You love it or you hate it (Chess)

Member Name: Bryn Pearson

Product:	Chess
Date:	13/02/02 (85 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: it passes the time, fair scope for strategic thinking

Disadvantages: totally confrontational, generally two players only, takes a great deal of learning.

THose who are god at ches consider it to be a superb game which takes real genius to play. Those of us possessed of less talent for the game find it frustrating and have been known to throw peices at people....It doesn't seem to make much odds are good you are at other games (throing modesty to the wind, I have to say I'm generally a pretty decent game player) Chess requires a certain kind of mind and mindset. Some people, like me, just never fully get the hang of it.

I first learned chess as a child - taught by my father, who as far as I can make out is a pretty good player. I played all the way through school, and was ... passable, never good. I find this game enormously frustrating and to be honest, I don't even like it much. I'm sure I'm not alone, so, anyone else out there who can't play, don't let it make you feel like some sort of intellectual misfit.

Ok, the game. The point is to overpower your enemy, either by killing most of their peices, or by trapping them. You trap them bu trapping the King, who can't move much. Normally if you land on a piece belonging to your opponent, that peice is removed from the board. The King cannot be removed in this way, but if you have a piace lined up and able to take him, the King is said to be 'in check' and must move out of the line of attack. If the King is unable to move - because he will move into the line of atatck of another piece, he is in 'checkmate' and there is a victory. if only two Kings remaine on the board, there is a stalemate.

You have a board with 64 squares on it, half black, half white. You have two players (normally)each player has 16 pieces which are laid out in a set way - on the row of squares at the end of their side of the board, they place their castles (rooks) one on each corner. Working into the middle, you then have knights (usually look like horses)then bishops, in the middle are the king and queen. The front row consi
sts entirely of pawns. Pawns move on space at a time, except in their first move when they can go two spaces. They can only go forwards in a straight line, except when they take other pieces, at which poin the move forward diagonally. Rooks move in stright lines and can go up down an across the board any number of squares. Knights move weirldy - one forwards, one diagonal, in any direction. They can jump over pieces (which doe snot take them). Bishops move in diagonal lines and can move any number of spaces in any diagonal direction. Queens can move both in straight lines and diagonally, and are not limited in the number of spaces they can move. Kings can move one space in any direction. There are some other moves like castling, but these really require diograms, so you will have to find a chess book if you want to know about them!

As you can probably gather from the above, the core rules of chess are fairly complex and take a bit of getting the hang of. On top of that there are acres of strategy - I could fill this site with the small amount I know, which would be a thankless task. There are books you can buy or borrow from the library if you want to learn thigns like opening moves, conealed attacks and the like.

If you are learning, I would recomend buying a very ordinary set to start with - novelty sets are all well and good, but it makes it harder to remember the moves associated with various peices, and when you face players with different boards, it can get a touch confusing.

Chess works best when the players are of equal apptitude and think in much the same way. I've played with people who are about as good as I am - who can put together a strategy lasting three or four moves, can feint, and disguise attacks a little, and that works just fine. I find playing with people who have been taught is just horrible, (and yes, I do always lose, I generally play to see how long I can last.) if you re teaching a child to play, this tends t
o be an issue - its well worth 'losing' now and then or else they will rapidly cease to be interested.

I married someone who has taken classes on the art of chess playing, who has learned chess theory, openings, strategies, manouvers and the like. The game is almost like a science, and apparently there is a lot you can learn. He's taught me a great deal, but the more I discover about chess, the less I find I like it. I think it depends a lot on who much you enjoy the notion of working with a large, but not infinite number of variables.

I will share with you a teaching method that Jonathan used to improve my chess. Set up pawns on one side of the board, just pawns. On the other, place a pair of pieces - the rooks, the bishops or the knights. Work through all of them, excepting the king. The idea is to get a pawn to the far side of the board, or to prevent this. It's a good way of learing how to use the pieces and the board, and it did wonders for me. It's a fascinating exersize, and it does teach you a lot about the game without having to plough through acres of books.

Why don't I like chess? I've been pondering this question for about a year. Technically, I should be bright enough to be able to play it, I can manipulate a reasonable amount of information, I can formulate strategies. I think part of my problem is that playing depends on being able to take in and asses a vast amount of visual information - something I am not so hot at. To play chess well, you must be able to comprehend the board, to look at what is going on and see the relationships between every piece. Each move alters that relationship and changes the possible actions. I will admit, that holding this much visual information in my mind is a struggle as I think predominantly in words. While you can to a certain extent play the person (most people can be unsettled in some way) there is less scope in chess than in many other games. My preference i
s for larger games with more players, where a combination of competition and assistance is required - chess is entirely confrontational in nature, and this reduces it's appeal for me.

Some variants on a theme of chess, if you want a bit of fun.

Variant one, you take five chessboards, placing four round each side of the fifth. You have four players, each with a set of pieces and each starting on a seperate board. The idea is to get everyone else into checkmate. Once you are in checkmate, you cannot move your pieces until or unless another player releases you from the checkmate. It takes a long time, you really do need four sets of pieces that look different, but it's a lot more interesting because you have scope for working with people as well as against them.

Variant two required three people, two rooms, and three chess boards. Persons one and two have a chess board with two sets of pieces, only one of which is one the board. person three needs a portable set. The two players play blind, moving their pieces out onto the board. Person three will tell them if they can't move into a square or if they have taken a piece. I've not tried playing this as it requires a phenomenal skill for holding a map of the board in your head, but I gather from people who have that it is really interesting.

If you hate chess, don't feel that you're somehow wrong - you aren't alone, and it's not the best game on the face of the planet. It favours a certain style of thought and a good visual memory - not everyone has those. I find the best thing to do after being slaughered at chess is play scrabble - I might not be the best at spelling, but I understand the board and have a knack for finding good words..... There's always a way of cheering yourself up if you can't play this particular board game, and being good at chess does not necessarily mean you are any sort of super genius, it just means you have the sort
of mind that works well for chess.

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