Check, Mate

I’ve never understood the game of chess. Or math. Or strategy, for that matter. Other than that, I think chess is the perfect game to play. When you stop to think about it, it’s even a good analogy for life, if your life is anything like mine. Since I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time, I cross my fingers, fake my way through it, and hope my queen doesn’t get taken out. 

There’s just one problem. In my life, I’m the queen. And usually I’m in jeopardy, so maybe a better name for this game would be Jeopardy.

I “learned,” and I use that word liberally, to play chess when I was ten and my opponent was old.  “It’s not really that complicated,” he told me. I had my doubts. Not only did it look complicated, but it also looked boring. Where were the dice? The gingerbread pawns from Candyland? The colorful spinners? Right away I knew I was being set up for failure.

But since I had a grownup paying attention to me, I pretended to enjoy moving little wooden toys around on top of a map while I tried not to die.

“It’s not a map,” he began. “It’s a chess board. And the pieces here aren’t toys. That’s not a horse, it’s a knight. The knight doesn’t move like the other pieces. It’s sneaky. It moves over one and up two.”

I scratched my chin as I listened. So, the horses in chess can dance, cha cha cha. Or else they stumble over their feet, like they’ve had too much to drink. Got it.

“What about the little castles?” I asked. “What do they do?” Well, they weren’t castles, I was told. They’re rooks. But they looked like castles, so why not call them castles? "Because that's not their name," I was told.

I let out a sigh. This was such an old person’s game.

Nothing about chess seemed normal to me. It was confusing. The pawns were the weakest players, but as a consolation they could move two spaces forward on their first attempt. After that, they lost all motivation. They had no awesome superpowers like the little castle pieces, I mean rooks. Rooks can slide all the way across a whole row of squares, forward or backward or sideways, like they’re wearing ice skates. That’s cool.

The best thing about pawns is that you can use them for ransoms. That’s not the best thing if you’re a pawn, though, because it means you’ll be sacrificed when you reach the other end of the board instead of being rewarded for crawling all the way over there while avoiding enemy capture. 

That’s not how we treat our own military, and I don’t think pawns should be treated that way either. “No man left behind,” that’s our motto. But if you’re a pawn, all bets are off. At the finish line, you’ll be finished. Then you'll be exchanged for a more important, yet careless, player who failed his mission and was taken hostage earlier.

If you ask me, that’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Pawns, it turns out, are only useful if they agree to go to prison and be tortured in place of a castle or a horse or a vain queen who was too busy flirting with the bishop to avoid being captured. 

So, we began to play. The object of the game was to act like I was learning strategy. I’m not a very good actor. I play chess like most people play checkers—hurry and get all your pieces over to the other side of the tiled squares so you can be King. Incorrect. That’s how you get all your pieces moved off the board and your King gets checkmated.

Oh.

And while we’re on the subject, what’s up with the King? He’s actually less powerful than a pawn. It’s like he’s got shackles on his ankles. No one respects a King with shankles. He can only move one square at a time in any direction. So why is he the King? The queen is way more powerful. Just like the little castles, she can slide from one end of the board to the other any time she wants to, and even diagonally, like she’s doing retail therapy in a shopping mall. But the King? The guy making all the money? His feet are glued to the floor watching everyone else have all the fun.

Who came up with these rules? I bet it was the Queen.

I began to make my horse do fancy dancing, sent my rooks sailing into my opponent’s bishop and soon there was a growing graveyard of all my players lying in enemy territory, giving me dirty looks. It was disappointing to find out that bishops are actually sneaky and violent—they crash into you diagonally when you least expect it. That's not very spiritual. But it is convenient that they know how to deliver the last rites.

I was having so much fun I couldn’t wait for the game to be over. When, after an hour, it was finally finished, I had three pawns left, all frantically trying to take down a King while they dodged an entire brigade of horses and castles. I had managed to eliminate five of my opponent’s pawns and watched in dismay as my queen pledged allegiance to the other team.

It ended the way I knew it would. In simple terms, my strategy was to name all the horses, have the bishop marry the Queen to her King, watch as they welcomed eight little baby pawns into their royal family, and live happily forever in their tiny little castles.

“That’s not how you play chess,” I was told right after I was checkmated. Well, that’s not true. I just proved that’s how I play chess.

Come to think of it, that’s the last chess lesson I ever had. Maybe I do know strategy.

With thanks to Ingrid Lemaire for permission to use the darling photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: chess | look at the birds behind her on the wall | Ingrid Lemaire | Flickr