I am learning how to play chess.
I’ve never learned before. Okay, that’s a lie. I learned in elementary school and even played a game or two back in the day–the day, meaning when I wasn’t choreographing dance moves to New Kids on the Block or Debbie Gibson and filming the dance in front of a live studio audience made up of my stuffed animals. I didn’t like chess back in elementary school. I wasn’t exactly what you would call a strategic thinker (maybe you got that from the choreographing antics).
I haven’t touched the board since the sixth grade. Except to dust it. (We have this really cool one my husband got in Africa.) To be honest, I don’t really want to learn now, what with learning how to be a mother and all. I think there’s enough learning going on.
But the story demands it. I can’t fake it.
So I checked out a couple of books from the library. (When my husband saw them, he mentioned that he already has some books on the subject and would be happy to teach me how to play. My husband is an excellent teacher when it comes to things like these, but I don’t want him to realize how stupid I am, so I’m reading about how to play first.)
The book I’m currently making my way through (slowly–see above comment about learning how to be a mother; see also numerous tweets about having a boy who doesn’t believe in naps) is Let’s Play Chess: A Step-by-Step Guide for New Players by Bruce Pandolfini.
When the man says “step-by-step…for new players,” he wasn’t joking. With some detail, he explains the chessboard, the difference between a board and pieces, between White and Black players (meaning, according to the lighter and darker squares on the board, not according to ethnicity), between a piece and a pawn. He describes what a move is and informs us that you can’t capture your own forces (no friendly fire here!). He defines legal and illegal moves: “A legal move abides by the rules of the game: it can be played. An illegal move violates the rules of the game: it can’t be played.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
He also gives us handy mantras and mnemonic devices, like “light on right” (to remember the starting position of the board for naming the horizontal ranks and the vertical files) and “queen on the square of her own color.”
Here’s the interesting thing: chess raises existential questions, like the fact that you can’t move a unit in two different directions on the same turn (except for the knight), or that while the rest of the pieces retain their original queenside or kingside designations throughout the game, no matter which side they have now moved to, the pawn is renamed every time it moves. Identity crisis? Chameleon?
Perhaps there’s a story to the game itself, to how the pieces move, to how they exist in time and space. Maybe this will be my saving grace as I attempt to relearn this difficult enterprise.
Or, perhaps, I’m doomed, for according to Bruce, “If you can’t ‘see ahead’ it’s hard to play chess with logic and purpose.” I’m more of a live-in-the-moment sort of girl.
