Thoughts from Rose Avenue

As soon as I was old enough to learn, my father taught me to play chess. He was not a chess player himself, but he knew the basic rules of the game, and he thought it was something I ought to know how to do.

Chess was way more interesting than checkers. I loved how each piece had its own way of navigating the board, and how the game’s idiosyncratic choreography led to unexpected situations that I had to improvise my way out of. After playing a few introductory games with my father, I began to play with my friend Carl, who lived across the street.

Carl was as new to chess as I was, so our games were played just for their entertainment value, mostly as a way to pass the time on rainy days. In a sense, I viewed chess the way I’d later view a game of Twister: The outcome didn’t matter so much as what sorts of interactions happened on the board.

Then, one day, everything changed. Shortly after our game began, Carl’s rook advanced inexorably toward me, and when it got far enough into my territory, it began to knock off my pieces, one by one. The game ended quickly, before I’d had much of a chance to do anything. The next game went the same way. Obviously, Carl had been studying.

What I discovered that day was that my father hadn’t really taught me chess. He’d taught me the rules of chess, but he’d left out the main part of the game, which was analyzing your opponent’s weaknesses, predicting how each move would play out down the line, and working out a strategy to limit your opponent’s available defenses against your attacks. In other words, it was about ruthlessly driving your opponent to defeat.

This is supposed to be the part of the story where I vow to learn all I can about chess strategy so I can exact my revenge on Carl, and go on to vanquish much better players. But in truth, that idea never occurred to me. I’d never seen the point of competitiveness. Sure, losing felt bad, but winning meant making my opponent feel bad, and where was the pleasure in that? I’d always thought that the idea of one person winning and one person losing was just to make sure that games had a way to end. If playing chess meant investing time, work, and emotional energy into defeating the other person, I didn’t see the point. It made much more sense just to quit playing chess.

While my father had been the one who introduced me to chess, it was my mother who taught me to play Scrabble. As with my father and chess, my mother was not a Scrabble player — mah jongg with “the ladies” was her game of choice — but she thought that learning Scrabble would encourage my interest in language, which was something that she shared. The Scrabble board was a place where I could show off the breadth of my vocabulary and engage in creative problem-solving, so playing the game came pretty naturally to me. My mother usually won, but that seemed only fair, since she was the one did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle every week. Part of the fun was watching how elegantly she played the game.

It was not until years later that I discovered that I had been as wrong about Scrabble as about chess. For real players, Scrabble was not about vocabulary at all. Playing it well required memorizing lists of words, but it wasn’t necessary to know what the words meant or how to use them in a sentence. For purposes of the game, they were merely sequences of letters, as arbitrary as the winning tile combinations on my mother’s mah jongg card.

Worse, Scrabble was as much about playing aggressively as chess had been. It wasn’t enough to make good use of the letters you’d drawn; you were supposed to keep track of which letters your opponents were likely to have, and prevent them from laying down the ones with higher point values. In fact, you were supposed, as much as possible, to prevent them from putting down any letters at all. Whenever I dared to play Scrabble as an adult, I was berated by my opponents for making it too easy for them. “Look!” they would say disparagingly. “You just opened up this whole section of the board for me!”

I didn’t get it. I thought I was doing a good thing. I always came up with my best Scrabble words when I had numerous options as to where to put my letters, so why wouldn’t I want to give other players the same opportunity? To do otherwise just felt mean-spirited.

Now that I think about it, I guess I’m just uncomfortable with the whole idea of strategy. Strategy has its places — for example, I try to load the dishwasher strategically, so that I can keep adding dishes throughout the day without having to rearrange anything — but in interpersonal affairs, it feels cynical. Strategizing means trying to outsmart other people, to take advantage of their blind spots, rather than aiming to be generous toward them. It’s certainly not an attractive part of human nature.

I understand that in the real world — particularly in business and politics — it’s often necessary to act strategically. People whose interests are different from yours are going to try to outmaneuver you, and they’ll do whatever they can to find an edge. You may need to do the same in your own defense. Games of chess, from what I understand, were long considered a training ground for military strategists, allowing them to cultivate skills that would aid them on the battlefield. Napoleon, for example, was known to be an avid chess player. But while I understand the necessity of learning those skills, I can’t find a way to experience them as a source of pleasure — especially among friends. We may live in a world of winners and losers, but recreate that world in microcosm on a game board? I don’t want to spend my leisure time plotting against people; I want to find ways to share with them.