Games of chess and musings on creativity
Absolutely nothing to do with food
Lately I have been binging the Blind Boy podcast, if you know you know. If you don’t, know, please treat yourself. I am overwhelmed by the wide breadth of things that he talks about. He goes on these ridiculous tangents and then out of nowhere, somehow, he finds the perfect link back to his main point and you are left thinking ‘yes, of course that sex-crazed Catholic saint has everything to do with a mass extinction event caused by reverse photosynthesis. It all seems so obvious now.’ That’s how I wanna be.
The area that has fascinated me the most of his musings is those on creativity. His insistence that creativity is an essential part of being human. That life finds a way to tell stories. That creativity is never about reward or recognition. That the act of creating to achieve or be successful is damaging to the creative process, the flow state.
About a year ago, I read Rick Rubin’s ‘The Creative Act’ on the emphatic recommendation of a friend. There is significant overlap and interplay between their attitudes to creativity. It seems to me certain that they move in the same circles and have either met or been inspired by each other before. Veterans of the podcast, please tell me if Blind Boy ever mentions Rubin. It seems facile to mention these two giants in passing in a blog post about something else entirely, but that is what I’m doing. I am borrowing their brains for a tiny morsel. Hopefully, they don’t mind. Simply put, to create is to be alive. We owe it to ourselves to be playful in all that we do.
To be alive is to create. And I think that due to instant gratification culture and fast-food-esque short form content, I have lost that truth somewhere along the way. It has bled into every medium that I hold dear. Why did I just watch a hundred plus 7 second videos on how to make souffle?? Why did I do that?? Did video 99 not cover the basics enough for me?? What the hell is happening to my silly little brain. And NEVER has it been more clear to me than when I play chess.
Chess is wonderful. Anyone who has played for a long time will know this, even if they have fallen out with it from time to time. It is complicated, yet beautifully simple. It is frustrating and yet so very satisfying. For me, chess acts as synecdoche for the act of creating, or more specifically, what it feels like to give yourself to a discipline with no hope of becoming great.
I think I peaked at 1500 ELO on Rapid and Blitz. This probably means very little to the vast majority but maybe one person reading this is now nodding their head right now in approval. It’s respectable. It shows a dedication to the game. Now, I am not a clever person when it comes to numbers, calculations or anything mathematical. I have had to fail so so much in chess, to feel that I was getting nowhere slowly, to struggle against my own inner makeup, to get here. Blind Boy says that failure is an essential part of the creative process. Failure is healthy, it’s growth, it’s human. Boy do I feel human.
Back to chess. The amount of times I have decided to get good, the times I have sat down and crammed opening theory only for it to slowly fade out of my daily routine as life gets in the way, is silly. But here we are. 10 years of playing. 42,000 online games. An average rating at best.
I have fallen out of love with chess. Over. and. over. again. Last year my new years resolution was to stop playing bullet and blitz games because it was effectively making me sad. Never improving, playing the same three openings with the black pieces and the same one opening with white every day, with no improvement. Moving those silly digital pieces almost with muscle memory. No thoughts behind those dead eyes. And the playfulness of chess was not there. If I won it was through no skill or innovation of my own, it was down to being faster than the other idiot playing the same banal opening. Or it would be a position I had reached literally thousands of times. When I won I felt nothing. The joy of tactics and the romance of playing for joy of playing had been lost a long time ago. I never got better. I never got worse. The most innocuous stasis known to man. I knew what it would take to improve. Chess is like any sport. The better you are, the more you realise how high the mountain goes. The Dunning Kruger effect. The more you learn, the stupider you feel.
So here we are, circa 2023, chess is a stupid game for nerds and I hate it.
But that has all changed in the last few years. I have fallen in love with impromptu chess. Over the board. Out of nowhere. During a party where you felt awkward because you didn’t know anybody except for your girlfriend. In a hostel to break the ice. With the owner of a pub that you’ve been going to your whole life that you have never exchanged more than 3 words with.
I’m sat opposite my then-girlfriend. She saw that I was struggling with socialising so she found a chess set and suggested we play to set my mind at ease. It worked. Side note: what a beautiful thing to do. Aren’t humans just the best sometimes. I got lost in the game and forgot what social anxiety was for a few minutes. A guy is looking over my shoulder, not saying a word. His finger is placed comically on his lower lip as if he is a cartoon character and the artist needs to make it immediately clear to the audience that he is deep in thought. When our game is over, he talks about the position. He knows his shit. I’m suddenly in my comfort zone, talking about something I not only care about but have sufficient knowledge to riff freely with this stranger. After a bit more chess banter, we play. He boasts a much higher rating than me (but also a much higher blood-alcohol percentage). He plays romantically. Sacrificing material in the opening. I match his play-style and we have this wonderful wordless dialogue going. I castle queen side checking his open king and forcing him into the centre. He plays a defensive move that also sets up a mating net for my king. But his bishop is now pinned to his king. Meanwhile, on my opponents back rank, my rook lies dormant. I gained an early material advantage but because of this she has been trapped behind a blockade for half the game. Now, she activates like a sleeper agent. A few beautiful sacrifices later I can tell my new opponent is suddenly realising how precarious his position is. He locks the fuck in. Moves that he at first blitzed out now require 15 minute intervals where I can see his brain whirring into action. I was zoned into the board but now I let my eyes wander around the room. People are so much more interesting to look at from inside a chess game somehow. Finally, he squeezes me into an endgame but I have a few extra pawns and eventually he knows he is beat. We shake hands and the game is over. A rollercoaster of emotions. Arrogance turned to panic. Drunken carelessness became sober focus. And it all happened between the two of us. Nobody else feels the way we feel right now at this party. I see him later on and we talk about the game in a coded way that sounds like gibberish to the people around us.
One year later, I am travelling with one of my best mates. I’m in Mexico, Saint Cristobal, to be precise. I play so many games. It is an icebreaker. It is wordless dialogue. I win more than I lose, and eventually, word gets around that I’m alright at chess. It sounds silly but that’s what happened. I get challenged quite a lot and I go on a hot streak. I win consistently. Maybe part of it is the feeling of being appreciated for something I am good at. Reward and recognition: the death of the flow-state. Reluctantly, a guy we vaguely know through friends sits down opposite me. He is the life of the party, yet understated. We get on so well with him. He is excited to play, but I can tell a part of him is wondering why on earth we are playing chess in the middle of a hostel at 8pm on a Friday. He starts as white. We enter a mainline Caro Kann position and very early on I can tell that he was being incredibly modest. I think he told me he doesn’t play anymore which should have been the alarm bells moment, but maybe I was riding a bit of a high. Pieces fly off the board. He is unbelievably solid. He says opening theory is not his forte, he is more of a maverick, playing chess the way it should be played: for fun. Is this move fun? Then I’m playing it. I copy this mentality and we are in a position I have never seen before move ten. The rest of the game goes like this. We both take long breaks to think, and even then, both our fingers linger above the pieces we want to move before touching them. There is a strange intimacy to the silence before a move. Eventually, he gets a winning position and I blunder a skewer on my king on the a-file. He takes the piece tentatively, not sure if it’s a trap. It’s not. It’s a clean rook. I smile and shake his hand. We go on to play online for days after while we both travel and eventually we stop, but I can’t wait to bump into him again in the wild and get my rematch.
Later that same year, I am home. The adventures of my travels growing more and more of a distant memory, but there are noticeable changes for those that look. One such change is my confidence amongst strangers. Myself, my cousin, sister and father are in a pub on a family holiday destination we go to religiously once a year. The pub is beautiful. I only noticed recently just how incredible this strange place is. We are playing Perudo (a dice gambling/bluffing game) when the owner comes to sit with us out of the blue. We know him, or at least everyone else seems to. Until now, I don’t think I’ve exchanged more than a ‘thank you’, or a ‘take care’ with him. My sister says that I play chess. I forget how it comes up, but suddenly we are setting up the pieces. Everyone else gets on with other games (I think bananagrams?) and we enter what I can only describe as a bubble. I can’t remember a game as thrilling as our first. d4, d5, c4: the queens gambit. Known for its solid reputation. Then… e5!! The albin countergambit. Immediately, my prep is out the window. He smiles at my expression. From here, he tests the waters. He plays slightly dubious moves to see if I punish them. I do. He straightens his back and narrows his eyes. Early on, I win a clean bishop through an ambitous pin gone wrong on his side. I feel in control. Then suddenly, less than a dozen moves later I look at my position and suddenly I see there is no oxygen. My rooks are suffocating while his pieces sing to each other. There is a playfulness to his chess that I have only just seen. No-one knows how exciting this game is except for us. My heart is genuinely racing. I make some bold choices in the middle of the board that prompt an eyebrow raise. But then he sees the vision. His king has no legal moves. My rook takes away the d-file and my pawn boxes him into his place. I slowly and precisely manoeuvre my knight so it is one jump away from mating him. But he defends well. Now, there are two defenders lazering c6 from the other side of the board, just waiting for my knight to move. And then I see it. Queen sac. Rook sac. Mate. It is beautiful. I think my opponent sees it simultaneously because we both smile, eyes widening. I calculate. My eyes close. I can feel the alcohol hit just a little more. Dutch courage. I want to do it so badly. And then at the last second, I see deeper into the position. He has to take the queen, that’s a given. He doesn’t have to take the rook. Not immediately. There is a concept in chess called zwischenzug. An in-between move. If you are in check, it takes precedent over any other move your opponent makes. They have to deal with the threat first. He can take my queen, check my king and then due to that in-between move, there is one more defender on c6. With all the energy gone from my body, I remove my king from danger, we exchange a few pieces. The game goes on for a very long time. At one point, a live band starts playing and my opponent whips out his fiddle to join in. One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The game ends in a tactically sound draw. A pawn race turns into a queen v queen endgame and we shake hands. The firm grip of mutual respect.
Just before we leave later that week, I get to play him twice more. A brutal prep-heavy Caro Kann takedown gives me a point and a tactical, yet very beautiful counterattack, which traps my queen into a trade relinquishing defence of my centre pawns, gives him the equaliser. We are currently playing a ‘Daily’ move game where we have days to make decisions.
All of this is to say, in the longest most convoluted way imaginable, (and thank you anybody who read this far, this one is a MESS and I appreciate you) this is to say that I hate reels. I hate bullet chess. I hate that instant gratification culture has crept up on me even in the things I considered important. But those things can’t take away my love of chess.
Just like chess, life can be beautiful and romantic, or it can be monotonous and pointless. It all depends on how and why you play.
I love meeting strangers. I love getting to know them without talking to them. I love waiting for the next move and letting my eyes wander off the board and see the random things that are happening around me. I love chess as a facilitator for conversation. I love that you can get to know someone in an entirely different and weirdly personal way by the way they play. I love that conversation flows out of someone easier when their mind is focused on something else. Like Rebecca in the Picanteria. Like facing forward on a long car journey, so you don’t have to look someone in the eye when you tell them something important. I love ephemeral chess games that only exist as a fading image in my head.
I hope that this has been an enjoyable read. I just sat down and wrote. I think this is the way I’m going to write here in the future. I’m not writing for anybody, and when I don’t write for a purpose I can write whatever I want. I can empty my brain instead of filling it up with more things. And the food side of my writing is not going anywhere. But I have learnt something about my own creativity from Blind Boy. That I’ve been so caught up with creating a brand for myself, Jakey’s Food Stories, that I have been writing for an imaginary yet very particular audience. I should just write for the joy of writing. For the feeling of saying things that I actually want to say, no matter how they are recieved. At the end of the day, creativity is something beautiful and human, not something commercial.
I said the word human so much in this one, it has stopped being a word.
I’m finding it difficult to end this one because my restless fingers want to keep writing, which is a feeling I haven’t felt in YEARS. It’s making me slightly emotional. I want to write about the human need for an ending next, some very interesting conversations about endings recently. Also, the owner of that bar is making a chess board out of 5000 year old bog oak! He also showed me about six chess sets that he and his carpenter friend have made together! It was very cool.
Love you all ! Take care out there xx
