Chess is war, plain and simple. There’s no such thing as peaceful coexistence, no treaties, no ceasefires, no mercy. One army is going to be annihilated, better make sure it’s not yours. Don’t want to fight? Then step the fuck away from the board. Okay, maybe that’s a little too intense. It is just a game, after all. It’s supposed to be fun! But unlike most other games, “chance” and “luck” don’t apply. It’s a game of pure information. You can see every possible move and every possible plan that your opponent has available to him, and he can see everything available to you. There are no tricks, there are no lies. As one of the greats put it, “On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culmination in checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.” You put your best idea down on the board and your opponent tries his best to refute it with an idea of his own. The person with the better idea wins. Every time.
So what am I going to talk about for 16 weeks? Well, I’m certainly not going to explain the rules of chess. I’m not going to talk about the theory behind certain openings or review any famous games. I’m not going to fill this blog with notation of games I’ve played (although it is a tempting way to fulfill word count requirements). Instead I just want to talk about chess. The game has been around for 1500 years, so there’s plenty to talk about. I want to cover a little bit of its history and (d)evolution from a gentleman’s game into a “nerd sport”. You’ll see how the game was, for a short time, another front of the Cold War, with the United States and the Soviets battling to demonstrate their superiority. I’ll touch on the influence that technology and endlessly calculating computers have had on the Royal Game and how they’re shaping its future. We’ll cover one of my favorite topics in chess, cheating, and we can go over some of the more interesting (and peculiar) instances that have occurred. I’ll show you some of the giant egos that chess has helped create, and we can all laugh sadistically when we watch those egos get crushed. We’ll certainly take a look at the life of Bobby Fischer, one of the craziest (and greatest) players who ever lived. But most of all, I want to try to figure out what it is about the game that polarizes so strongly. What it is that captivates so many and causes so many more to absolutely despise the game. Love chess? Stick around. Hate it? Maybe I can change your mind (probably not). Either way, I’ll keep it interesting. I might accidentally talk about some of the things I promised not to talk about, but as Fischer so eloquently put it, “those rules are for the Communist cheaters, not for me.”
