Lord Byron once said, "Life is too short to play chess."
Undoubtedly, the English poet and adventurer was not very patient, since millions of people around the world - many of them young - today do not think the same.
Since the premiere of the series
Gambito de dama,
this ancestral entertainment has been in vogue again, to the point that the writer Adriana Hernández Planillas has described in
The Game of Life
the parallels between chess and existence.
These are some of the applications for the art of living that we find in the book:
You are responsible for what happens to you
. Chess, like life, is a game of cause and effect. A bad decision at a crucial moment in the game weakens us until the end. In the author's opinion, what happens on the board is still a version raised to infinity of the popular
Choose Your Own Adventure
books : “Every move has consequences, but the same happens in life. What happens to us is not usually the result of chance, but of what we have been sowing along the way, ”says Hernández Planillas.
Starting with black is not the same as losing.
Chess players know that whoever opens with White has a certain advantage in the game, since he takes the initiative and his opponent is in tow of his decisions. For this reason, the color of each player is decided by lot. A good strategist, however, can also win with Black, just as he does in life. People with a past not conducive to success. For resilient people, it is not where you come from that counts, but where you are going.
A bad plan is better than no plan at all.
The phrase is from Frank Marshall, an American chess player of the last century. By this he meant that any strategy, even if it ends up being wrong, will be better than being inoperative. The good thing about a plan, even if it is imperfect, is that it puts us on our way. The mythical Kasparov explains in his book
How Life Imitates Chess
that the good strategist "begins with a goal for the distant future and works backward to the present."
Celebrate the game.
Moving around the board of life is already a privilege if we look at the eternity of not existing that precedes us and the one that will follow us. Adriana Hernández recovers a speech from Don Quixote to explain it: "While the game lasts, each piece has its own particular job and when the game ends, they all mix and find them in a bag, which is like finding life in the grave." The message: let's play with joy and make our best decisions for the duration of the game. A peculiarity of chess is that the pawn, the piece with the lowest value, is the only one that can become a queen if it reaches the end of the board.
Step by step forward, like the pawn.
Inexperienced players easily sacrifice these modest pieces, forgetting that at the end of the game they can bring them victory. The pawn, on the other hand, is the only one that cannot retreat, so each move is final. Also in our lives, what we do cannot be undone, and the construction of the future is done in the present tense, as Kasparov said, taking a single step at a time. Many steps well taken will allow us to crown ourselves, as happens in chess.
The humble power of the pawn reminds us of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Let's remember some of its principles: Perfection does not exist, but progress does. To achieve this, in addition to being constant, we only have to answer: what can I do better today than yesterday? There is always another way to do it, even if it seems that our reality is limited. Explore new paths without fear of error.
Don't take anything for granted.
Ask the question why?
your personal mantra.
Dig deep into the issues to come up with a new vision.
Excuses are the poison of progress.
Perhaps they calm some consciences, but they keep us anchored to the problem.
If something doesn't work, it needs to be fixed.
Let's not wait for the definitive solution to get going because that is another way to procrastinate.
Even if you only partially fix the problem, you will have taken a step forward.
Any improvements are tentative until we figure out how to make it even better.
Fischer, inspirer of Beth Harmon
- The
Lady's Gambit
series is an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Walter Tevis.
Experts see in the protagonist a reflection of the American player Bobby Fischer, who learned Russian to be able to read Soviet chess publications.
- In 1972 he became a national hero after defeating Spassky.
Shortly after, he stopped playing.
He became a tramp.
To get out of poverty, in 1992 he accepted the offer of a millionaire to play revenge against Spassky in Yugoslavia, against the prohibition of his country due to the blockade due to the war.
Still, he played and won.
- Bobby Fischer was in search and capture.
After being arrested in Japan for carrying an invalid passport, he would die some time later in Iceland.
He was 64 years old, the number of squares on the board.
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