by Sita

Created on: August 15, 2011

"He taught himself to play chess by watching," my grandmother always said. "There was a program at the park, and your dad wanted to play, but the counselor said he was too young. So he stood there and watched, and by the end of the summer, do you know- your dad was beating the counselor." Maybe that was why he taught me to play when I was just a child myself.

Or maybe it was because the game of chess is more than just the sum of the board and its pieces. I read somewhere once that in its earliest forms, chess was really just a battle simulation, and in a way, it still is. Yet there's a physical game, and a psychological game. The game my father played that first summer was psychological.

A pawn can force a king to act, Each piece has its own significance, its own role. Yet that's not the real game, is it?

The real game is watching, waiting- learning your opponent's strategy. Its planning ahead and scouting out a similar plan, or lack thereof, from your opponent. You can't play chess well if you aren't paying attention. If you play the same person more than once, you come to know which pieces they depend on, which ones they will sacrifice. You learn how to improvise when your original plan doesn't go as you thought, or you struggle on the defensive while all your men get captured for your mistakes.

I used to play against my sister, waiting for the time when my dad would be free to play a game. But it wasn't any fun. All you had to do was capture her queen, and regardless of the rest of the game, it sent her into this downward spiral she didn't know how to recover from. That was her strength, and without that piece her entire strategy fell apart.

My dad would sit down and begin each game almost exactly the same way. It was unnerving. You'd almost think he didn't think you'd learned anything at all, that he was going to get you the exact same way he did last time. I realize now that sometimes I was so busy trying to figure out if he was even taking it seriously that I would get taken by surprise by things I should have easily seen coming. Or he'd spend so much time thinking about what ended up being so simple of a move that I would be looking for the set up, ending up seeing one that wasn't there and protecting the wrong portion of the board. I don't remember that he ever spoke much during these games, though we'd begged so long for the time to be spent in playing them. It was easy to imagine, during one of those well-thought out turns, how a game of chess could

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