International Chess Day
Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2019 1:56 pm
Apparently happened yesterday. Who knew? Anyway I guess that any publicity is good for chess and there were a range of celebrations on the various chess web sites to mark the day. However, on FB, I stumbled on some very profound stuff from Lev Aronian's wife, Arianne Caoili, who gave some thought provoking advice:
"Happy International Chess Day. I cannot imagine my life without chess. But my take is probably more on the dark side. I think that most of all, chess players automatically expect the worst: that’s why we try to calculate and evaluate alternative variations, because we don’t expect our opponents to just play into our hands. It’s actually never about prediction, which #nassimtaleb would rightly call intellectual arrogance or Platonic thinking.
Chess is actually about anticipation of a range of futures and putting an emphasis on what you DON’T know, rather than what you do know. And it doesn’t matter how much you prepare, the only thing you can be certain of is that the position you get today never happened before, and not under these circumstances. The constant feedback loops after mistakes train your brain that it’s not about losing, but learning. And if you’ve achieved anything at all, you know that getting beaten up over and over trains your mental toughness and you expect difficulty.
All things end and you have to move on. That’s hard to deal with but also realistic. And unfortunately, no matter what your emotions are, “facts don’t care about your feelings”. That’s all very sober but good training for real life."
"Happy International Chess Day. I cannot imagine my life without chess. But my take is probably more on the dark side. I think that most of all, chess players automatically expect the worst: that’s why we try to calculate and evaluate alternative variations, because we don’t expect our opponents to just play into our hands. It’s actually never about prediction, which #nassimtaleb would rightly call intellectual arrogance or Platonic thinking.
Chess is actually about anticipation of a range of futures and putting an emphasis on what you DON’T know, rather than what you do know. And it doesn’t matter how much you prepare, the only thing you can be certain of is that the position you get today never happened before, and not under these circumstances. The constant feedback loops after mistakes train your brain that it’s not about losing, but learning. And if you’ve achieved anything at all, you know that getting beaten up over and over trains your mental toughness and you expect difficulty.
All things end and you have to move on. That’s hard to deal with but also realistic. And unfortunately, no matter what your emotions are, “facts don’t care about your feelings”. That’s all very sober but good training for real life."