Checkmate: 4 Life Lessons That Show Why Chess Is Much More Than Just a Benchmark For Genius
By: Arya Anthony Kamyab
Tags: Life Lessons, Chess, Philosophy, Life, Strategy

Checkmate: 4 Life Lessons That Show Why Chess Is Much More Than Just a Benchmark For Genius

What makes this timeless game so relatable to all walks of life?

Photo by ᴊᴀᴄʜʏᴍ ᴍɪᴄʜᴀʟ on Unsplash

A brand new Netflix series has thrown chess back into the limelight and onto our television screens. One of the oldest games in history, the game of chess dates back to the Gupta Empire of the 6th Century and it was through its spread to the Persian empire that it acquired its current terminology and name. Chess, coming from the word ‘Shah’, meaning King, and ‘Checkmate’ coming from the phrase ‘Shah Mat’ or ‘the king is helpless’

64 squares, 32 pieces, and 1 ‘simple’ task — To track down your opponents' king and place it in checkmate.

The game transcended politics and culture, giving purpose and passion to individuals from all corners of the globe — In this post, we will be exploring the role it can play in teaching us valuable lessons about the lives that we lead.

1. Threats and danger through the loss of material is unavoidable in chess. Try to minimize your losses and move on

It is no secret that threats are rife in chess — Blink once and you are in ‘Check’, a lapse of judgment and your rook is threatened, blink again, your queen is pinned. Stressors quickly come, quickly go.

The American Neuroendocrinology researcher, Professor Robert Sapolsky proclaimed that the average chess player can burn up to 6000 calories a day while playing in a tournament. This is based on breathing rates which can triple during a competition, and blood pressure that goes through the roof for impressive lengths of time. Sapolsky suggests that the stress response on display from the chess grandmasters are on par with what elite athletes experience.

“Grandmasters sustain elevated BP for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners.” — Professor Robert Sapolsky

Chess presents an unceasing number of questions and threats to those who wish to play it and it is through this pressure that the human mind can unleash its potential. Similarly to life, it is how we answer these pressures and stressors that determine the final picture of the game.

Those who can hold their nerve in the face of this hardship are the ones who make it out the other side. This can be demonstrated no better than in the 1987 World Championship Soviet showdown between Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov proclaimed that defeat was visible in the eyes of Karpov way before he made the fatal blunder with his pawn that eventually led to his downfall.

“Those who think that it’s easy to play chess are mistaken. During a game, a player lives on his nerves, and at the same time he must be perfectly composed” — Victor Kortchnoi, 4 time USSR Chess champion

2. Always look for the sacrifice — Sometimes even the greatest sacrifices can result in a winning position later down the line

Often coined the greatest queen sacrifice in chess history, the 1962 Nezhetdinov vs Chernikov match will go down in the history books for the dazzling positional queen sacrifice played by Nezhmetdinov.

Any beginner will tell you from lesson one that you don’t want to lose your queen. A piece of great importance, its far-reaching effects can be devastating for your opponent. It is for this reason why queen sacrifices are often met with gasps of surprise from those who fail to spot the positional advantage acquired from it, such as in the case of Nezhetdinov.

Chess teaches us that in life, letting go of material can be the key to unlocking favorable positions further down the line. Just like in chess, there may come points where our success or end goal is contingent on our ability to sacrifice.

This could mean sacrificing some of your time to develop a craft or setting aside time to reach out to loved ones.

3. Develop your pieces early on and build foundations by gaining control of the middle ground

So you make your first move, you remember that the chess manual gave you 3 main objectives for your opening game:

Gain control of the center Develop your pieces Get your king to safety

Why is it that the chess theory books put so much stress on these objectives? Because how you start a game determines how you finish. It lays a foundation to build on.

This single principle could be the antidote for many of our past failures and shortcomings. Just like a good foundation is needed to uphold a house, and a basic education helps our future endeavors, a robust opening is indispensable to finding an eventual checkmate.

Chess teaches us that whilst we have no option to keep the end goal in sight through a prudent mindset, our current move should never be trivialized and dismissed with hubristic arrogance.

“Play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the endgame like a machine” — Rudolph Spielmann

4. If you lose, make sure to do it with humility — The next game is only around the corner

No one likes losing — Often we wrap our very being in the various ventures and fields that we choose to pursue and loss or failure is all it takes to get us questioning every supposed truth we once believed about ourselves.

Imagine engaging in an intense mental exercise for hours upon end, where one lapse of judgment can end it all. Is it, therefore, any surprise that hearing your opponent say ‘Checkmate’ is a chess-players worst nightmare?

If you are, however, willing to care more about your progression than simply just winning, if you are willing to study your losses and not just your successes, then there are few things that can stop you.

Loss in any life event where there is no one to blame but yourself can be difficult to stomach — chess is no different. There is no roll of the dice to cast as the reason for your imperfections, no unlucky hand to pin your frailties on — It is only you and you.

“That’s what chess is all about. One day you give your opponent a lesson, the next day he gives you one” — Bobby Fischer, 1972 world chess champion

As we spoke about in a previous blog post, The consequences of these “failures” are very much overemphasized by our cognition in an attempt to take us down the path of least resistance, to get us to pack up our chessboard and never play again, but you now know that success only comes in the face of disappointment — So let’s learn to leave our pride and ego at the door the next time we embark upon a new challenge or activity.

It’s not over yet…

So long as there are people around to play it, chess will continue to be a pertinent part of human culture, just like it has been over the last one and a half millennia — There is simply nothing else like it.