Ray Brinzer

This cannot possibly be an original observation, but I don’t recall seeing it anywhere. Chess teaches you to fight to the bitter end; backgammon teaches you to quit before it gets worse.

Many chess players will resign after making a blunder, but that assumes the opponent will not subsequently slip up and put you back in the game. Rationally, the thing to do is to dig in and fight harder. In backgammon, on the other hand, the urge to accept a double in a bad situation and make it work is generally a bad thing, and leads to doom.

Backgammon seems a little more sophisticated, in this sense, requiring judgment were chess merely requires tenacity. But while there are times in life where it’s important to cut your losses, if I had to pick one approach it would be fighting. Better to leave your leg in a trap than to hope for a friendly trapper.

When I was in college, I took (extracirricular) chess classes taught by Kevin Burnett, a fellow who was in the middle of what turned out to be a six-year run as chess champion of the state of Iowa. Kevin made a lot of very simple, sensible observations about the game, and came back to them often. We learned a lot of ordinary things, like how many moves it takes to queen a pawn (five), and how to recognize situations where basic tactics, like forks, pins, and skewers, were imminent.

The students, many of whom were not bad players, would often bring in their games, and we’d analyze them in class. Frequently the mistakes were very obvious. There were a few times when I offered a game and then, without ever a harsh word from Kevin, promptly wondered why I hadn’t had the sense to keep quiet. I hadn’t bothered to study the game properly myself, and the only explanation the mistakes required was how I could have managed to make them.

There is a great deal that goes into being a great chess player. Pursuing simple, sensible goals and not making stupid mistakes seems to be enough to make one much better than the average chess player. Without ever being told as much, I understood that if I wasn’t going to show a basic level of discipline that I was hopeless.

After awhile, I could hear Kevin’s voice in my head as I played. This improved my game a lot; having the right voices in your head is a big deal, in life. I also started to be able to see a board in my head, and I realized that playing “blindfold” (as Kevin frequently did, though without an actual blindfold) isn’t such a big deal as people make of it.

So, my friends and acquaintances tend to regard me as a very good chess player. I can easily say, with no sense of false humility, that they’re quite wrong. It’s possible that I play well enough that someone who takes the game seriously might not find me to be a total idiot. And if so, it’s merely because I’ve learned some basics.

The fact is, molding yourself to do simple things correctly, in a consistent fashion, takes a lot of time and effort. And it’s worth a lot of time and effort. Understanding this, mistakes in every field of education become apparent.