KAISSA AND THE BEAST: A COMMENT ABOUT CHESS

A Response To Grandmaster Rustam Kasimdzhanov’s Open Letter on the Commercial Future of Competitive Chess.

For the readers of my blog: I interrupt my ongoing "Variations on the American Theme" to register an immediate response to this most recent piece of chess news, which I have found quite interesting. 

(Note: Kaissa is the apocryphal Muse of Chess, and my allusion to Beauty and the Beast is also very proper. The French fairytale has some rough riding in it, but a happy end, which is exactly what I wish for, in the ongoing tale of chess. Incidentally, Kaissa and the Beast is a cluster title, originally representing my chess entry Man Against The Machine, which will be posted later on.)

Readers of my blog may not be aware of it, but in my youth I used to be an expert chess player, and a long-time member of the Central Chess Club of the USSR, until the demands of my primary professional career were to reduce my love of chess to an occasional indulgence, somewhat fueled by my sporadic participation in team chess competitions, on behalf of my Institute of USA and Canada Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

It was this particular preoccupation with chess, where I was able to reach a very high level of understanding of the game, yet could not back it up with professional home preparation and active participation, due to the lack of time, which still feeds my ability to follow the current events in the magical world of chess (to some extent, it can be compared to the enchanted world of Harry Potter, as opposed to the Muggle world of non-chessed citizenry), and to be compelled from time to time to write about it from a rather unusual perspective, yet not so esoteric that only an involved chess player could understand it---far from it! For the benefit of the readers of my blog, I will be posting a few of these in a not too distant future, but, for the time being, here is this one.

On July 21, 2011, several leading international chess publications published the following open letter to the International Chess Federation FIDE by the reputable Grandmaster and one-time FIDE Weltmeister Rustam Kasimdzhanov, raising the serious subject of the commercial future of competitive chess, with a suggestion how to raise the mass appeal of the game, to allow it to enjoy a popularity on a par with, say, tennis. Here is that letter, quoted from the acclaimed German source ChessBase.

(July 21, 2011.)

Dear chess friends,

I am writing this open letter, addressed both to FIDE and the entire chess playing world, due to a certain crisis in which our noble game finds itself lately. This crisis is not only defined by a general dissatisfaction, coming from sponsors, organizers and amateurs; also among the professionals there has been some growing distress. Quite a number of traditional tournaments are no longer organized; in those still out there an ever growing number of extremely strong players is competing for the same money. At the same time voices from all around are expressing serious concern about lackluster play in some top tournaments, and notorious short draws.
To understand the reasons why our sport has never made it to the heights it deserves, I find it useful to take a look at a sport very similar to ours – tennis. Both games feature the battle of two personalities, showing a whole array of technical weapons in their fight, competing in speed and precision, in patience and wisdom. Why, despite these apparent similarities, despite the fact that many more people worldwide are capable of playing chess properly, do we stand light-years behind tennis in everything that defines success in professional sport?
The reasons are numerous, no doubt, but the main problem, as I see it, is the existence of a draw as a result in chess. Short draws (and I also have made a number of those) make our game look more like an insider academic activity, rather than sport; but they can’t be avoided – the preparation of today and the inherent qualities of chess are such, that a draw, and in fact a short draw, is a most likely result in a game between strong well-prepared players. Still, in a well-organized tournament, top players, getting up to go to their hotel rooms after a ten minute draw, do not add attractiveness to chess.
Returning to tennis, the main attraction is, as I see it, the fact that every single fight produces a result--- a winner and a loser--- at the end of the day. And there is a thrill for every spectator to see, say, Nadal and Federer, come to court, and know with certainty that one of them will triumph, and the other one will lose. In short, to put it figuratively, there will be blood. And there will be great champions.
In our game, however, things are different. We also have great champions, but their greatness is sometimes limited to insiders of the game. In order to be successful outside of our little world, in order to make front pages and TV, and thereby also the finance that comes in the package, we need champions that appeal to the general public, even to a public far from intricacies of chess. Such was the winning streak of Novak Djokovic this year, for instance. Something that a win in a chess super tournament with 8 out of 13 simply cannot match.
And now comes my proposal. If we want success, sponsors, public and the rest of the package, we need to abolish those draws in classical tournaments. And not by Sofia rules – tournaments with Sofia rules have produced as many draws as any other; and not by the 30-move rule, where players are often just waiting for move 30. We need something entirely different. Like a tiebreak in tennis. We need a result. Every single day.
And here is how it works. We play classical chess, say with a time control of four to five hours. Draw? No problem – change the colors, give us 20 minutes each and replay. Draw again? Ten minutes each, change the colors and replay. Until there is a winner of that day. And the winner wins the game and gets one point and the loser gets a zero; and the game is rated accordingly, regardless of whether it came in a classical game, rapid or blitz.
This way the expectations of the crowd will never be deceived. There will always be a winner, there will always be blood. There will come an age of great champions, since with this system there’ll be times when Vishy (Anand, current world champion from India) or Magnus (Carlsen, Norwegian youngster and prodigy, currently ranked #1 in the world, above Weltmeister Anand!) will win Wijk-aan-Zee (one of the "grand slam" tournaments of chess) with 13 out of 13; and there’ll be winning streaks when some of the great champions will win 50 games in a row. We’ll make front pages.

And much more than that. It will be good for our sport. Not just sponsors, and attention, and prizes. It will be essentially good for our game. People will try extremely hard with white (color considered advantageous as it gives the player the right of the first move), in order to decide the issue now, and not in a black (color considered disadvantageous as opposed to white) rapid game. Instead of offering a draw in a slightly better ending, in order to save energy and catch a movie, chess players will show their whole ability and will win these endings. As a matter of fact, this will develop classical chess.

And there is so much more. Often players playing white, feeling rough in the morning, get to the game with an attitude “I'll just make a draw today.” Imagine, what will happen to this attitude? Chess will become a true sport. We’ll wake up to win or to lose that day. We’ll come to the board ready to play chess. And, just like when we come to see Federer play, -– we see his whipping forehand, his effortless slice, his hammer serve and immaculate return –- same will happen in chess. Every single day we’ll see players like Aronian (Armenian player ranked #3 in the world) or Grischuk (one of the best Russian chess players) pressing with white, wriggling out of trouble with black, and showing some blitz skills to an ever larger public. That is something I would like to watch and play.
Grandmaster Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

And now my comment.

I applaud GM Rustam Kasimdzhanov for his energetic tackling of the extremely important question of how to increase the popularity of the game of chess among the general public. This question ought to have been more vigorously debated by chess professionals than has been the case, and although some interesting steps have already been taken in that direction, they have obviously been not enough, and something is obviously missing in the proposed solutions. I am referring, for instance, to the attempts to get the public interested in the “sci-fi” dimension of chess, by promoting the seemingly promising concept of man against the machine which, however, did not go well enough, as the soulless machine’s mechanical success over man’s humanly flawed performance was hardly inspirational for the public, to join the battle on the presumably losing side.

Another attempt was built around the Norwegian child prodigy, today still a youngster, Magnus Carlsen. To put it in a nutshell, he was presented to the public as a chess-playing fashion model, and to be honest he was up to the job, in the sense that by now he has perhaps become almost as recognizable to the “Muggle” world at large as the late genius Bobby Fischer.

Good for Carlsen (who in fact deserves generous sponsorship, even in the technical chess sense, by bringing an extra measure of excitement into the science of the game), and sort of good for chess, by the trickledown effect, but perhaps not good enough in the long run. Fischer’s and Carlsen’s personal popularity has hardly transferred to the game itself for the trickledown to open the floodgates. Something is still missing from the picture.

And so, here now comes Rustam Kasimdzhanov with a brave new proposal whose principal merit is that it addresses not so much the man (or the boy) overshadowing the game, as the game itself. Let us make it as exciting, sportwise, as tennis, let the public see blood, and, hopefully, increased revenues will start flowing in… Well, you have read the letter.

Love-forty… game, set, and match!!! So far so good, and I’m too a tennis fan. But, frankly, there is so much easy entertainment in tennis, besides the scoring system, which chess cannot provide. It also takes a special kind of literacy, reaching far beyond school and even college literacy, to understand and enjoy everything that goes on on the chessboard. Without special training (which tennis obviously does not require), an average spectator would not be all that much moved by the hypothetical blood on the scoring sheets. At the very same time, I have a feeling that many more than a handful of serious chess players and admirers of the game would be turned off by the circus atmosphere created by the scoring fest.

In other words, although I agree with Rustam that drawing quickies ought to be forcefully discouraged, I am not in favor of going that far. I would rather make some serious adjustments in the allotment of prize money in favor of well-fought battles, including, yes, good draws, while penalizing short colorless draws simply by making them far less profitable to such players. I am sure that developing a system of such incentives is not hard to do. Some such incentives are already practiced in certain tournaments, but they are not enough, for sure.

And now the other aspect of my comment, what I would call a “positive option.”

Chess is by its nature an elitist sport, which means that, unlike tennis, it requires specialized training not just from the players, but from the audience as well. At the same time chess can offer us far more excitement than a less intellectual sport, and the way to capitalize on the game’s inherent strengths is by educating the public about the fact that chess is a much higher type of scoring game than any of those most popular ones. In this regard, I think it may not be enough to repeat the familiar mantra that chess is not just a game, but a science and an art, etc. It is necessary to emphasize that chess is indeed a superior game of wits, and that its known advantages naturally transfer to life, becoming potentially indispensable to business success and improved human and international relations… As long as the public is allowed to understand the advantages of chess education for the average person, the floodgate will surely open and stay open for good. How many moms and dads are sending their beloved babies almost since their early walking age to karate schools to learn the rudiments of martial arts to develop the essential skills of self-defense? Well, I am aware that at the highest level, particularly in Asia, but also in certain special military training elsewhere, martial arts represent a very sophisticated and advanced type of psychological training, mental discipline and all, but this kind of training, I am afraid, is not available commercially to even the most eager consumers…

I am convinced that by far the most glaring failure of the chess advertisers to the public so far has been their inability to communicate the most basic thing about chess: that it is one of the most promising disciplines of developing superior psychology. Like the best of martial arts training, chess ought to prepare youngsters for mental combat, where learning some basic psychological aspects of the game may help them prevent such situations where they have to rely on their perhaps questionable Karate skills to defend themselves.

It may be argued that, like opera singing or orchestra conducting, chess requires special inborn talent, sine qua non. This may be true in the sense that our average student will never be able to compete commercially at the professional level of chess. But the lack of chess talent would never stand in the child’s way in so far as his psychological skill coming from the training goes.

It is true however that most chess trainers of the public have so far done an inadequate job in highlighting this crucial psychological aspect of chess to the trainees and their parents, particularly its transferability to the more general area of human relations. I am also aware that in some places, such as Las Vegas, Nevada, certain chess trainers promote cheating and on-paper-only success in attaining inflated ratings without any success in either performance or even elementary comprehension. That’s capitalism, of course, where one is always able to sell snake oil as long as he can find buyers for it.
But talking seriously, even the best chess trainers and popularizes of the game have not succeeded so far. Had they done so, chess would have quickly become a popular and highly respected sport, with spectators flocking to chess events if not to understand every move, then just for the thrill of being there, and naturally, the money would start pouring in immediately in far larger quantities than before, so that no destitute chess player would have to switch to poker, just to make his or her ends meet.

As far as the special powers of chess psychology are concerned, I know very well what I am talking about. The great world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik, a distinguished Doctor of Science in his own right, was a frequent advisor to the Kremlin and to a number of other Soviet government organizations, not just on the questions of computer technology, where his contribution is widely known, but also privately, with no public record, on certain questions of psychology, which he scientifically derived from his chess experience. It is therefore not surprising at all that Henry Kissinger, an avid, albeit unexceptional chess player, was always reluctant to play chess with the Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin, as he had very good reasons to suspect Dobrynin, a superior chess player and an adept of the Botvinnik school of psychology, of being capable of studying Dr. Kissinger’s character by studying his game habits and coming to certain conclusions which Moscow could then use in the larger field of superpower politics.

…No offence to professional psychologists, their domain is not exactly a restricted country club. Anybody who has more than a fleeting interest in psychology and a sufficient mental discipline for regular study can do wonders with that, and in some cases become a self-trained psychologist to the extent that his patients would not know the difference. The problem is however that it is not very easy to stumble on the right track and stay there. The game of chess can get you there, as long as you are prepared to see it first and foremost as a battle of wits. Every good chess player is a psychologist ipso facto, but many of them are too busy with the challenges of the limited chess world of their opponents, somehow overlooking this special larger aspect of the game, which is its transferability to the outside world. On the other hand, I repeat, even a bad chess player can become well trained in the psychology of human relations simply by understanding the basics of the game of chess and by making the right psychological applications.

…The public will just love this hidden aspect of chess, and every professional chess event will see crowds attending it, and the sponsors will be there too. Not at the expense of physical exercise, of course, but as a brainy complement to it, it is up to the champions of the game of chess to make it as attractive to moms and dads as kiddie martial arts, and possibly even more attractive than tennis.