Chess as a model for decision making

My childhood memories of chess were fairly limited to one particular summer. Someone in the neighbourhood got a chess set and every kid in the vicinity was craning their neck around two people hand to chin in thought.

Honestly, my first impression of the game was that it took too much time to get to a result and lacked the action-packedness of other board games. We certainly had no idea of a drawn game, hence there were many instances with just two kings playing endless hop scotch all over the board.

The summer passed, the games changed. Chess was something I only saw kids go to for school tournaments. The fact that most of the kids from the chess club seemed to be the “scholarly” sort made it feel a bit inaccessible. Hence deeming it only fit for the smart ones, I dipped my toes in a new physical sport every year trying desperately to get the rhythm of what “my sport” was. There was no sorting hat, just trial and error. And so I stuck at racquet sports distancing myself further from Chess.

A year ago, I almost got my ass handed to me in Chess by my 6 year old nephew. I was served a number of remarks on how I wasn’t developing my pieces properly or missing forking opportunities, while I just nodded pretending to know what those terms meant. And so I did what an ego hurt 30 something with time on his hands would do. I pegged Chess as a new mountain I’d aspire to conquer. Probably conquer might be too ambitious, but just taking a selfie few miles up from base camp would do. But this was the resurgence.

I realised my preconceived notion of Chess solely being a smart person activity wasn’t exactly sound. After getting back into the game through an academic lens, It seemed like it required a greater reliance on pattern recognition, time management and executive decision making. A parallel would be on how solving a Rubik’s cube, on paper, feels like an insurmountable task. But the knowledge of just one algorithm (a predefined set of moves based on how the colours are arranged) was enough to jump start a journey to being a speed cuber. It was memorisation over constant applied logic. (Funnily I took to Rubik’s cube solving to curb my smoking habit to keep myself occupied every moment I craved one. But once I started solving it sub 2 mins I rewarded myself by buying a pack. 🤦‍♂️)

Chess is a finite state machine. And it’s way more deterministic once you start getting really good at it. As you climb levels, the realm of best moves in a game would feel narrower. Which in itself can feel a bit limiting. Explains how a lot of Chess players partly segue into Poker, a game which adds a dimension of the personality of the player to a great degree.

But this “limiting” perception of chess also makes it feel much more applicable in using that model in a real world scenario. Here are some bits that my low 700 ELO chess brain is trying to churn lessons out of.

Strategy and Holistic approach

As you get better at playing Chess you start moving from making isolated good moves to long term strategic moves. You can stick to the basic tenets and keep making moves looking ahead only probably one or two moves ahead.

But once you get the hold of things you start seeing larger patterns. Which more often happens through prolonged exposure through repetition of being in those states/patterns.

Weirdly I’ve started looking at making personal decisions in a different way. Trying not to be myopic and having a good lookahead, but only to an extent where I know what factors I can control. So each large action (one move) I take needs to be thought through a realm of potential actions (moves) it can open up as opportunities.

This might sound fairly basic, but now I’ve started paying heed to even the strategy on how I make those choices.

Never play hope chess

This is one principle gets tossed around often but underlines an important idea to not solely bank on chance. The principle is to not play hoping that the other player would screw up.

A reading of this I see applicable IRL is to not make decisions solely based on some things working out. It’s always better to be prepared for a future difficult decision than be naively optimistic of something that might only have half a chance of occurring.

Time Control

Competitive chess is generally played under various constraints of time. So the game being a Bullet (under 3 minutes), a Blitz (under 10 minutes), a Rapid (10 - 60 minutes) or a Classical/Standard (90+ minutes) can greatly change the way it is played.

A lot of the Blitz and Bullet games rely on some degree of split second decision making especially while approaching an endgame. A lot of the training for which is cemented through the longer formats of the game. Directly diving head first into Blitz/Bullet games, as I erroneously did, can burn your fingers into making harmful decision patterns. By constantly playing fast and loose it can start feeling a lot like gambling, but the nature of chess being deterministic lead to it being less prone to a luck based outcome like gambling.

The idea here is to exercise and train your decision making ability with a longer time constraints and chipping it down to quicker means once a level of expertise is achieved.

The pieces and points

Each chess piece has a number allotted to it, which roughly aids in general decision making. Whether it be a good trade or a risky sacrifice, every decision can be aided through counting those points. They are definitely not set in stone. So based on certain contexts losing a point might make more sense, if it assuredly leads to gaining more later. But it generally acts like a guide to build a framework around for decision making.

Assigning such a point system to general life decisions can be daunting. Since it requires assigning a value to each aspect of what we want to make a decision over. But building a rough guide can still prevent road blocks that lead to decision paralysis. A numerical system can thus act as a counterbalance to choices we’d otherwise make from pure emotion.

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A lot of it, I admit, might seem contrived for the sake of drawing parallels. But that’s primarily cause I’m still a beginner when it comes to Chess.

The reason for me to even start look at this aspect was primarily to highlight the fact on how things are connected. Just like switching languages can lead to a change in perspective. A new interest or hobby thus has the potential to shape how you think. So there’s probably no need to be embarrassed about wanting to take up Extreme Ironing or Newsraiding cause you’d never know how that can lead to increased perseverance and lateral thinking abilities.