“Chess is a closed system in the sense that what happens within the game cannot be influenced by factors from outside the game. A pawn is not worth one kiss or one cabbage or one dollar. It isn’t as intuitive to say it isn’t worth one point, either, but it should be obvious why a pawn’s value might change over the course of a game.”Interesting quote, no? Of course, I think there are some immediately obvious ways to counter this thought. Consider for example a hypothetical game where the winner might get a kiss or a cabbage or even just a dollar as a prize (chess players love cabbage, I’ve heard). At some point in the game, there probably will be a moment when a move is worth a kiss or a cabbage or a dollar in the sense that by making the right move the victory is confirmed and the prize is won.
So, Rowson is wrong, then? Well, I’m not quite sure he’d agree. I think he would contend that this kind of thinking is exactly the sort that he writes about in this book. Humans are uniquely capable of creating association or identifying patterns where none exist. To move a bishop a few squares forward and think about winning a cabbage is a symptom of the problem many chess players experience when about to lose a game. Each positive move does add up or subtract from that final prize, of course, but it doesn’t really matter from the perspective of doing the kind of thinking needed to win the game. In some ways, thinking about what a move might represent in terms of rewards or prizes merely is a distraction, a use of valuable brain resources to think about something unrelated to analyzing positions and determining the best moves.
Perhaps the best way to summarize the book is to refer back to the start of Rowson’s quote – chess is a closed system. Rowson was of course referring to the ‘point value’ system with his quote but the thought applies as well to the mental process of each player. The seven ‘chess sins’ he describes all share a key characteristic in that each one represents some failure on the part of the player to keep the mental system closed. Wanting, for example, means the player is overly concerned with the results and ratings used by outsiders while perfectionism imposes a standard external to making the best move. When these thoughts drift into the mind from outside the game, the player’s performance is suddenly under threat.
The best players win by keeping the system closed and focusing only on making the next move in the game. I wonder if this is the true reason why computers have become so good at playing the game. Though my first instinct is to suggest a computer’s greater processing power is responsible for its victories, it may be that the computer’s ability to ignore all this mental and emotional stuff prevents it from throwing away games from winning positions. In other words, a computer doesn’t win because it can analyze a million positions in a second – it just doesn’t lose because it has no use for all those cabbages handed out to the victor.
