I’ve been a club chess player and keen chess fan since my teens. After a break of many years I picked it up again when I moved to Bratislava where I play for one of the many clubs here. Last weekend I played in a rapid tournament in a local pub which lead me to muse about the relationship between people’s attitude to things like chess rules and their view of politics.
The conventional image of chess being played in smoky rooms by dowdy elderly bearded gentlemen pouring over the chessboard for hours at a time has been challenged recently by the hugely popular Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, but far more than that, faster time controls and the move to online world class tournaments during lockdowns have lead to chess being re-invented as a big money exciting spectator sport on a par with video gaming.
Chess has also always been seen as a sport that upholds the highest values of honour and discipline, an image which has been somewhat tarnished by a recent scandal involving accusations of cheating by the world champion, Norwegian Magnus Carlson, against a young up-and-coming American Grandmaster Hans Niemann, which put The Royal Game on the font pages.
The accusations came after Niemann became the first player to beat Carlson in a standard time-limit over-the-board game in more than two years. Niemann has already confessed to cheating online when younger (he is only 19 now)- but how do you cheat at chess when playing in person? No actual evidence of how Niemann could have cheated have been produced, but there has been plenty of speculation- even Elon Musk chipped in about where electronic devices might be hidden:
But there are more prosaic methods open to amateurs who don’t take the rules quite so seriously.
Anyone who learns to play chess beyond the most basic level will learn to strictly adhere to the “touch move” rule: if you touch a piece, you have to move it, and if you make a move and take your hand off the piece, you have to leave it there.
Chess is a game of thinking ahead and visualisation. Obviously the whole nature of the game changes if you can move the pieces first to see what it looks like on the board and take them back if you don’t like it. Every chessplayer knows only too well the painful experience of thinking carefully, executing your move only to see immediately it is losing.
Without this rule, much of the tension and drama of chess is lost. In blitz chess, where players may have just seconds to make life and death decisions in complex positions, even the top players can blunder mate in one.
There was in fact a notorious case in which Kasparov took a move back against a young Judit Polgar:
Taking a move back is forbidden, sacrilegious almost- or so I thought.
At my club a couple of weeks ago I played some casual games with a young man, around 25 or so, and had been very surprised when he went to took back a move after realising it would lose a piece. He accepted it when I objected, but just shrugged saying “we play street rules here”.
Maybe he meant the more relaxed regime of coffee-house chess, such as among hustlers who play in parks in the US. Here, trash talk is an important part of the game, developed to a high level- but they don’t take back moves, even if other sleight of hand might be attempted on occasion:
In casual games, taking back a move is pointless above beginner level- just accept defeat and start another game. Otherwise chess becomes reduced to the level of those endless games of Monopoly where new rules are invented, extra loans given and rent forgiven just to keep the game going.
The young man in question had invited me to a rapid tournament at the weekend. About 20 players came together in a local pub to play 5 rounds with 10 minutes each player for the game. The atmosphere was definitely more coffee-house , with beer flowing and plenty of drunken laughing and even singing at one point. Not what I would normally expect and it certainly made it very hard to concentrate, but everyone was having fun so I was hardly going to complain.
Still, this was a competition with written rules- “Phones must be switched off during play” -circulated beforehand, and a small prize fund (about 100 euros for the winner) and some other small prizes.
So I was even more alarmed when, after the fourth round, I asked the same young man I had played the previous week if he had won his game and he replied- “yes- because my opponent allowed me to take back a move after I blundered!”
I told him he should not have done that, no matter his opponent “allowed” him to- but he just shrugged and again evoked “street rules”- “I don’t care”.
This resulted in him having more points which determined who he played next- in this case, me.
Still upset about what I consider cheating, I nevertheless decided to play, even more determined to win perhpas to prove a point. I quickly gained a dominating position, was close to winning, only to throw it away by a blunder-
what would he have said if I had taken the move back?
Of course you can do what you want if you are drinking with your mates- but this was a competition with a cash prize. I do not for a minute think that most of the players there would have themselves taken back a move, but clearly such “street rules” are tolerated. Given the general atmosphere, and me being an outsider (most of the others seemed to know each other) there was no chance of making some kind of complaint at the time.
I was still thinking about this when one of the more inebriated and loud players, sporting an “I -Heart- Ukraine” badge, asked me where I was from and why would I come to Slovakia? “There is nothing here- why would you want to live in Slovakia?”
This happens quite a lot. Slovaks typically have a fatalistic view of their country and are convinced it is uniquely terrible, a sentiment expressed when you mention anything problematic especially with bureaucracy with a helpless raising of the shoulders and the ironic “Welcome to Slovakia!”
When I protested and said I thought Slovakia had a lot to offer others joined in: did I wonder people here were so pessimistic about their country when there is so much corruption?
The next round was starting so we could not explore this further but usually I say, things are no better elsewhere. Slovakia is small fry compared to much of what is going on in the world. Corruption is everywhere.
Take the US for example. There is corruption it seems at every level and in every pore of government. Have they not heard of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal? The collusion between Big Tech and the CIA to suppress the story and fabricate Russiagate to explain it away and thereby help steal the election? The same collusion between Twitter and the FBI to suppress scientific debate about the Con-vid lockdowns? The secret multi-billion euro deal between the EU’s von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla over the experimental gene therapy which they attempted to mandate for the entire population without proper safety testing?
The same holds across the world where health “advisors” and “scientific” officers ramped up fear in order to push vaccines they themselves would profit from.
You could go on for years detailing corruption of every kind in virtually every government- and it is of paramount importance that the alternative media continues to do so.
Slovakia differs perhaps only in the complete absence of self-awareness. If my fellow chess players are oblivious to the small-time corruption in their own chess clubs, can they really demand higher standards amongst their politicians? It almost feels as if complaining about their government is just an excuse for not first putting their own house in order.