by Sasha Chapin
It’s not Duchamp’s fault that he was never that good. First of all, he was just too late. As is true of me, his period of intense study began in his twenties rather than his infancy, which is really where it has to begin if you plan on becoming competitive. Greatness requires an early acquaintance with the game’s classic patterns—a basic education delivered long before the first whispers of pubescence. If you’re an adult learner, your brain is too old and rigid for the deep neural adaptation you need. Chess demands the sole ownership of a bunch of brain cells that the post-adolescent mind may have already devoted to the ability to navigate a grocery store lineup without screaming, or, in Duchamp’s case, the social aptitude required to deal with the more irritating members of his milieu. If you’re a player starting late in life, the most you can be, generally, is third class. Duchamp actually did remarkably well, given the low ceiling of chess achievement available to a late bloomer.
Moreover, age isn’t the only factor that constrained Duchamp’s success. If that were the sole determinant of chess mastery, then every intelligent player who started young and had a solid work ethic would have a shot at the World Championship. But that’s not the case. That’s really, really not the case. Being great at chess is also a matter of raw talent. Chess is one of those things, like music or math, that certain minds really fuse with. You just have it, or you don’t.
I feel like I need to defend this statement with some hard data, since the very concept of talent has gone out of style. It’s unfashionable to claim that people are exceptional, in any domain, because of any intrinsic gifts. It’s more often claimed that variations in ability are mostly or exclusively based on varying amounts of deliberate practice. Mastery, supposedly, is just a matter of working hard—you could be a master too, with the right level of dedication. Over the last decade or so, this position has been expounded by many, many authors. Probably the most notable advocate is Malcolm Gladwell, whose book Outliers popularized the now-famous “10,000-Hour Rule”: if you’re really good at something, it’s because you’ve spent about ten thousand hours on it.
Now, obviously, nobody is silly enough to think that talent doesn’t exist, period. That’s not the debate here. The existence of talent is proven by the fact of people like Srinivasa Ramanujan—the man who, without any formal training, became one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived, effortlessly emitting utterly complicated theorems that astounded his colleagues. The debate here is about proportion. It’s about whether people like Ramanujan, the true freaks, are the only cases in which talent is a primary factor—whether talent is only relevant in the most extreme cases. Can we ordinary people blame talent for our lack of success? When we say that we don’t have talent, are we just coming up with a convenient excuse for our lack of diligence? To what extent can we transcend certain inborn aptitudes?
These are big questions. They don’t have simple answers, or at least none that I’m qualified to provide. But if we limit the discussion to chess, the answer is clear. The data shows that talent matters. A lot.
Probably the most persuasive piece of evidence that talent is important in games in general is a meta-analysis conducted by Macnamara et al., published in Psychological Science in 2014. After analyzing a combination of eighty-eight studies of skill acquisition, the researchers concluded that, when it comes to games, only 26 per cent of individual variance in skill level can be attributed to practice. Practice is valuable, but its importance is dominated by a combination of other factors, like working memory, general intelligence, and starting age. So the paper suggests that if you want to be a world-class player, you should start really, really young and be really, really lucky with your genetics. This was further corroborated by another meta-analysis conducted by the same researchers, pertaining specifically to chess players, which demonstrated the same conclusion.
Now, there’s an obvious objection here—can’t playing chess make you more intelligent, thus improving your raw talent in a roundabout way? Well, current evidence says no. According to another study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, playing chess doesn’t improve your non-chess faculties significantly. (One interesting implication here is that a lot of the chess economy is built on a fraud: lots of parents send their children to expensive chess camps in an effort to make them smarter, in the same way that some other parents enhance their babies with Mozart, but this effort seems futile, based on the data.)
This is not nearly all of the evidence for my side of the debate. There are a lot more factors that make the deliberate practice hypothesis look even more doomed. Like the fact that the ability to practice for hours is itself genetically influenced—it relies on traits like conscientiousness, which are highly heritable. But we don’t need to explore that too deeply. The basic case is made: talent matters. Unless all of this research somehow fails to replicate, or is fundamentally flawed in non-obvious ways—which, of course, is possible—then Gladwell’s rule does not belong on the chessboard.
So, then, exactly how big is the gulf between the talented player and the untalented player? Quite simply: it’s huge.
One way of demonstrating this is by producing some anecdotes about the sheer intellectual freakishness of the greatest players, like Bobby Fischer. Fischer’s brain was odd. My favorite example of what I mean goes as follows. In 1972, Fischer was hanging around Reykjavik for a few days before playing the World Championship there. He called a friend of his, whose daughter answered the phone and told him in Icelandic that her father was away. Fischer didn’t know a word of Icelandic, and so hung up the phone. The next day, he mentioned the call to an Icelandic chess player, and repeated, syllable for syllable, what the little girl had said to him, accurately enough that the Icelandic player was able to understand it. If this is how easily Fischer’s mind could hang on to a jumble of phonemes drawn from a difficult foreign language, one could imagine how ably his mind could manipulate the minutiae of his favorite game.
We could also dwell, for a moment, upon a more direct demonstration of the freakishness of great players—the chess phenomenon called the simultaneous exhibition, or “simul.” (Rhymes with “primal.”) Simuls are events where a high-rated player plays a large number of parallel games with lower-rated players at the same time. They’re a theatrical manifestation of the true depth of chess mastery. It’s the chess equivalent of those scenes in a martial arts movie where Jackie Chan effortlessly defeats two dozen opponents with an attitude of zesty bonhomie.
But in simuls, there are often more than two dozen opponents, especially if you’re Magnus Carlsen, the current World Champion, perhaps the greatest player to have ever lived. In February 2016, Magnus played a seventy-board simul in Hamburg. That’s him versus seventy competent amateur players, at once.
Think about that. Think about a giant playing hall, filled with seventy players like me, who deeply love the game of chess and who have, like Duchamp, put in years of devotion and sacrifice. They’ve forsaken summer afternoons, and warm embraces, and a knowledge of the wider world, so that they might achieve greatness in an art which will never be appreciated by most people alive. And, in return for their fanaticism, they’ve earned the honor of facing the greatest breathing player. For each and every one, this is an Important Life Occasion, and they commit every available bit of brain bandwidth to making as perfect a move as possible, every move. They love Magnus, but in that span of six hours, their love is replaced by an adversarial froth. Each considers their game a matter of the utmost significance, and hopes this might be the hour of their greatest work.
On the other hand, Magnus, looking cool and trim as always, is strolling from board to board, thinking, “Hmm, that move looks good,” and making it, after only a brief moment of contemplation. During each of those brief moments, immensely complicated calculations are made, at frightening speed, by the highly trained chess-related machinery that lurks behind his skull. He’s one of those people who looks at the board and just sees, without effort, the game’s distan
t horizons—a shimmering array of what could be. Variations flutter out before him, as clear as the branches of a bare tree. And this calculating power is enhanced by an unusually deep memory, a memory that has fully absorbed thousands and thousands of games, both notable brilliancies and trivial squabbles. Every time he looks at pieces on a board, their position is automatically compared with the position of every piece in every game he’s ever played, and the plethora of games he’s ever studied, as well as patterns absorbed from tens of thousands of puzzles. The result of this combination of preternatural aptitude and slavish training is an eerie, near-perfect intuition. With seemingly little effort, in seconds, Magnus finds moves that lesser players would never dream of, even if given days of cogitation time.
Magnus won sixty-nine of those seventy simultaneous games. One of them was a draw. The player who drew him will treasure, for the rest of his life, that he held off one-seventieth of Magnus’s skill. That’s how good great chess players are. That’s how wide the gap is.
And Magnus is actually infamous for not needing to study quite as hard as other high-level players. He makes sure to live a well-rounded life, avoiding the stereotypical monasticism of figures like Bobby Fischer. He plays soccer, has a well-documented beautiful girlfriend, and is an occasional fashion model—like me, he kind of looks like a low-budget version of Matt Damon. He prepared for his first game with Garry Kasparov, a former World Champion, by reading comics rather than reviewing his openings, having faith that his mind was robust enough that he didn’t need to do any last-minute cramming. He was twelve. The game was a draw. Talent matters.
This is bittersweet news for the aspiring player. On the one hand, you’re basically relegated by your genetics to a certain valley of the chess landscape, and you only find out where you are after you’ve labored for a number of years, when you either dwarf your peers or vice versa. On the other hand, this means that you can’t hate yourself for not being a great player. It’s not fair, any more than it would be fair for nearsighted people to lambaste themselves for not piloting fighter jets. It just doesn’t make sense. Unless you’re some kind of maniac, you should be satisfied by what small improvements you can make.
But maybe you are some kind of maniac. Maybe you’re a fantastically arrogant person who loves chess but can’t accept that they’re not great at it. Perhaps the joy of playing your favorite game is matched by the constant pain of knowing how badly you’re playing it, such that every game you play is like vigorously stabbing yourself with your favorite knife. Perhaps this mix of elation and loathing produces a deep and sorrowful addiction, such that you’re spending almost literally all of your time on chess, even though it doesn’t necessarily make you happy. And seeing yourself trapped in this vicious cycle, you vow to quit, because you’d like to be able to do normal things like have a job and a girlfriend and stuff, rather than hang out with a board game on your laptop every night. But, regardless of how earnestly you make this vow, your conviction is immediately slain by the force of your compulsion. As Omar Khayyam once wrote, “Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before I swore—but was I sober when I swore?”
That was me, in May, having returned from Bangkok.
After a brief, pleasant vacation in New York, I arrived in Toronto and took a room that smelled like sauerkraut above a crowded street whose people I spied on, feeling resentful and insecure. For the last five months I had been “traveling,” which is a fun substitute for an identity. Now I wasn’t sure what sort of person I was planning on being. All around me in the waking springtime I saw people coming alive, breezing through the intersection in flamboyant outfits, and wondered how they were pulling it off.
My time away left me with no real insights. My world-view was not transformed.
Everything was essentially unmodified, including me. While I wasn’t sure what I expected, I was sure that it hadn’t happened. Maybe the phrase “run away to find yourself” is so common because it’s hard to find anything else. You don’t necessarily accumulate profound knowledge. You simply see what pants are in fashion in a different time zone. You drink different beer, but the sun is the same and so are you. Then, you leave.
The only thing that was different about me was, well, chess. Or, rather, at that point, the lack of chess, because I’d sworn to give it up—both to myself and to the few friends who knew about the more tedious details of my existence. After all, life was out there for the taking, and I shouldn’t spend all my time getting checkmated. But there was a cavity in my head where all the churning about the Poisoned Pawn Variation of the Winawer French Defense used to be. Without the activation of that specific part of my brain, I felt weak and watery.
Everything non-chess-related seemed silly. At parties, I watched the faces of my acquaintances flap away, dispensing sloppy trivialities that couldn’t match the majesty of an unexpected move. “Shut the fuck up,” I thought, ruefully. What good were the things I previously enjoyed? Once I had inhabited the realm of chess, full of violence and aesthetic beauty, but also replete with the restfulness of unambiguous actuality, my previous life was unappealing. When you quit chess, or try to, you don’t just leave a game behind. You leave a world behind. It’s painful. All I did was get drunk and circulate, inhabiting vague mental states in barrooms and living rooms.
And on one of these nights, I came home a little more drunk than usual and fired up a little blitz game. The next morning, having realized that I’d played chess the night before, I told myself that a slip isn’t the same as a relapse, and I solemnly renewed my vow to never again move a single pawn. Six hours later, I had a full relapse—a week disappeared into a long session of unsatisfying blitz. Following this, I tried again, this time installing software that prevented me from accessing chess websites. A few days later, I came home drunk again and uninstalled the software. Another clump of days evaporated. Finally, it got so bad that I told myself I’d trade one addiction for another—I’d take up smoking again, which I had quit during my last month in Bangkok, in exchange for not playing chess. This is how I became a chain-smoking chess player.
There was only one disruption that got in the way of the complete domination, by chess, of my entire mental life. I was falling in love—with a person this time, and not a board game.
5
NO MACS
People love using chess as a metaphor. Supposedly, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is the most chess-like of the martial arts. One chef I knew, upon hearing of my passion for the game, characterized his selection of flavors as “a chess game I play with your mouth, bro.” In the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, a CIA weapons specialist is seen playing a simul in a park while simultaneously delivering a monologue about the artillery required to invade Afghanistan, a filmic juxtaposition which implies that military planning and middle-game strategy are complementary skills.
Part of me hates this tendency. After all, as I’ve mentioned, part of what makes chess wonderful is how much it isn’t like all of this other shit we put up with on earth. On the other hand, I’ve made a few sweeping comparisons between life and chess already in this book, and it felt, as I was writing those passages, like I couldn’t avoid doing so. Chess has a way of encircling the imagination, of generating fanciful poetics and dubious conceptual linkage. And I’m about to engage in another spell of that behavior right now.
It’s true of both chess and life that sometimes an unwise move is unexpectedly fortuitous—sometimes a seeming mistake, or a moment of hotheaded flailing, provokes a situation that couldn’t have been devised by sober strategy. For example, if I hadn’t quite so terribly screwed up one of the writing assignments that I’d hurriedly completed while I prepared for the tournament in Bangkok, I never would have met Katherine.
She was a senior editor at a publication that demanded scrupulously written arts criticism based on diligent research. She had accepted one of my pitches, which promised that I’d write a thoughtful profile of one of my favorite Toronto painters. But instead, what I delivered to her inbox was a scram
bled piece of mumbo jumbo, larded up with a few pretty sentences so she maybe wouldn’t notice how bad it was. She noticed. After chopping up my piece to the extent that it miraculously became publishable, she sent me a stern email telling me that my work was unacceptable. I assumed she’d never want to speak to or work with me again. That assumption was incorrect. Somehow, she still thought I could contribute something worthwhile to the magazine. So, right around the time my chess addiction was coming back, she suggested we have coffee in order to improve our relationship.
We significantly improved our relationship. The air hurriedly rearranged itself when she entered the room. I knew immediately that I was in trouble. She was shockingly pretty, with glinting and mobile eyes, a chaotic cascade of blonde hair, and a cherubic face that was frequently the home of a broad, wild smile. But her appearance wasn’t what really got me. It was a certain kind of awareness. She was blessed and cursed with an unstoppable power of observation. While I drifted through life in a state of interior absorption, aware of little except my interior monologue, she missed nearly nothing, and her intelligence made something of every stimulus it encountered. It was a reactivity I could sense when I was around her—it was obvious that she was closer to the pulse of reality than I was. Being around that energy made me feel more alive than I usually was. After our initial meeting, I concluded that spending time without Katherine was objectively nonsensical.
We met for a subsequent coffee on a rainy day, during which meeting I did the obvious thing. I suggested that we do drugs together—specifically psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms. She agreed. After some discussion, we met where she was living, on Toronto Island, a clump of grass, sand, and charming houses in Lake Ontario. In her attic apartment, we scarfed down a few mushrooms coated with peanut butter, and, out in the sun, we found a little patch of beach overlooking the glassy condos that line the Toronto waterfront.
