SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B3
MYTH NO. 1
Chess is dull and unsexy.
“Does it seem to you like there just isn’t
enough televised chess on these days?”
David Letterman joked sarcastically in 1989.
More recently, coverage of “The Queen’s
Gambit” has expressed doubt about the
visual and dramatic appeal of the game.
Vanity Fair said that, to most people, the
game seems “dull and buttoned-up.” And the
Cut cried, “The Sexiest Show on Television Is
About... Chess?”
The Netflix series plays up the royal
game’s glamorous side and, yes, its sensual
side. But the connection between chess and
sex goes back centuries. Historian Marilyn
Yalom writes that medieval artists — in
manuscript illustrations, tapestries and
stained-glass windows, among other art
forms — treated the game as synonymous
with seduction: “A chess scene between a
man and a woman signified romance.”
Yalom also describes a work of fiction from
around 1400, called “The Book of Erotic
Chess,” in which “each move on the board
represented a decisive moment in the game
of love” between the characters.
Today’s international chess competitions
often feature just one game a day, in the
midafternoon — leaving players with plenty
of time to connect at drinks, long dinners
and parties. Some enthusiasts have even
compiled lists of the greatest “chess
couples” to have “found romance over the 64
squares,” and who have a combined rating of
over 5000 from the International Chess
Federation (FIDE).
MYTH NO. 2
Strong chess players see dozens
of moves ahead.
It’s an old cliche that the best players plot
long lines of future moves. In a 2010 profile,
Time magazine described Carlsen’s
“beautiful mind” and how he “often
calculates 20 moves ahead.” A recent ESPN
story about an 8-year-old chess prodigy
similarly marveled at his “ability to think 20
moves ahead.”
In fact, great chess players use a
combination of strategic intuition, pattern
recognition and calculation to decide their
moves; intuition alone is plenty to beat
much weaker players. Chess players do
think deeply about a position and its
possible outcomes. But they look sideways
as much as straight ahead, scanning the
board to see any possible moves they are
missing in their current position. If I look
ahead three moves but check five different
counters, that’s more total moves than
looking down a 10-move tunnel. It’s much
more useful, too: If you miss your
opponent’s “reply” in the middle of your 10-
move line, all the energy you spent looking
beyond your error is wasted. Man plans,
God laughs — or as we say in chess, “Long
variation, wrong variation.”
MYTH NO. 3
It takes genius to win at chess.
The public often associates chess with
intelligence — and chess champions with
preternatural brilliance. In the second
episode of “The Queen’s Gambit,” a librarian
tells the protagonist, Beth Harmon, that a
grandmasters — and what they have in
common is hard work. Chess playing is a skill
more than a fixed trait; excellence takes
dedication, time and a love for the process.
Along with practice games and tournaments,
and individual and group coaching sessions, a
serious chess training regimen often includes
the study of top players’ games, opening
strategies, endgames and checkmating
patterns. Serious players also use computers to
deeply analyze their own games.MYTH NO. 4Deep Blue’s win in 1997
meant the end of chess.“What would it really mean if Deep Blue
won?” Newsweek asked before the matchbetween Garry Kasparov and IBM’s
computer engine: “Some people have argued
whether chess would be diminished by this
upheaval.” I got a chance to visit the match
in New York; I remember the audience’s
simultaneous horror and awe at Kasparov’s
loss — and the laments that the computer
had “solved” chess. More recently, New
Scientist claimed that computers had been
“ruining” chess ever since Deep Blue and
that AI was “conquering” the game.
It’s true that, in time, the top computers
dismantled the top humans so easily it was
no longer competitive enough to be fun, and
the epic man vs. machine matches were
discontinued. But the death knell was
premature. The game’s popularity has
soared, as players and viewers find new
ways to connect online. According to the
founder of Chess.com, the site’s traffic has
grown up to 50 percent each year since its
founding in 2007; it had a huge spike in
registrations and site use in 2020, due to the
pandemic and “The Queen’s Gambit.” And
where, in 2015, a few dozen people watched
streams of chess on Twitch at any given
time, today the average viewership is over
4,000, according to Fast Company.
At any rate, chess has not been “solved.”
Even the top computers don’t know the best
sequence of moves in every position — they
just play enough fantastic moves (and very
few bad ones) that they beat humans over
and over. Recent progress in artificial
intelligence shows just how much more
there is to explore: In 2018, Google’s
AlphaZero achieved new levels of greatness
when it defeated Stockfish, a traditional
computer chess program, entrancing the
chess world with sacrifices and pawn
storms.MYTH NO. 5The king is the most
important piece in chess.Teachers and how-to guides often
reiterate that, while the queen is the most
powerful piece, the king is the most
important — a principle repeated in online
chess tutorials and enshrined on Wikipedia.
But eight foot-soldiers have something to
say about that. The mighty pawn, the only
piece that captures differently than it
moves, trudges ahead one step at a time.
Since it’s the only piece that cannot move
backward, every push is final. Pawns form
the bones of the game: Play would be a
mushy mess without them.
Pawn power was sent to the lab for
study when, this year, Alpha Zero played
against itself in nine variations on chess.
Five of the variants tweaked the rules
governing pawns. In torpedo chess, in which
pawns can move two squares at a time,
tactical volatility was hugely increased.
Another variant, in which pawns moved
backward, led to fewer decisive games, since
that rule allowed for the reversal of strategic
errors. Change the pawn, and you shake the
very essence of the game. In the words of
18th-century French chess champion
Francois-Andre Danican Philidor, “The
pawns are the soul of chess.”
Twitter: @JenShahadeJennifer Shahade is a chess champion, author,
poker player and women’s program director at
U.S. Chess.By Jennifer Shahade
Chess is having a moment. Chess is also having a decade. The game has been on an upward tra-
jectory in pop culture ever since the charismatic Magnus Carlsen, who has even worked as a mod-
el, won the World Chess Championship in 2013. That same year, Congress declared St. Louis the
country’s “chess capital.” Now Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” has ratcheted interest up to new
heights. As millions of converts download chess apps and buy boards, it’s time to dispel a few myths
about this ancient game.FIVE MYTHSChess
MARK MAKELA/REUTERSThanks to live-
streamed
tournaments and
the new Netflix
series “The Queen’s
Gambit,” interest in
chess has spiked
this year. And no,
you don’t have to be
a genius to play the
game well.grandmaster is a “genius player.” A Wired
article about chess in pop culture cited the
joy of “watching genius at work.” In 2009,
Time asked Carlsen how he dealt with
people “assuming you are 40,000 times
more intelligent” than average: “You’re
clearly not a normal intellect,” the
interviewer declared.
Carlsen, the highest-rated grandmaster in
history, has reiterated many times that he
considers himself “a normal person.” In an
interview with Rainn Wilson in 2013, he
said that the first sentence of his
autobiography would be: “I am not a
genius.” What differentiated him from his
competitors, he explained, was
commitment; he didn’t treat chess as a
“normal hobby.”
FIDE recognizes more than 1,700comfortable articulating America’s racial
complexities than he was during his time in
the White House. In his discussion of the Beer
Summit, he gives a thoughtful analysis of the
“humiliations and inequities” that Black peo-
ple experience every day, lacing in the “multi-
ple occasions” when police stopped him for no
reason or security guards followed him in
department stores. If Obama mentions Biden
only in passing, it’s understandable given that
Biden has never experienced these day-to-day
indignities. But the vice president’s inclusion
in the Beer Summit showed Obama’s faith that
Biden is capable of navigating the delicate
intersection of Black and White sensitivities,
an important quality he brings to the White
House at a time when the nation is in desper-
ate need of racial reckoning.
Biden is portrayed in the memoir largely as
a man who served his boss well. We see him as
a guy who asked tough questions in important
meetings and was, as we’ve heard numerous
times, the last person in the room when
Obama needed to make crucial decisions. But
mostly Biden crosses these pages as just one
member of a team of advisers.
In truth, he was much more than that.
Given the president’s journey with his vice
president, it’s a fair assumption that Obama
has collected some profound observations on
Biden as a man, leader and now incoming
president. In the memoir, Obama is bracingly
honest about the hardships of governance and
the political realities of being president; he is
eloquent on his life as father, husband and son.
He analyzes the exploits of his aides and
makes clear that he feels comfortable with
people who share his qualities. Treasury Sec-
retary Tim Geithner, Obama writes, had “a
reserve that I recognized in myself.” Of David
Plouffe, his 2008 campaign manager, he ob-
serves that “the two of us had much in
common. We were both analytical and even-
keeled.” Of his vice president, he writes, “We
couldn’t have been more different.” So differ-
ent, perhaps, that Biden defied Obama’s ready
perspicacity. In “A Promised Land,” the presi-
dent gazes mostly from a distance at his vice
president. He lacks, or holds close to the vest,
his conclusions about Biden, portraying him
largely in prosaic, one-dimensional images.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the
tale of the twosome remains mostly off-screen.
The star of this show is Obama. He has
expended considerable sweat on many yellow
pads to construct a literary scaffolding on
which to build his legacy. Yet the blunted
portrait of Biden — Obama’s “brother in
arms,” as one of his advisers described him to
me — is a loss for all of us wishing to know this
perceptive observer’s unique insights into our
next president.Steven Levingston, nonfiction editor of The
Washington Post, is the author of “Barack and Joe:
The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership.”Biden’s son Beau, and Obama’s awarding of
the Medal of Freedom to Biden days before the
inauguration of Donald Trump. Perhaps the
president’s promised second volume will ex-
plore the breadth of the friendship.
In these pages, the praise of Biden is largely
descriptive — neither analytical nor revelato-
ry. “Joe was all warmth,” Obama writes. “You
could see it as he worked a room, his hand-
some face always cast in a dazzling smile (just
inches from whomever he was talking to),
asking a person where they were from, telling
them a story about how much he loved their
hometown.” That’s fine writerly language, but
it raises deeper questions: How did Biden’s
innate warmth affect their relationship? What
did Obama learn from it? What, in turn, did
Biden gain personally from his relationship
with Obama? The answers would give us a
sharper picture of each man and provide
meaningful intelligence on our next president.
During the 2008 Democratic primary con-
test, Biden stumbled into a racially charged
blunder when he told a reporter that his
then-rival Obama was “articulate and bright
and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Obama
dispenses with the incident in a single sen-
tence, noting that the phrase was “surely
meant as a compliment, but interpreted by
some as suggesting that such characteristics
in a Black man were noteworthy.” His reason
for mentioning it at all is to observe that
Biden’s “lack of a filter periodically got him in
trouble.” In this, Obama resorts to the obvious
rather than risking the incisive. Why doesn’t
he describe how he really felt at the time? In
fact, he scolded Biden for suggesting that
other Black leaders were inarticulate, but then
he quickly forgave him. What had he seen in
Biden that encouraged him to absolve his
opponent? Did Obama act out of mere politi-
cal expediency? Or was he swayed by Biden’s
power of persuasion — a profitable trait now
for an incoming president who may face an
intractable Senate? Obama sheds no light.
When I was researching my book “Barack
and Joe: The Making of an Extraordinary
Partnership,” I had many questions about both
men, but they denied my interview requests.
So I turned to their aides for answers. The
closest I got to understanding Obama’s reac-
tion to Biden’s racial gaffe was an analysis
given to me by Obama adviser David Axelrod.
“Obama didn’t go to a darker place in his
OBAMA FROM B1
A Biden-Obama
bromance? Not
in this book.
specialist, told me for my book that the beer
fest “was a fraught and tough situation” — the
kind that played to the vice president’s social
skills. “The vice president has an uncanny
ability to cut through to the real human
emotion and understand where others are
coming from,” she explained.
But perhaps there was more to it. George-
town University professor Michael Eric Dys-
on, an eloquent voice on racial relations (who
eventually wrote the forward to my book), had
a provocative interpretation: Biden was indis-
pensable, given the Black president’s famous
taciturnity on race. Around the Beer Summit
table, Biden could not only be a unifying White
emissary but also give voice to issues of
injustice and discrimination that Obama pre-
ferred to sidestep. “Biden had black resonanc-
es in a way, ironically enough, that he brought
to bear to the benefit of Barack Obama, the
black man,” Dyson said. Noting that Obama’s
upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia left him
in some ways deficient in certain parts of
Black life and culture, Dyson argued that
Biden “was more intimately familiar with
some rituals of American blackness than
Obama was.” Biden’s racial bona fides were so
deeply established that “the perception was
that the blackest man in the White House was
the white guy.”
More than a decade later, Obama is moreinterpretation of what was said,” Axelrod told
me. Instead, he accepted Biden as Biden.
Obama told Axelrod: “I understand what Joe
meant. I know what’s in his heart.”
Axelrod’s perspective points to another
hoped-for revelation that “A Promised Land”
might have given us: How did Biden’s heart
speak to Obama? Knowing this, readers would
have an inkling of how Biden might rely on his
heart — and mind — to navigate the fractious
racial and political climate he’ll inherit as
president.
A few months into the Obama presidency,
African American Harvard professor Henry
Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for alleged disor-
derly conduct in Cambridge, Mass., when
someone reported him for supposedly break-
ing into his own house. Amid the swirl of
controversy — stoked by Obama, who said the
police had acted “stupidly” — the president
invited Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt.
James Crowley, to the White House for a beer.
Then three participants inexplicably turned
into four. “Six days later,” Obama writes, “Joe
Biden and I sat down with Sergeant Crowley
and Skip Gates at the White House for what
came to be known as the ‘Beer Summit.’ ” It
confounded me while researching my book,
and again while reading Obama’s, why Biden
suddenly was added to the guest list. Kate
Bedingfield, White House communicationsDEMETRIUS FREEMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Barack Obama
campaigns with Joe
Biden on Oct. 31 in
Detroit. “We
couldn’t have been
more different,”
Obama writes
about his former
vice president in his
memoir.