Competition: An event in which there are more losers than winners. Otherwise it’s not a competition. A society based on competition is therefore primarily a society of losers. - John Ralston Saul
In this essay I will offer some tips on playing chess like an arsehole. I will then suggest some wider applications for the principles behind Arsehole Chess. Let’s be clear from the start: this is not an essay about how to be good at chess. In fact it’s probably not even about chess at all, really.
If you want to be good at chess you need imagination, a flexible mind, and a capacious memory, combined with a crushingly, awe-inspiringly huge capacity for calculating possibilities and counter-possibilities. Have those, win at chess, knock yourself out. This is not for you.
This essay is about a different kind of chess. My kind of chess. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with my chess history.
Like many male children, I learned chess Oedipus-style, as a death-struggle with my father. I learned the basic moves early, and shunted the pieces around draughts-style, happy just to know how the horse moves and pinch a pawn or two. Usually with the horse. Horses are cool.
But continually losing at chess is a uniquely annoying experience. You don’t get wiped out wholesale, like draughts or monopoly. No one solves the mystery or guesses the meaning of the charade. The winner doesn’t even get to take the king; just freezes the poor useless figurehead in an untenable position, then walks away. Checkmate is in fact what most people mean when they use stalemate as a metaphor. The game is over because you can’t do anything.
So, slowly, I started to get annoyed with constantly being cornerpainted, and got serious about trying to Win This Thing. Cue years of tearfully playing it out to the last stupid move, trapped in corners, my queen long dead and buried in a pile of misplaced pawns and once-cool horses, while the opposing forces formed a smug scrum around my beleaguered sovereign.
In desperation, aged about mid-puberty, I dug out an old chess book and learned some basic openings. I played through the desiccated triumphs of long-irrelevant masters (Morphy vs Allies, anyone?) and was pleased and excited to realise that I could See What They Were Doing There, even if I couldn’t create it for myself. I learned a few basic End Games (of which more later), and got a basic grasp of the idea of playing for position rather than just bowling pieces like a dickhead.
The game changed. For the first time ever, there were occasions where I had the initiative; where I knew what I was trying to do, and I was more or less doing it. And when the day came, eventually, that I won a game, it wasn’t that big of a surprise; I’d been playing better chess for months. Then, obviously, Freud flew in on a wingèd omphalos, declared me A Man, and I beat the old man at chess every game from then on, until it was just sad and we stopped playing.
No, wait. That’s not what happened. What happened from then on was that I was usually pretty obviously the better player, but I still hardly ever won, because my father plays chess like an arsehole. And having learned the Rudiments of Ruy Lopez with limited success, I set about collating the Principles of Arsehole Chess, which, to save you the years of horror through which I went to collect them, I summarise here.
Principle the first: Underestimate your opponent.
Always assume you are not playing Kasparov. If it turns out you are playing Kasparov, you’re fucked anyhow; at the very least, assuming you’re not playing him may give you a tiny edge in confidence. There’s nothing to lose, except a game of chess.Principle the second: Attack. If attacking looks like the wrong idea, attack.
Good players of many sports will tell you that the best means of defence is a good attack. Arsehole chess dictum two tells us that the best attack of attack is attack attack.Attack.
When your obviously-superior opponent defuses your probably-not-that-great first attack, find another way to attack. If, like me, you tend to stupidly lose vital pieces by recklessly attacking, attack with less-vital* pieces. If, like me, your idiocy leaves you with nothing standing except a king, attack with your king. He can move in any direction! Attack!
Principle the third: Never give up. If it’s obviously time to give up, don’t give up.
I distinctly remember the first time I saw someone topple a king: I was watching a game of chess at high school, there were heaps of pieces still on the board, but one player was in a pretty nice position, so his opponent knocked over his king. Then the game was finished, because that meant he’d given up. I didn’t even know that was a possible move. I tried it at home the next time I was hopelessly stuck; the old man set the king back on its square and said, “It’s your move”. It took another half an hour for me to finally actually lose.And prolonging the agony is key, unless you’re playing Kasparov. (Which, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember you’re not. Even if you are.) Because, while a proper chess player will make short work of your bullshit, most normal people you’re going to meet will get more frustrated the longer you take to admit defeat. Eventually, frustration leads to a slip. Then, bam! Your king takes their rook and starts to leer threateningly at that cool-looking horse over in the corner. The sheer shock of this kind of crap can help you winkle a stalemate out of the most ludicrously checky-looking predicament.
Principle the fourth: Make everything as hard and unpleasant as possible for your opponent.
Unschooled players often upset players who have a firm knowledge of chess for the precise reason that they don’t know enough to know they’re supposed to be losing now. I’m going to write that again, because it’s such a great idea: You don’t know enough to know you’re supposed to be losing now. Therefore (occasionally), you actually don’t lose.A good sub-Kasparovian player will often have a nicely-worked out plan with contingencies included. If you’re obeying rules one and two, you won’t have noticed this, a) because you underestimated your opponent and b) because you’ll have been too busy attacking like a particularly virulent strain of necrotising fasciitis. But if it’s clear there’s somewhere you’re supposed to go to make their master plan work out, go elsewhere, however stupid. If it’s the difference between mate in 4 and mate in 6, make them do 6 moves. If nothing else you’ve wasted 45 more seconds of their life.
The thing about the end games in the books, is that they describe this world of silly chivalry in which the noble loser knows s/he’s bested and plays along with the beautiful logic of the superior player’s perfectly-crafted coup-de-grace.
Fuck that. Don’t let them pierce you neatly with a rapier just because it’s pretty. Make them bludgeon you to death, slowly, with a brick. If you get a chance to loose the brick from their fingers, do it. Make them use a jandal. Use your last breath to give them a nasty scratch with your toenail, if that’s all you can move. Fight. Chess is a fight. Fight.
Arsehole Chess in Practice
If you apply the principles of Arsehole Chess to your normal game, (assuming you have one, and if you do you’re one up on me), you’ll find you beat obviously-superior opponents more often than you expect (which is to say, sometimes). A modest goal, sure. But what d’you expect? They’re better than you. They should win all the time. The only reason they don’t is because you’re playing like an arsehole.But obviously there’s more to it than that, or I wouldn’t have wasted a whole Wednesday night typing out my stupid chess theory which doesn’t even help you win at chess much. There’s an attitude to Arsehole Chess which comes in handy when dealing with the other rigidly structured game where they’re usually better than you are.**
Apparently, history ended in 1990, and we were left in a world where, rather than two huge opposing ideologies butting heads across decades and continents, market capitalism was the winner, and its only opponent was, well, actual people. Economies, and then markets, and then societies, came to be based on competition. And as John Ralston Saul so prematurely noted at the start of this debacle, a society based on competition is primarily a society of losers.
Screeds have been written on how to succeed, because success is winning the competition, and competition is what we’re all here for. How-to-succeed guides are stupid though. It’s easy to succeed - you just have to be Kasparov.
Most of us don’t need to know how to succeed, because most of us can’t be the Best Shoe Salesman, or the #1 Golfer, or the Person With A Job That Brings In Enough Income To Cover Living. Telling people how to succeed is implicitly selling a myth - if you had done things differently, you could be the best. Which means implicitly that if you’re not the best, it’s your fault. But that is a dirty, damned lie. It’s not our fault we’re not the best. If you worked exactly as hard as the Best Shoe Salesman, it would come down to whether that one client liked your tie or not as to who won the great sales race, and you can’t control that. If you trained exactly as hard as the #1 golfer, and had exactly the same expensive equipment and expert caddying, it would come down to the tiniest natural physical or cognitive advantage as to who was #1, and you can’t control that. If there are fewer jobs which pay a living wage than there are people who need money, a number of people will go without, and they can’t control that. No matter what anyone tells you, it’s not your fault you’re not Kasparov. No amount of telling you to be him is going to help.
Most of us are going to fail.
Most of us are going to fail, and there is a beauty to that. The feminist who spends a lifetime battling patriarchy and the male supremacist who spends a lifetime battling human decency and the tide of history will both likely die before their battle is won, one way or the other. The person with a job that brings in enough income to cover living is likely shit at golf. The rich white man who wrote the How-To-Succeed guide will soon enough have to use boxes of remaindered copies as rudimentary rafts when the by-products of success-crazed industry melt the ice caps. Or something, you get the picture.
Most of us don’t need to know how to succeed, but it’s nice to know what to do while you’re failing. I honestly don’t know what to suggest; if I did, I wouldn’t be failing quite so horribly. But I have this feeling when I’m playing Shit Chess that’s awfully similar to the feeling I have when I’m being Shit At Life in general, which is - just keep going. Attack. Don’t give up. Make it as hard for them to beat you as possible. They can’t be that good.
If you’re not Kasparov, and most of us aren’t, whether you win or lose is largely a matter of random chance. What you get to choose is how you play. If all else fails, try playing like an arsehole. What have you got to lose?
*Actually, they’re more vital now. They’re all you’ve bloody got.
**It’s life. Okay? I wasn’t going to write it out, but then I got all “Oh, maybe that’s just pretentiously obscurist”; and then I typed it out “…the other rigidly structured game where they’re usually better than you are - life.” And that was just too upworthy to live. So I put it in a footnote. Happy? I’m not.
