The Immortal Game (24 page)

“W
E LEARN BY CHESS,”
wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1786, “the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources.”

It was only about a month after I began researching the deep history of chess’s entanglement with the human mind that I realized this wasn’t just a story about our past, but also one about our future. We have always needed to learn good habits, and we always will. In August 2002, ABC News
Nightline
featured a profile of Eugene Brown, an ex-con whose chance encounter with chess in prison had become a part of his personal salvation. Through the game he learned discipline, focus, patience, and persistence. After his release, Brown made it his mission to use chess as a tool to rescue disadvantaged youths before they got into serious trouble. He opened up a youth recreation center called Chess House. “When I came out [of prison],” Brown said, “I was carrying chess with me. Everywhere I was going, I had a board, and I was teaching people: There’s three phases to a chess game—the opening, the middle and the end, and you have to put them all together to win. You just don’t win in the opening. That’s what I was trying to do when I went into that bank. I was trying to win in the opening. I was trying to get instant results…. You keep making bad moves, you’re going to get checkmated. And on the street, it ain’t checkmate. It’s your life. It’s a wheelchair. It’s incarceration.”

One striking thing about Brown’s story was that it did not seem ridiculous. The producers at ABC News, and subsequently their viewers, found it interesting and not at all bizarre that this sixth-century Persian war game, with pieces named after medieval European figures and rules that have not substantially changed for more than five hundred years, would give a down-and-out American in the twenty-first century some insight into his own flaws and a philosophy on how to repair them. In the era of Xbox and PlayStation, chess was no longer the most popular game around, but it was still very much a part of the fabric of our culture, and even seemed to be enjoying yet another popular resurgence. Membership in the United States Chess Federation was at an all-time high. Sales of chess sets in Britain were booming. The game was attracting a storm of attention on the Internet—with upwards of 100 million games played online annually. There were also large swells in urban and suburban youth competition, and among trendsetters. Will Smith, Don Imus, Bill Gates, Julia Roberts, Sting, and Salman Rushdie all played. Madonna was taking lessons. Arnold Schwarzenegger, prior to his California governorship, established a permanent chess table in his movie set trailer, with one chair labeled “Loser” and the other—his—labeled “Winner.” The improvisational rock band Phish had recently made history by arranging the two most populous chess games ever: the band versus its entire 15,000-person audience. Each side collectively offered one move per show (the audience voted during intermission), stretching out each game for several weeks. The band won the first game, the audience the second.

Part of the game’s modern appeal, in a world increasingly interconnected in finance and culture, might be its universality. By the late twentieth century, the western European standardized form of the game had long since spread to every part of every continent, including all of Africa and South America, and had even overtaken the older
chatrang
/
shatranj
in its original quarters: India, Iran, Russia, and the Arab nations.

Most important of all, though, the game was becoming an integral part of school life in many nations, including the United States. A growing number of school systems were even making it a part of their curricula. In New York City, where I live, chess had recently worked its way into the classrooms of 160 public schools. It was also widely taught in private schools, where competition was fierce for the most sought-after instructors. To witness this growing school–chess connection, knowing the game’s profound history, was nothing short of surreal.

“G
OOD MORNING, CLASS.”
In a well-lit classroom in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, roving chess instructor Nicholas Chatzilias introduced himself to a group of curious, well-disciplined eight-year-olds. The large, rectangular room on the second floor of Public School 52 had three computers in the corner, a row of shallow coat closets on the east wall, and a table full of snacks and small plant aquariums at the far end. Nestled close to the blackboard, nineteen second graders were arranged in four desk clusters. Chatzilias gently set his plastic poster-tube case against a table, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote his name up on the board.

“You can call me Mr. Nicholas,” he told the group. A longtime amateur chess competitor, Chatzilias was now being paid to teach his passion by the New York-based Chess-in-the-Schools foundation. He taught weekly chess classes in five different public schools and supervised their after-school chess clubs. Of the wide range of elementary, middle, and junior high kids that Chatzilias would be working with this semester, this youngest group would perhaps be the most challenging—and yet, at the same time, the most promising. At their tender age, they could only so quickly learn the nuances of the game. Once they took to it, though, the benefits could be extraordinary. Contemporary studies were helping to establish with modern scholarship what Benjamin Franklin and others had been saying for centuries about chess’s wide range of intellectual and character benefits. The earlier the kids started, the better. Chess literacy was like its own unique language: anyone could learn it, but the very youngest players could hardwire it directly into their brains.

Bringing chess into school classrooms was an experiment with roots in mid-twentieth-century Russia that began to catch the attention of Western educators in the late 1960s. In the mid-1970s, studies in Belgium and Zaire suggested that chess could improve students’ spatial, numerical, and verbal abilities—as well as overall cognitive development. Other promising studies followed from Hong Kong, Venezuela, New Brunswick, Pennsylvania, and Texas. With each new study came an increasing number of communities inclined to give chess a try. After all, schools are not only supposed to impart knowledge; they’re also supposed to teach kids
how to learn
, to instill curiosity and critical thinking skills. “It’s the finest thing that ever happened to this school,” remarked one New York City principal. A Florida superintendent echoed that sentiment: “Chess has taught my students more than any other subject,” he said. “I used to teach for schools in the poor neighborhoods and that’s why I came here,” explained Maria Manuri, an educator working with a Toronto-based program called Chess’n Math. “With chess, you can learn all kinds of things. It’s not just concentration, not just logic, it’s everything. It’s how to lose, how to win, how to be social. In schools today there’s no ethics anymore. Chess can teach that to you too.”

Indeed, researchers were finding that chess might help kids with skills far beyond math and logic. “Chess can enhance concentration, patience, and perseverance,” concluded the University of Sydney’s Peter Dauvergne, “as well as develop creativity, intuition, memory, and most importantly, the ability to analyse and deduce from a set of general principles, learning to make tough decisions and solve problems flexibly.” At Memphis State University, Dianne Horgan investigated the cognitive mechanisms involved. She came away with a few powerful conclusions:

1.
More learning longer.
Chess teaches children to sharpen their information evaluation skills, and to build those skills for a longer period of time—to keep their “acquisition and revision processes active.”

2.
More efficient learning.
Chess training and tournaments require an unusual amount of “process feedback”—not just acknowledging that something has gone wrong after a lost game, but having to learn what went wrong. Honing feedback skills could have wide implications for future development.

3.
More self-perception.
Serious chess training improves “calibration,” the correlation between a person’s ability and that person’s perception of his or her ability. (In the general population, calibration skills are poor.) Improving calibration can greatly enhance the value of feedback.

Chess was obviously not the only way to give the young brain a tune-up. But schools needed an array of tools to help them consistently produce disciplined, curious, persistent minds. The world is awash in information, scientific nuance, and fragmentation of culture and perspectives. Failure to deliver at least a basic education has greater consequences than ever before.

In New York, Chess-in-the-Schools, formerly known as the American Chess Foundation, had been offering free instruction to underprivileged New York City students since 1986. By 2005, thanks largely to support from New York philanthropist Lewis Cullman, they had a $4 million annual budget supporting fifty instructors in 160 schools. “Chess is not a game of luck,” the foundation declared in its mission statement. “Children who practice and develop skills will reap rewards. The confidence they develop extends to other areas of their academic and emotional lives…. Our program has proven to be a cost-effective way to inspire and empower children to succeed, one move at a time.”

Even after learning so much about chess’s potential impact on the mind, I was still highly skeptical of this notion of actually importing the game directly into our school classrooms. At a time when public education was in such disrepair, did chess really deserve to be a priority agenda item? Wouldn’t students’ time and energy perhaps be better spent elsewhere? I wanted to witness this firsthand. Mr. Nicholas invited me to sit in on his class.

“Can anyone tell me how old chess is?” he asked his young students. “How long has it been around?”

Hands shot up with wild guesses.

“Eighteen years?”

“Thirty-eight?”

Obviously, Chatzilias wasn’t expecting a correct answer from second graders. Rather, this was his opening gambit in a strategy to demonstrate how truly special and set apart the game was. None of his ambitious plans would go anywhere unless he could really get these kids hooked. They had to fall in love with the game.

“Here are some other games I’m sure you’ve heard of,” he said, writing their names on the blackboard.

Gameboy
years old

Monopoly
years old

Baseball
years old