Somebody at the Wall Street Journal wrote a comment about chess which I thought was well done. I'm adding it to my list of favorite quotes.

The more you know about chess, the more you appreciate it. Like music, chess has some deep mathematical roots, but both require an unusual amount of 'instinctive' skill if you hope to rise to be among the best. Perhaps that is why many of us admire it -- it is one of those endeavors where you must admit "I may have some talent, but there is no way I could do that!"

Wall Street Journal
BOOKS
BOOKSHELF
‘All the Wrong Moves’ Review: Life Is Better in Chessland

The author’s addiction to the game fills him with self-loathing. But when his girlfriend starts attending his matches, he’s no longer ashamed.

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in May 2018.

By 

Roger Lowenstein

Aug. 15, 2019 7:04 pm ET

In “The Luzhin Defense,” Vladimir Nabokov ’s novel of chess and madness, the protagonist forsakes ordinary reality for the private universe of his interior chessboard. The painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp not only forsook art for chess; he spent his honeymoon in a chess club in Nice, France. His bride glued his pieces to the board and obtained a divorce. Then there was Boris Spassky, the Soviet champion who wryly remarked of his doomed marriage: “We were like bishops of opposite color.”

Sasha Chapin has felt it all—the monomaniacal focus, the addictive compulsion, the cresting and crashing of emotion when life is lived on 64 squares. By age 29, Mr. Chapin had forsaken leisurely afternoons and tender embraces, survived on junk food, and endured humiliation at the hands of over-tutored, pimpled and “ectomorphic” children. He had tried to quit the game but couldn’t stay away. “It just seems better out there in Chessland.”

“All the Wrong Moves” is a briskly told coming-of-age memoir and a kind of confessional. “It’s tricky to explain the appeal of chess to someone who doesn’t play,” Mr. Chapin says. Like many amateurs, this reviewer included, he is not an especially good player, only a stricken one. Chess fills him with self-loathing, like some “shameful and private disease,” but also with rapture.

Mr. Chapin has a fine eye for the game’s beauty and observes in a typically insightful metaphor that chess elevates one of the more dismaying aspects of existence—violence—into “symbolic ballet.” Since the game translates animal aggression into pure thought, the author sees it as “the most human thing you can do.” He quotes Bobby Fischer on Paul Morphy, a 19th-century phenom; Morphy was, Fischer said, “perhaps the most accurate player who ever lived.” The operative word, Mr. Chapin notes, is accurate. “This is a word that chess players use often. . . . It implies that there’s a truth to the game, and that a player’s goal is to get as close to that truth as possible.”

PHOTO: WSJ

ALL THE WRONG MOVES

By Sasha Chapin
Doubleday, 217 pages, $24.95

Not that Mr. Chapin is preachy. He describes one opponent as “a lower-rated player with an odd smell.” St. Louis, where he goes to take chess lessons, is “humid, boring and flat”; the pizza there is “a cracker, topped with ketchup.” Much of the mockery is turned on himself. He recalls that during his childhood in Canada “nobody liked me, and . . . they were probably right not to like me. I was an annoying and abrasive person.”

There is a bit of Holden Caulfield in that voice, and Mr. Chapin is also on a voyage of self-discovery. “Anyway, like most people,” he wryly begins, “I became obsessed with chess after I ran away to Asia with a stripper I’d just met.” In a flashback, he relates that he had taken to chess as a youngster but dropped the game when he realized that mastery was not to be his (and when his older brother started beating him).

The next thing we know, Mr. Chapin is trying to launch a career as a freelance writer and gets it in his head that relocating to Thailand would allow him to write in solitude. “Whether or not I believed this myself I’m not sure, but it was obviously untrue,” he writes. His self-deprecation does become annoying, but then, he warned us. On assignment in Kathmandu he encounters chess hustlers in a “rubble-strewn square” and suddenly the old flame is rekindled.

When he returns home to Toronto, he meets Katherine, an arts editor, of whom he writes: “The air hurriedly rearranged itself when she entered the room.” This is a charming way of saying that he fell hard. One senses that Katherine is the first thing the adult Mr. Chapin has encountered that he can’t hold at bay with sarcasm. For a while, he lived two lives: “a public, romantic one with Katherine” and a private, addictive one at the board. He finds that when his girlfriend watches his matches, chess no longer seems shameful. Yet still he feels he must choose between the “two magnetic poles” of Katherine and Caissa, the goddess of chess.

In the course of his entertaining odyssey, Mr. Chapin offers a Zen-like secret to chess, and to living, and some sharp observations on the game. He compares its ritual openings to a well-trod path by which one enters an “endless forest” yet ultimately finds oneself lost in a confusing thicket. Chess, he says, is “a perfect information game,” in which all information is available to both players; some simply process it better. He rejects, as it applies to chess, the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell ’s “Outliers” (2008), which asserted that success derives from 10,000 hours or so of practice. Chess requires study, Mr. Chapin concedes, but also raw talent. Starting young helps, too.

And he delivers a fine cameo of a chess genius. Mr. Chapin describes Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, in an exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, against 70 would-be rivals. “Looking cool and trim,” the champ strolls from board to board, pausing a moment before touching a piece and moving on to the next opponent. Meanwhile, his adversaries laboriously study their positions. Mr. Carlsen racks up 69 wins and a draw. How does he do it? Mr. Chapin wonders. “Every time he looks at pieces on a board, their positions are automatically compared with the position of every piece in every game he’s ever played, and the plethora of games he’s ever studied.” It is a feat of memory beyond the author’s wildest hopes. “Becoming a frog was probably more likely.” But, to judge from the confident style of “All the Wrong Moves,” his first book, Mr. Chapin does have a future as a writer.

Mr. Lowenstein’s latest book is “America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve.”