Love & Chess

Chess is the ultimate board game but one could easily overdo it. Especially youngsters because the ambition always is to be the best, to be world champion, and of course there can be only one world champion. Even grandmasters are few and far between and computers these days seem invincible.

Enjoy it but watch out for the traps! The game can be learnt in a few minutes but a lifetime is not enough to master it. You should be very realistic to really enjoy the game.

To be a chess player is too serious and too much work for it  to be merely a game or an idle pastime and it is too frivolous for an occupation. Professional Chess does not pay well even the very best can hardly manage to make a living. An old Indian proverb says that it is a sea where a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe. Certainly I am not an expert at the game of chess nor on the subject. Although it is consolation that in fact nobody is really an expert and no-one can master the game.

My high school days were often very unhappy because of household and other personal problems. I managed to cope escaping in chess and in mathematics but I managed to maintain balance as far as that goes. 'Chess, like love, like music, has the ability to make men happy'. It is definitely a good thing and a worthwile activity.

~

Some of the guys took it much further especially the one friend, he was very good I think he's the best player I've known. He played blindfolded with apparent ease in his mind like that it is really impressive when you see it the first time:

There is a board with the men, one says your move in algebraic notation which he answers with his, and you in turn. He never sees the board. The game is played thus. A demonstration is really very good as a party trick he could do it even when was drunk and that too. He could actually play a few games at the same time and all of them blindfolded. He very seldom losed. He also believed in 'you can't keep on running away' and 'if you can't beat them join them'.

~

I was never much more than a good club-player. We do have a few International Masters here in SA and also a Grandmaster. We fell behind with the sports boycots those days.

Apparantly there are many more women and girls these days who enjoy and play competitive chess, in my days it was the exception. It is good clean fun a social pastime basically free of cost and of course the girls are all very popular! Still much less competition there!

By the way if a friend challenges you and wins every game at a time when you are man-down, insisting on playing all the time and when eventually you start winning again, and he starts losing games he suddenly now doesn't want to play anymore. He's not a friend he's a weakling.

~

Every position must have a best move (or equivalents, it is possible that there could be more than one). This will establish whether necessarily white wins, or black wins, or there is a draw.  

It seems to be a reasonably easily formulated problem in discrete mathematics. In principle such a simple description of an ultimate 'perfect game' is that of a universal 'best move' that follows after each best move.

The obvious question is is there a perfect game? And if then, what is the result? In fact it is not hard to show it does exist but to find it would need some kind of infinite computer. I can't really think how one should go about calculating a perfect game there would be far more distinct games than all the atoms in the known universe, at least more than many orders of a Googleplex! Yet still, the totality of games is a finite and unique number. One can actually easily demonstrate upper bounds.

~

Computers already seem unbeatable even an ordinary PC running a standard program can play at
grandmaster strength. Current computer programs follow methods quite similar to human players.  A program uses rules and criteria to evaluate each given position and it then makes tactical and strategic decisions based on that.

In its immense and almost infinite complexity after all it really is just a game. Boris Spassky said it is like life, and Bobby Fischer said that chess is life.

Is life a game of chess? It is a beautiful game, life is too short for chess.
+
After the game the king and pawn go into the same box.