don’t work beyond 1000 elo?
Levy had a series where he analyzed the games of his subscribers. Many of them had bought his video courses and book and all the goodies. When he then analyzed the game, he would be utterly shocked and devastated. How can they mess up so badly after buying courses? Because buying courses and studying them is different. Most people get distracted very easily and more often than not, are not able to force them to do tedious tasks. Having a coach to guide you is immeasurable in this regard. Instead of needing to sift through content and find what is useful and what is fluff, the coach does it for you.
Simply speaking: improving at chess requires structured training. While online resources are abundant, they often lack the depth and focus provided by a coach.
Now that I have hopefully convinced you that getting better at chess either requires one to be prudent and disciplined and have a lot of experience with online learning or requires the help of a coach, we will talk about something I noticed.
Between the third round and fourth, the mother of the bronze winner in the under nine category was asking how they determined between silver and bronze as both medals went to players with the same number of points. A rival whom I want to crush A friend from chess days and I explained about the tie-break in Swiss-style tournaments. The mother asked about learning chess and all. The chief arbitrator, who also coached chess(I was an ex-student), was talking with the mother. The child was interested in chess and the parents could afford the fees. They just felt that chess was unnecessary.
What I later found out, the kid goes to drama and abacus and English speaking and speed math classes. The idea here is that if the kid is good in English and math they can get foreign admission easily. I know kids who have gone to science classes since age 9 as it will help them in JEE(India’s engineering entrance). To add the cherry to this proverbial cake, the highest scorer of this year’s JEE had been studying since age 7. For an exam to be given at age 18. What next? This is so reminiscent of the ‘careers’ in Hunger Games because similar to them, these guys have no creativity and no idea of life other than Physics, Chemistry and Math.
I remember that when I used to play Chess, there used to be 30-40 kids in U9 and U12 categories. This year, it was less than 20. The same is true for most sports in India.
Other than cricket, table tennis and football; India is seeing kids shy away from sports. Sports are seen as mere recreation, not necessary or contributing to the development of them. While highly educated parents will still enrol their kids for sports; the majority will not.
On a very recent episode of Factually by Adam Conover, the guest Kelly Clancy, a neuroscientist talked about how games affect the brain. Play is an evolutionarily ancient behaviour observed not only in humans but also in insects, fish, and mammals. This behaviour is correlated with intelligence, with more intelligent animals engaging in more play. Play is so hardwired into our brains and such a fundamental aspect of our circuitry that even rats whose cortex has been removed, the part associated with memory, thinking, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, emotions, consciousness and functions, still engage in play. Play behaviour is crucial for socialization. Rats who are born deaf are unable to listen to cues for play and hence play less and end up exhibiting social awkwardness and aggression as adults. These things are noted in humans as well.
Games and sports are not just about winning tournaments or achieving high rankings. It is about the physical, cognitive and emotional skills they foster, the community they build, and the lifelong lessons they impart. These aspects are often overlooked in the pursuit of conventional academic and career success. Discipline, self-motivation, commitment and perseverance: the qualities we all attribute to the ‘ideal’ person are easily cultivated by sports. The main point is that these qualities are the result of training or preparation for tournaments, not of tournaments themself. And this training requires external help.
This was a rather long piece. And a quite rambly one. But I’ll conclude it why I feel that chess has benefited me. I don’t like sitting still. I always want something to do. Write a blog post, teach classes, work on a textbook, solve puzzles… But when I write an exam, I need to sit at one desk. Not look around and focus on the questions!
I need to plan for exams. What to revise in the last week? What to eat? What to avoid? What to do during travel to the centre? What to do between the time we get seated to the time we get papers? How to not lose your cool if something goes wrong?
There is a long-standing correlation between chess and math. They both require you to observe patterns, make a plan of attack and then use correct methods to deliver solutions.
You get all of this by playing tournaments. By playing challenging matches. I was recently ranked quite well and accepted to one of the most prestigious math universities in the world. I don’t know how many words in the former line would change for the worse if I hadn’t learned chess.
And in the end, the biggest thing chess, or any sport for that matter, teaches you is to lose and still keep going. Life can’t always be on the up and up. And sometimes one needs to take a loss, and still keep going.
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