It’s been a pretty eventful year.
That picture you see up above? We’ll get back to it, but for now let’s talk about some other things.
Like I was saying, it’s been a pretty eventful year.
I won’t get into the specifics of it but as you can imagine I’ve been able to take advantage of a lot of opportunity that’s made itself available to me by my move to California. New technologies to research, machines and programs to get proficient in and the availability of like minded individuals whom I have been able to communicate with and get ideas from. The promise of a new future and better tomorrow seems to be right around the corner and every day has been a task to maximize each hour in my day and pack as much as I can into each hour and minute that I’m able to be in California.
All this aside however and of all things that I’ve dealt with, I’ve had something come out of the woodworks and absolutely rock my world recently.
And that simple thing… was Chess.
Yes, that chess. The game that takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Chess has always been somewhat of a dark art for me, and with other more enticing activities to distract me I’ve never gone beyond the game aside from the fundamental rules of the pieces. I’ve never felt that the game was really relevant in any matter in my life.
AS IF IT NEEDED TO BE ANY HARDER
Well, that changed when I was challenged to a game of chess by a co-worker. We had some time to kill and he had the app on his iPhone, so we started playing a game. What transpired was really a brawl in the most basic essence of the term. There was no strategy, there was no thinking, we just blindly threw our pieces out there. We both took way to much time to over analyze the game and we both made blunders and mistakes. My pieces got massacred in short order but somehow I was able to still stay outside the confines of his players field of movement. My king danced around his bishops and knights and he increasingly grew frustrated because he couldn’t quite make the check. It got personal real quick, with him making rather obscene remarks about what he was going to do to my king once he managed to checkmate him.
NOTE TO READER: There are no funny chess comics.
Eventually, I lost. And it stung. It wasn’t so much as the losing part more so then the fact that we both really had no idea what we were doing and it was just a painful process. It felt like it I just had an iota of preparation then it could have worked out a lot better for me but I didn’t. So I did what I generally do when I’m confronted with something I just don’t quite understand and getting my ass kicked in it all the same
I jumped right at it and confronted it head on.
I really had other things to do but I made the conscious decision that this was something that was important for me and I made time in my schedule to deal with this particular problem of the month. I looked up chess material on the internet and eventually found (which shouldn’t have been a surprise) the chess.com website. Free membership allowed you to play against other players from across the world and you were ranked based on your wins and losses. You could play several variations of the game including timing limitation, tournament rules, etc.
The ranking system starts the players out (what turned out to be a very optimistic) 700 points. As you play the game your opponent was represented by a username, an avatar picture and a flag of his home country. I played against opponents from Kazakhstan, Egypt, Brazil, and a host of other flags that I didn’t recognize. As it turned out, it didn’t matter where the opponent was from because I was getting my ass royally handed to myself. It was bad, it was worst then any other ass kicking I’ve ever had on any other game, Nintendo, arcade, or even Playstation 3. My anger turned turned to rage then turned to legitimate concern that maybe the US really was that far behind on the education scale.
How on earth could I have played seemingly every variation of logic and electronic games just to turn around and get owned by this ancient game that predated anything other game that I’ve played up to now. This was not good. Forget everything that Mario, Doom, and Half-Life taught me about strategy and spatial situational awareness. This was applying a digital mindset to an analog environment and it was just not working.
USELESS
USELESS
SLIGHTLY LESS USELESS
USELESS
After my ranking dropped from the 700’s to the 400’s then to the sub 300’s, even the game was having issues matching me up with a similar ranked players. When I was getting consistent mid to high 400’s players and I was getting brutalized in every game, I realized that I had reached a point where outright repetition and drill was not going to cut it. It wasn’t too hard to imagine some kid on a monochrome 486 leftover owning me on this game. Hell, Dora the Explorer was probably making an example of me on this game. I needed to strategize and start figuring out the underlying system to the game and get some control of the situation here.
So I researched and discovered an entire rabbits hole of information on the game. What I needed to find out was where I was weak on the game and that was obviously my openings. I just did not have a firm ground strategy for getting my game off the ground.
I will not go into detail on it but suffice to say this particular video ended up being a major game changer for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kURU67G98O8needed something else.
The tactics behind chess are just ground shaking and phenomenal. Never have I experienced a medium where every move and aspect of the game has been calculated and recalculated to such a finite degree. Every possible move has a labeled variation to it, and the game of chess itself can be broken into different sections; the opening, the middle game, and the end game.
But the point of the blog wasn’t to particularly talk about chess itself, as I’m sure that can be left to your own devices if you ever cared to go that direction.
More particular, the point of my interest was the actual presentation of the chess board itself. One of the constants in the adventure has been the otherwise digital presentation of the chess board itself.
This presentation that you see above has been pretty consistent with the digital chess environment. It’s a top down view with clearly defined pieces with absolutely no visual overlap. When presented like this, it breaks every single piece down to it’s core element, and a user can easily imagine the pieces in terms of data points on a line graph, and not so much as the chess board itself. This is what I was used to.
Which made me all the more surprised when I was checking into a hotel over the weekend and they had a chess board out on the table. It looked like this.
Maybe it was just me, but despite these two photos picturing the exact same game, it looked like complete night and day differences to me. Maybe the pieces were manufactured wrong, or the symmetry just seemed off, or a multitude of other factors but that chess board just did not correlate with my experience with the digital chess board. I pushed around some of the white pieces experimentally, playing with some openings that I had practiced but everything just looked wrong. I couldn’t really tell the pieces apart at a glance and it was difficult to see if the bishop was clear to move or not.
It’s just amazing how just the difference in angle or presentation can have just such a staggering and shocking difference on the perceived aptitude of the game. Even though all the data points were still there, the game seemed completely different and alien in comparison to the digital aspect that I was familiar with.
Referencing the first photo, it makes you wonder how powerful of an effect this is when applied to other aspects of our lives. I guess that just goes to show that no matter how used to the data we are, never underestimate the ability of a fresh outlook on this. We just may notice something that we never have before.
Oh, and I’m doing considerably better in chess now.