Why I Finally Decided to Become Decent at Chess

In 3rd grade I read a Klutz book about how to play Chess. As a homely young gentleman I figured it was my responsibility to know the game of the nobles. In the book, I learned a very basic “tactic” called Blitzkrieg. If not blocked against, the game was yours in 4 moves. I exercised this tactic at school quite often, and enjoyed my status as Chess expert.

But very quickly, it was revealed that Blitzkrieg is effortlessly easy to protect against. All of a sudden, I had 16 pieces that needed some sort of direction and no idea which ones to move where. So I quit.

Chess is one of the oldest games in existence, and perhaps the most popular game of all time (except maybe Go). And for more than a century now, people have been playing Chess really really well- developing strategies and tactics and defenses that are all cataloged and memorized by really excellent Chess players known as “Grand Masters.” It’s gotten to the point, in fact, that if you aren’t beating old Russian wizards in under 10 minutes by the time you’re 13, you aren’t ever going to beat those old Russian wizards.

So why bother? My attitude since 6th grade when my friend Nihar beat me by some unseen “strategy” has been “it would require too much time and effort to be ‘good’ at this game, thus I will suck at it, not try, and as a result not be that pissed when I lose.”

But recently I had a *moment*. I was showing my friend Tom around the West Village when we decided to go into one of those old Chess shops on MacDougal street, full of awesome looking boards and old men playing in the back. Tom asked me if I liked Chess and I told him my defeated attitude and realized that’s a horrible reason not to learn something.

“Stopping yourself from trying something just because you know you won’t be the best at it is foolish. If that’s your attitude, you’re not going to try anything. You’ll just sit there, being really bad at everything but not caring because you never tried!” I thought, tears dribbling down my heroic face. It was an Oscar moment for sure.

Apologies for being preachy, but I am much happier now that I’ve decided to play Chess. Maybe it’s because I have a tendency to become wildly passionate about random things that I run into on MacDougal street. But it may also be because Chess is a fun game to learn, and in order to get good at Chess you need to change the way you think. That way of thinking won’t just help you master the game, but can help you approach different aspects of your life in a better way. America.

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