Scholar’s Mate
January 02, 2025 at 08:30PMMychal Denzel Smith learned the rules of chess young, but he only came to the game of chess later—and when he did, he studied deeply. It was an immersion born of necessity: his daughter’s birth, followed closely by his mother’s death, had nearly shattered him. Now, with barely a year separating him from that loss, he invites you to sit at the board with him, and to examine the spirit of the game.
Now I start my days with my three c’s: coffee, cigar, and chess (and sometimes end them with cognac in place of coffee). I can’t deny my attraction to the aesthetics of this image: a writer and his vices beginning his day with a rigorous intellectual exercise—not far off, if I’m honest, from the joy my father took in believing his children saw him as a master businessman in the imaginary world of Monopoly (in reality, I saw him taking joy in stealing our joy). But this ritual does exactly what I want it to do, which is to stimulate the part of my brain left dormant after my mother’s death, and in a low-stakes way. Winning or losing is irrelevant (I like to win, but I’m realistic); I need only for my mind to be activated. “But man is a frivolous and unseemly being, and perhaps, similar to a chess player,” the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground says, “likes only the process of achieving the goal, but not the goal itself.” The process is exciting because there are as many ways to play chess as there are chess players: each new opponent offers a different set of challenges to solve. You don’t know if you’re going to an Italian Game (pawn to e4, knight to f3, bishop to c4, my favorite opening), a Queen’s Gambit, a King’s Indian, a Scotch (my least favorite to play against), an Alekhine’s Defense, a Ruy Lopez, a Scandinavian, and on and on. Does your opponent like to trade queens early? Are they a pawn stormer? Do they value bishops more than knights, or vice versa? Do you want to castle kingside or queenside? Do you castle at all? It’s all unknowable until the next piece moves, and then it all changes, and you have to carefully think your way through.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/02/scholars-mate/
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