## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Moss]] - Full Title: The Rookie - Category: #books ## Highlights - ‘Preparation is partly about conditioning your nervous system for the delicate balance of imperious desire and contemplative restraint,’ explained Rowson. The killer instinct of the tiger and the self-denial of the monk – this was the combination I had to seek. ([Location 338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=338)) - Mikhail Botvinnik, the great Russian-born world champion and founder of the Soviet school of chess, considered Greco the first true chess professional – he used to wager on the games he played – and admired his style of play. ‘Greco introduced combinations into chess,’ said Botvinnik in an interview published in 1988. ‘Before his time there had been no such thing. It was a major step forward.’ ([Location 407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=407)) - Greco represented the 17th century and was recognised as one of the founding fathers of the game for his combinative play; Philidor was chosen from the 18th century because, according to Botvinnik, ‘he drew attention to the assessment of positions that are determined by the pawn structure’; Morphy was chosen because ‘he demonstrated positional understanding in open games, where the pieces are mobile and the pawns play a subordinate role – what pawns were to Philidor, pieces were to Morphy’; and, finally, Steinitz was admitted to the pantheon because he ‘contributed an understanding of closed positions [where the pieces are locked in by the pawn structure].’ Greco, Philidor, Morphy, Steinitz – modern chess history in capsule form. ([Location 470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=470)) - the Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree said, a game ‘beautiful enough to waste your life for’. ([Location 511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=511)) - ‘Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency’ – Raymond Chandler, novelist ([Location 815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=815)) - Arthur Koestler, who admitted he was a ‘passionate duffer’ where chess was concerned, reported on the Fischer–Spassky match for The Sunday Times. He was struck by the double-sidedness of chess, calling it the ‘perfect paradigm for both the glory and the bloodiness of the human mind. On the one hand, an exercise in pure imagination happily married to logic, staged as a ballet of symbolic figures on a mosaic of 64 squares; on the other hand, a gladiatorial contest. This dichotomy is perhaps the main secret of the game’s astonishingly long history.’ ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=862)) - Barnes pays chess the courtesy of treating it seriously. He is intrigued by the strange theatre of the absurd, the long pauses in the ‘action’, the way that Channel 4’s ambitious real-time coverage of the match ‘wandered into quasi-philosophical problems of being and nothingness’ during periods when nothing at all was happening. But it is not ridiculous. Not quite. It is a legitimate mental endeavour. And he grasps the key point – that you are searching for a sort of truth. He likens a chess game to a courtroom in which the two parties contest their competing truths – a brilliant metaphor. It is that search for the truth of a position that makes chess worthwhile. It is because Barnes sees this that he doesn’t descend to easy mockery. ‘Chess is, famously, an activity entirely unrelated to the rest of life,’ he writes. ‘From this springs its fragile profundity.’ ([Location 883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=883)) - Chess subscribes to Sayre’s law, which states that ‘in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake’. It is a circumscribed world filled with mighty egos; feuds go on for decades; the viciousness of chess blogs and forums is remarkable. In this world where, in truth, nothing is really at stake, the passions aroused are extraordinary. There may be an element of displacement here: it is a game, but a game that comes to mean more than life itself. Winning and losing mean nothing, but they seem to mean everything because they are the yardstick by which we judge ourselves. ([Location 1064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1064)) - ‘For some, chess is a hobby picked up along the way,’ he writes, ‘while for others it’s a cathedral of truth and beauty. ([Location 1189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1189)) - ‘The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake,’ said Savielly Tartakower, a Polish grandmaster from the first half of the 20th century and the game’s greatest aphorist. ([Location 1203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1203)) - Chess, Donner insists, is a struggle, a fight to the death. ‘When one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can at last begin to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the moment when, among masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is not art. No, chess cannot be compared with anything. Many things can be compared with chess, but chess is only chess.’ ([Location 1232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1232)) - ‘Chess appeals to a kind of male, autistic mentality that women don’t have, or fewer women have,’ he said. ‘Women are more sociable than men, and chess is at base a rather anti-social game. The periphery, the before and after, can be social, but the game itself involves being silent for hours.’ ([Location 1470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1470)) - Chess, like fishing and pigeon fancying, is a great form of structured time-wasting. ([Location 1661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1661)) - One of Kennedy’s earliest recollections was of his parents playing chess, and the experience was a painful one. ‘The two used to quarrel like cat and dog over the game,’ he writes. Thanks to his early experiences, he knew exactly where he stood in the art v fight-to-the-death debate: ‘A game of chess is essentially an argument. The board and men are accessories to the argument: that is, they are the outward symbols of the language in which it is carried on. But they are by no means necessary to it. Indeed, I have heard of a saying among the Hungarians, who are fond of chess and in the habit of contesting games while riding on horseback, that the board and men only spoil the play.’ ([Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1759)) - respect chess by exhausting all the possibilities offered by a game ([Location 1930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1930)) - (many strong chess players have never learned to drive, either for economic or what appear to be cognitive reasons). ([Location 1997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=1997)) - ‘When you’re playing chess, you are personalising the game,’ Peters told me. ‘You are letting yourself and your ability be judged by the result. If I play chess, I say it’s just my mind having a bit of fun, so there’s no pressure because I don’t know what my mind is going to do. I’ve dissociated myself from it. The result doesn’t touch me. I’m different from my mind. It’s not me.’ ([Location 2108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=2108)) - I asked Ree if his famous adage that chess was a game ‘beautiful enough to waste your life for’ was really how he saw it. ‘It was a sort of joke of course,’ he laughed, ‘something I said on the spur of the moment to a writer who was doing some interviews for a book. I don’t really think it’s a wasted life. I am happy to have spent my life playing the game and writing about it.’ ([Location 2366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=2366)) - Botvinnik and Tal are extreme examples of the two types of player, but they are extremes and most people are somewhere in between.’ One needed to study and take it seriously, yet at the end realise it meant nothing. Like life itself, which is perhaps why it appealed to Duchamp, who insisted ‘there is no solution because there is no problem’. Life was not a puzzle to be solved or a dilemma to be fretted over. It just was, and should be celebrated as such. Similarly a game of chess meant everything while it was being played and nothing once it was concluded. We should love it, but, as Steve Peters had told me back in London, not allow success or failure at the board to define us. It was a game, brilliantly transient, deeply vacuous. Play as if your life depended on it, but, if you die, do so gracefully, graciously. ([Location 2400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=2400)) - Some of the best players are far from academic in other ways, demonstrating that there is little correlation between orthodox educational achievement and chess talent. Good chess players are often original thinkers and natural rebels. Conformists make very bad players. Everyone can spot a conformist’s moves. ([Location 3336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=3336)) - Spiegel explained why schools liked to build chess into their curriculum: ‘It’s seen as developing pure analytical thinking. It makes thinking relevant in a certain way. There’s a way in which school is totally irrelevant to everything you do, and for kids it’s nice to have a game where if you think, you win, and if you don’t think, you lose, because it makes thinking seem important. It also teaches children consequences; they see a chain of cause and effect.’ ([Location 3338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=3338)) - The more chess players I met, the more I realised that freedom was the key – to their lives and their chess. ([Location 3553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=3553)) - ‘Nine to five and life in the boardroom is not for me,’ he said. He preferred to be the true chairman of the board. ([Location 3576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=3576)) - Devoting yourself to chess was an act of rebellion; a rejection of the conventional world; a statement of solidarity with the marginalised. I now realised that this was what had made me come back to chess. I was uncomfortable with, or perhaps just bored by, the pressing world; I wanted this small, beautiful, meaningless world; I wanted to possess it and to be possessed by it. ([Location 3773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=3773)) - Many of the people I encountered in chess were intelligent misfits; they had in some way been dispossessed, losing their job or suffering a marriage breakdown or feeling some grudge against the system; chess empowered them, gave them a space in which they felt comfortable and in control; it was an antidote to their powerlessness in life, a simulacrum of success, a satisfying narrative they could cling to. A game of chess was a battle they felt able to fight – perhaps had to fight – because they had lost life’s greater war. ([Location 3782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=3782)) - Herman Melville, who in Billy Budd describes it as ‘an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it’. ([Location 4101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=4101)) - Speelman once said chess was ‘a medium through which concentration and a higher state of mind is achieved … it is like contemplating your navel, only better.’ When I reminded him of this quote, he explained what he had meant: ‘My concept of time changes completely when I play chess. Five or six hours hardly seems to take any time at all.’ He said that when he played in a team match, so intense was his concentration on his own game that he would have no sense of the games being played on either side of him: ‘The normal continuity of viewing the world outside goes. Once I’m playing I’m completely focused, until it’s over and I’m unfocused. I like that very much. It’s an endeavour where you can transcend yourself.’ ([Location 4253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=4253)) - In Speelman’s view they are calculating machines and don’t really understand chess. ‘They don’t outplay humans,’ he said. ‘They out-error-check them. They take things when we leave them en prise. It doesn’t matter that human beings blunder, because it can’t be helped; we do. Computers don’t often do anything very original, and when they play each other they quite often have really awful games. You need some sort of guiding hand behind the fact that they can calculate to infinity and beyond.’ ([Location 4263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=4263)) - ‘I was playing chess with my friend and he said, “Let’s make this interesting.” So we stopped playing chess’ – Comedian Matt Kirshen ([Location 4287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=4287)) - ‘Chess players are notoriously lazy and basically incapable of doing anything else, so chess is what we do.’ Professional chess is an affirmation of individuality, a cry for freedom – and a way of staying in bed until midday. ([Location 4856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01FR8MH2S&location=4856)) - Tags: [[favorite]]