This is the second part of the article, “Chess, Life and Happiness”. The author is Luca, an RCA student. If you missed the first part, you can read it here. (I recommend you to do so – you will learn about the value of independent thinking and lots more)
Luca Valsecchi
Now you may continue studying the article, and enjoy the well-thought ideas about the interconnection of chess and life.
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STRIVING FOR ACTIVITY
In chess, when we succeed in keeping our pieces active, or even better, more active than those of our opponent, we enjoy a wide choice of good moves and plans. Or, which is the same thing: if we’ve been able to restrict the opponent’s activity we reduced also the number of viable options, making more difficult for him/her to find good moves.
And you can even drive your opponent in the anti-activity zone: the zugzwang, where all his/her options are bad!
Activity is a major, powerful factor in chess, and surprisingly (to those who don’t know about the deep connection between chess and life) so is in life. In both cases, activity takes a lot of different forms and shapes. It is a general concept that applies to countless specific, concrete situations.
All living beings must do something: moving, acting, reproducing, just to increase the chances to survive. A human being in the current society should always stay active physically and mentally, engaged in many undertakings in different fields. New things, interests, friends, challenges should be periodically injected in our life to keep it flexible, healthy, and full of opportunities.
In chess as in life, activity is somewhat a potential entity; you have to cash in at the right moment, transforming it into a real, permanent result: a +1 on the tournament table, a successful project ending, a sum on your bank account. Then, you move on to something else.
Inactivity, stillness, repetition have to be avoided at all costs. I think you got the point: you can master activity in chess, understand its paramount importance and necessity, and then exploit that awareness in real life!
Suggested course: “Grandmaster’s Positional Understanding” – learn everything about piece activity, and positional principles.KEEPING THE TENSION
This is a great concept, which I knew about only thanks to GM Igor Smirnov’s teaching. In any chess position, if we initiate exchanges of pieces or pawns on a given square, when the exchanges are over, an uncontested adversary piece or pawn remains sitting on that square.
So, unless we can detect a compensation for this fact somewhere else on the board (e.g. favorable tactics, new open lines for our pieces and many possible others) we would better keep the tension, avoiding taking first. To do so we must be ready to accept and stand a bit of psychological pressure, because we have to keep under control a more complicated position, which requires constant attention (and calculations) from our side.
True, we put our opponent in the same situation also, and this is why keeping the tension is so a powerful technique. Why instead we weaker players tend to release the tension?
The answer is quite easy: we just like to take a temporary relief executing few forcing moves, getting rid of some opponent’s disturbing pieces or options we somewhat fear. But generally, during a chess game, we really cannot afford this luxury. It is also not logical, because very often it favors the opponent’s activity and initiative.
Remember: To take is a mistake! Get “Secrets of Strong Chess Players” now (FREE course)
In a similar way sometimes in real life, we are confronted with difficult or complicated situations. Understandably, we would like to get rid of them very quickly and in a simple manner. But by settling for a quick resolution or liquidation on somebody else’s terms, we will most likely lose something.
It is better to keep up all the options till the last moment, looking for some advantage. Of course we must be smart and strong enough to withstand the stress. You can train this skill at no risk on the safe chess domain. Then you can put them to your use in more serious contingencies.
TIME MANAGEMENT
The factor of time enters in many chess-related activities. The most basic aspect is the concept of “tempo“, i.e. the right to move that the opponents alternately have during an actual game of chess. The value of a tempo can easily be decisive to win a game.
Even in the starting position when there is no contact between the two armies (they are in fact rather distant) the right to move gives White a small but definite advantage. In the middle-game, if just we had once the right to move twice, we would most likely get a winning position.
During play, we trade a “tempo” for a move on the board, then it’s opponent’s turn! In this respect we want to invest that tempo as opposed to spend it. Spend would mean to make a useless move, investing means to make a “right” move that brings us an advantage, immediately or in the near future.
The same applies to the time we allocate to deliberate on a move during a chess game and the time we plan for training. If we target to win over-the-board chess tournaments, one hour of game analysis probably is a better investment than playing one hour of bullet or blitz on the internet servers. Everything we do should be an investment, not an expense.
If we have learned this lesson in chess, we will think twice before wasting our time (or money, or efforts) in our everyday life.
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As someone said (here I imagine a “spaghetti western” movie kind of character speaking) “Everyone has a time to live and a place to die”!
THINKING PROCESS IS EVERYTHING!
It was not before I studied one of the basic RCA courses that I really grasped this idea. The largest knowledge is useless if you don’t have a thinking process to engage it quickly. In fact, very little knowledge is needed to play very good chess, as long has you have the needed skills.
Those skills can be learned one by one and incorporated into the thinking process until they become like conditioned reflexes. Then you literally forget about them and you will act effortlessly and with absolute precision. This is clearly not an easy task, otherwise we would all be GMs, but the fact is, in order to improve in chess you have to make the effort to continuously hone and train your thinking process.
During that training, a peculiar discipline is needed, namely the ability to control the flow of our thoughts. This discipline is a skill in itself. We learn not to let our thoughts spinning in random associative chains but we exclude some and we keep just the ones we choose. These skills have the deepest value to me, and to explain why, please allow me a little digression.
We can all agree on the fact that a desirable thing in life is simply happiness. One could even go further and say that happiness is life’s goal, but I would not go that far, since this is a quite subjective opinion. I read once and never forgot a technical definition of what happiness really is:
“A state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time“.
What an interesting, scientific definition! One of its merits is that it’s devoid of any reference to specific external circumstances (money, love, honors etc.). I invite you to spend some time thinking by yourself about its implications. , namely on what we think most of the time, i.e. on our thinking habits.
Once we learned the methods to train ourselves to establish good thinking habits in chess (substituting the bad ones), what prevents us to apply the same criteria to start to improve the quality of our thinking in general?
But this topic goes well beyond the scope of this article. At any rate, chess training gives us the opportunity to “learn how to learn” and this could be a very powerful tool if used imaginatively on different life’s aspects.
CONCLUSIONS
- The real world and the chess world seem to follow the same blueprint.
- We just scratched the surface, listing some of the most noticeable analogies and synergies, with few comments.
- There are many others, less obvious connections that are left for further investigations.
- Indeed, chess is much more than a simple game!
P.S. I really enjoyed Luca’s article. How about you? Feel free to write your thoughts in the comments below.Remember: you’ve gotta be active! 
