M2M Day 353: Wow, chess is a beautiful game
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For October, my goal is to defeat world champion Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess.
Today, I turned a corner in my chess development: I’m finally starting to appreciate the beauty in the game, which is fueling my desire to improve my chess game in the traditional way, in addition to the algorithmic way.
Before starting this month’s challenge, I was a bit concerned about studying chess. In particular, I imagined that learning chess was just memorizing predetermined sequences of moves, and was worried that, by simply converting chess to memorized patterns, the game would lose some of its interest to me.
In the past, while playing chess with friends, I’ve enjoyed my reliance on real-time cleverness and intuition, not pattern recognition. I feared I would lose this part of my game, as I learned more theory and began to play more like a well-trained computer.
Ironically, this fear came true, but not in the way that I expected. After all, my main training approach this month (my algorithmic approach) effectively removes all of the cleverness and intuition from the gameplay, and instead, treats chess like one big, boring computation.
This computational approach is still thrilling to me though, not because it makes the actual game more fun, but because it represents an entirely new method of playing chess.
Interestingly though, adding to my chess knowledge in the normal way hasn’t reduced my intellectual pleasure in the game as I expected. In fact, it has increased it.
The more I see and understand, the more I can appreciate the beauty of particular chess lines or combinations of moves.
Sure, there are certain parts of my game that are now more mechanical, but this allows me to explore new intellectual curiosities and combinations at higher levels. It seems there is always a higher level to explore (especially since my chess rating is around 1200, while Magnus is at 2822 and computers are at around 3100).
The more normal chess I’ve learned this month, the more I’m drawn to pursuing the traditional approach. There is just something intellectually beautiful about the game and the potential to make ever-continuing progress, and I’d love to explore this world further.
With that said, this isn’t a world that can fully be explored in one month, so I’m happily continuing with primary focus on my algorithmic approach.
To be clear, I’m not pitting the algorithmic approach against the traditional approach. Instead, I’m saying: “Early in this month, I fell in love with the mathematical beauty of and the potential to break new ground with the algorithmic approach. Just today, I’ve finally found a similar beauty in the way that chess is traditionally played and learned, and also want to explore this further”.
In other words, this month, I’m developing two new fascinations that I can enjoy, appreciate, and explore for the rest of my life.
This is the great thing about the M2M project: It has continually exposed me to new, personally-satisfying pursuits that I can continue to enjoy forever, even once the particular month ends.
Today, my brain suddenly identified traditional chess as one of these lifelong pursuits.
If I had this appreciation for traditional chess at the beginning of the month, I wonder if I would have so easily and quickly resorted to the algorithmic approach, or if I would have been held back by my romanticism for the “normal way”.
Luckily, this wasn’t the case, and now I get to explore both in parallel.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
