Why I Hate Chess

I’m a believer in the idea that 95-ile isn’t that good. I remember reading this post for the first time years ago and agreeing with the author’s point that although the idea initially sounds elitist, in fact it’s quite encouraging, because it suggests that most people can actually achieve much more than they initially think if they follow certain principles. Additionally, I just think it’s fulfilling to try to do a good job at whatever I put my time towards doing.

Throughout my life, one of my big hobbies was playing chess. I’ve gone through three main periods when I really got into the game: once in high school, once in college, and once during the pandemic. As someone naturally inclined to playing strategy games and with a competitive streak, chess is an activity that is about as objective as it gets when it comes to ranking its players based on skill. It uses a commonly understood Elo rating scale and I think most people have been exposed to it one way or another, particularly in recent years after its explosion in popularity after the Queen’s Gambit show. However, despite it often being portrayed in the media as a game requiring intelligence to master, I think that (like almost all things) anyone can get quite good at it if they really want to.

The first thing to know is that chess can be played with many different time controls ranging from truly degenerate online variants like ultrabullet (15-seconds per player) to the more formally played in-person / over-the-board classical (3+ hours) time controls. My favorite time control in chess has always been bullet chess (or 1|0, i.e. one minute per player, zero increment per move). My reasoning is that it’s an ideal time control where you can still play a full-fledged game of logical moves without it being so accelerated that the person with the fastest mouse speed wins but also without it being so slow that you have to dedicate a large chunk of time to playing a single game. This also means that iteration cycles can be shortened, which is important because this allows one to become exposed to many different scenarios in a short amount of time. I think this is an important feature in many areas of life, because the faster you make mistakes, the faster you can improve.

For as long as I can remember, my opening strategy in chess has been heavily tailored towards speed chess. Whereas many “classically trained” chess players possess a repertoire of many openings for each side (white and black), I have always played not only the same opening for each color but in fact the same opening for both colors (simply mirroring my white opening for black). My logic was that in limited time controls, it makes sense to focus my efforts on learning a single opening and learning it well instead of learning many different openings. Bullet chess heavily relies on pattern recognition and playing the same opening allowed me to experience playing against almost every possible type of response in the first x moves – meanwhile my opponents have rarely encountered opponents who play my opening. This often forces opponents to waste valuable time thinking about how to respond as I’m able to blitz out my familiar moves. This teaches the lesson that when everyone is zigging (with mainline theory), you can go a long way just by zagging (and playing offbeat sidelines). Even though my chess opening may be theoretically unsound (i.e. not perfect), it was still able to get me a long way. This can be seen in many areas beyond chess as well. One example that comes to mind is players who have questionable shooting form like Lonzo Ball who are still able to make it to the NBA. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be good enough. Many times, perfect is the enemy of good.

However, just because you have a fast iteration cycle, play a lot of games, and do something unorthodox doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll end up good at chess. You still have to learn from your mistakes and understand why you’re failing. This often means taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture. It’s easy to think that chess is just a matter of seeing your opponent make a move in front of you and having to figure out the best move to make in response. But in a game with such an expansive decision tree as chess, memorizing responses to different moves and positions does not scale well at all. No matter how many games you play, you’ll never encounter every chess position, which outnumbers the number of atoms in the universe. Instead, a far more efficient way to improve is to learn from repeated mistakes and internalize principles that can translate and apply to positions you’ve never seen before. Learning concepts like putting rooks on open files / ranks, trying to preserve the bishop pair, and understanding how to deal with open / closed boards are heuristics that will actually make you a better chess player and allow you to plan ahead instead of simply being someone who knows how to respond to specific moves. An important lesson to be learned here is to learn principles instead of memorizing things. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Last year in 2024, I checked out the premiere of the film The Thinking Game at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival. The movie is a biopic that chronicles the life of Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind (and a chess prodigy in his youth). I remember watching the scene of a young Demis going to an international chess tournament in which he entered a grueling endgame against an elderly Soviet master. It came down to a position where he just had to make a single move to secure a draw, but after playing for hours on end, he was so exhausted and had expended all his mental energy, that he made one final blunder that lost him the game. However, what was interesting was that although the loss was devastating, even worse was how so much brainpower was exhausted in a playing hall with hundreds of minds focused on playing a simple game. The rest of the movie documented how Hassabis put chess on the backburner and started pursuing other areas of his life like working at a video game company before eventually starting Google Deepmind, one of the companies spearheading the modern AI revolution. Many would consider this to be a much greater accomplishment than being good at pushing pieces on a wooden board or computer screen all day. It’s important to climb the right mountain and pick the right battles.

All in all, I think my experiences with chess have taught me some valuable lessons, as well as improved my deductive skills, mental endurance, and overall cognitive abilities. However, I generally think now that staring at a computer screen for hours on end battling kids from halfway around the world is not really a productive use of time at all (related to why I don’t care too much for video games). I consider myself more or less retired from chess and mostly try to stay away from it now (although I can still be coerced into playing a few games of 1|0 when I’m truly bored, or follow some professional events). Instead, I basically replaced playing chess with more active hobbies like running, which can help train both the body and mind at once (ASICS -- “anima sana in corpore sano” / “a sound mind, in a sound body”). Anyways, thanks for reading!