Shathranj ke Khiladi (Experts of Chess)

TLDR;
Random musings about Chess and Life, The title of this post is from a story by Premchand, a Hindi writer who wrote pithy, wry and direct stories about aristocracy and the life of poor men under them. Experts of Chess briefly is a story of two chess players so engrossed in games of chess that they ignore the fall of their king and his kingdom and the decimation of soldiers, later they have an argument about the game and duel each other and are both mortally wounded which is the end of the story. This post has little to do with that story though and more about the game of chess and an analogy to life.

#include<chess.h>
#include<musings.h>
void main()
{

I’ve taken to playing chess about 4 months back. I was introduced by a friend to the game again (I used to play real lousy when I was a kid). She is good at it and has me beat all but 2 times out of the 12 games that we’ve played, there was a vodka fueled game where I was beaten really badly and I can’t still say it was because I was inebriated. Then I’ve played against the computer on Chess Titans on Windows 7. Started with Level 5, the first game lasted two hours with plenty of Undo Moves and a reversal from a checkmate (which according to the game statistics is counted as a loss even if you undo), played from there and won by checkmate. 

While I played I realized that early in the game there was no way to predict the future moves of my opponent to more than 3 moves as the number of possible combinations were insane. However, shit could get real very fast if you played fast and loose.

There is quite a bit of breathing room in the beginning and this is when you should prepare the layout of your pieces such that they back each other up. If you play a move just for the heck of it without an idea of what strategy that move benefits to, then you’ve wasted your move. A move that could tighten your offence or strengthen you defence is what you should always be on the lookout for.  Also no point taking out the big guns early when the board is full and you have no space to move. When the opponent is clever enough, even if you have them defended you will lose them to the pawns, which is never a good deal. Use the Knight early on, it can jump over pieces and on a choc-a-bloc board, it is a good way to pick out defensive pawn positions, avoid losing the Knight if you can help it. The computer always tries to get my Knights in exchange for its own and considers it a fair trade. I wonder why it would do that considering it could have used them just as well.

There are no spare moves towards the middle of the game. You have to play everything with a purpose and exactly right keeping all the pieces backing each other up while breaching into the enemy lines.  The middle of the game is when the pieces start going off the board and you have to start weighing your options. Would you mind losing a Knight for saving a rook or a bishop? A pawn threatens both your Knight and your bishop, which one do you choose? The Queen, yes you have to save her and you could end up sacrificing quite a bit just to save her. The computer always goes for your queen so never put it up-front with a lesser piece defending it. Send the Rook in for an attack if you have to and then defend the Rook with the Queen but never vice-versa because the computer will just take your Queen and not care what it loses in return. In other scenarios you will notice it putting its Queen head-to-head with yours and then losing its Queen to take yours. But this is a pre-meditated calculation that assumes that a Pawn from the computer is already half-way across the board and will reach the end of the board and promote itself to a Queen which will make your King a sitting duck.

The end of the game is a little anti-climactic. I’m told that towards the end, the game is predictable, so predictable that in fact the computer stores look-up tables for the moves that can result in the fastest check-mate. The irony is that, despite the board being largely empty, there is not much space to run around to and you will eventually be trapped into a corner and check-mated. Hope or horror also exists when a pawn goes over to the other side of the board and gets promoted, mostly to Queen. That is mostly the end, if you have just the King and other odd-end pawns, it could also be the end for the opponent if you have a bishop or another Queen on a largely empty board with the other King in the corner.

It seems to be quite a useful analogy for life. Play for a strong defense, build your fundamentals. When the attack comes you should have your defense ready otherwise it will be decimation. No point taking out the big guns first. Play the small battles with the pawns and weaken the defense of the enemy, then start moving in for the kill with the big guns

Recently I happened to play Level 6. It is very hard for me and this particular game lasted 2 hours or more. I got check-mated in at least 6 different ways and kept undoing the game to see what the point of no-return was. I played a variety of endings which were ending in check-mate. Finally I found an undo point where it seemed I was able to smuggle my Queen bang in the middle of enemy territory. It already had its Queen and kept troubling my King in an oscillating check series where I stayed put in a, for the lack of a better word, fortress of Pawns in a triangle. Then began my series of check moves, I had my Queen backed up with a Rook and that Rook backed up with another Rook just so that the computer Queen wouldn’t dare kill on the diagonal. Then a sudden check by the computer Queen which came and stood right behind my King and I took the Queen for nothing. Then there was nothing to do but to use my Queen as soon as possible for a check-mate and that was it. I had won Level 6 for the first time ever. I had drawn it previously but a win always has a nice warm fuzzy feeling to it. To beat a machine, well maybe not the best chess engine but a fairly decent one.

However if I were to stretch the analogy of chess for life far enough, is it possible that you could have made a series of moves from where there is a point of no return? It would not be really possible to know because I knew that until I did about 9 undoes (10 moves back more or less) I was not able to get to the point in the game where I was able to save my power pieces and also move in for the kill. I repeatedly lost my Rooks and the Queen in exchanges where the computer retained a Rook, lost the Queen and managed to promote a Pawn to Queen in the next 3 moves to give me a check-mate. Out of the 9 variants of the undo games I played (they all ended in check-mate for me differently) only one of the games was where I managed to defend as well as move in for the kill simultaneously.

Is it possible that I may have reached that point in life as well, where I may have just made the best of the positions I had set out initially but now it is just a few moves to check-mate? There is no Ctrl Z to the moves you make in life and there is of course no going back to play a different variant. Is the late 20’s, the middle game of academia-chess? Have the choices that determine the closing moves of the endgame been made? I guess I will know 5 years down the line and it will be too late to do anything by then. All I know is that going from one day to the next, I always make sure I always know more than what I started out with and knowledge has always been power. By a check-mate I mean the glass wall you hit up against and you just can't go higher than that, a win would be a place where you do the science you like and you live it too. Also when you realize that academic hierarchy like a lot of others in the world, is a little lop-sided, and you definitely don't want to be at the bottom of a pyramid of incompetents.

As to the question of if it ends in a check-mate for me, your guess is just as good as mine.

}