Chess Metaphors by Diego Rasskin-Gutman

Author:Diego Rasskin-Gutman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780262012676
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2015-02-16T03:31:47.904000+00:00

Chess: An Art? An Aesthetic Problem

Chess as a purely intellectual activity appeals to the aesthetic sense of players at all skill levels, as Richard Reti explains in his Modern Ideas in Chess (1974). Discovering the secrets of a position and experiencing the undoubted attractiveness of carrying out a sacrifice to secure a winning position make chess a creative activity. In the complexity of a position’s labyrinth of possible variations and moves, the chess player must discern patterns and come up with ideas to carry out on the board in the same way that the artist standing in front of the paint-spotted canvas must find a harmonious solution that satisfies his creative needs. In front of the chessboard, a player is alone, silently searching to unravel the secrets of the position.

The creative possibilities in chess are more restricted than in other arts, and its movements—an opponent who insists on ruining the plans of the player, a final objective of checkmate, and a multitude of intermediate objectives (such as dominating the central squares, developing the pieces, protecting the king, securing a material advantage, and so on)—must be carried out in a limited time frame (with the exception of the open time horizon of correspondence chess).

Chess is human communication. Each player, in each move, must understand the opponent’s message or soon fall into difficulties. In this way, the creative act is united with the capacity to understand the opponent’s intentions, resulting in a fight of ideas, wills, and creative imagination.

This facet of chess (its nature as a fight of ideas and wills) constitutes another important aspect of chess. The will that secures a winning combination awakens in the player a sensation of achievement that is accompanied by a feeling of superiority over the rival. But if the player loses the next game, this feeling then turns into exactly the opposite as the chess player looks inside himself for the reasons for his defeat rather than looking to the opponent’s skilled playing. Chess becomes an introspective window—a personal test where what matters is how the player sees himself and how he feels about his capacity to create and understand what happens on the board. And part of the act of creation during a game is the discovery of the possibilities that a position offers. Even in a phase of the game like the opening—where so much theory exists and the main variations have been studied in their minutest aspects in innumerable volumes with analyses of all the relevant possibilities—it is still possible to find something that nobody has seen before.

In Modern Ideas in Chess, Reti proposes two levels of recognition of the creativity and beauty in chess. The first and most evident is related to the sacrifice and its capacity to astonish, and the second is connected to an advanced knowledge of chess (such as the beauty that shines when a strategic plan is achieved). Nevertheless, sacrifice is the generator of beauty par excellence in chess. This is due to the emotions related to experiencing risk and to giving up material to secure a higher objective.

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