“Find your partner and set up the boards,” the chess tournament director calls out. I have a look at the pairings list for the game we are about to play. My opponent is currently leading the tournament, and I’m a bit farther down—though there have only been a few rounds played. I call out his name, find him, and sit down at my assigned seat. I unroll the board with the beige and green checkerboard pattern. I watch him come with the bag of pieces. I start to get a hot feeling in my chest and try to control my breath. I get nervous frequently, but especially so given that my opponent was better than me. It wasn’t just the score in the tournament—this guy carries himself differently from me, with an air of confidence. I shiver, not just because of the cold in the room. 

    He pours the pieces out of the bag, and we began setting them up. A king, a queen, two bishops, two knights, two rooks, and eight pawns for either side. The board is oriented correctly—white on the right. All in order. 

    Bouncing my legs up and down, I wait for the tournament director to finish checking on everyone and announce a start to the games. I’m black, which means that I move second—a disadvantage, but one with a fairly low significance at this level. I inhale deeply as we’re told to start playing. The chorus of thudding pieces begins, and my opponent makes his first move. 

    Chess is, really, quite a simple game. There are six piece types, each with a different set of moves, mostly straight lines. Each player takes a turn moving one of their pieces, possibly capturing an opponent’s piece by moving onto its square. The object of the game is, fundamentally, to trap the enemy’s king so there would be no way of rescuing it from being captured on your next turn. There are a few special moves, special situations, and other rules that must be kept in mind, but this is the general gist. Despite this simplicity, enormous complexity arises from these rules. The number of possible games is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Though most of that number are nonsensical games unlikely to be reached in practice, the number of different variations is still huge. Almost each move in a chess game is an irreversible decision that fundamentally alters the whole future course of the game. In that sense, it’s quite like life—there are many decisions that are hugely important and irreversible. Chess is also like life in the sense that it has different stages. There are three game phases—opening, middlegame, and endgame—that have vastly different characteristics, despite arising from the same set of rules. There are so many subtle nuances that people can spend their whole lives studying chess.

    And what’s the end result of all of this complexity? Computers suggest (though they don’t prove) that the perfect game should result in a draw. When high-level computers, far stronger than even the strongest human players, play from the starting position, the result is almost invariably a draw. Though white starts with an advantage, it isn’t enough to force a win, and in a perfect game of chess, black can simply defend well enough to hold a draw. 

    With human players, though, holding a perfect draw is not so easy. I stare at the position on the board and despair. I’m down a pawn, and I already know that the rest of this game is going to involve my opponent crushing me. His knights dash around fiendishly, his pawns suppress my position, and his bishops patrol the board, all while his queen tries to coordinate with his pieces to form an attack. I think, “A grandmaster would still easily beat this guy from this position”. I’m trying to motivate myself, but it doesn’t work. I know, after all, that I am not a grandmaster. The subtle positional ideas, the threats that my opponent might overlook, the moves that pose practical problems for my opponent—I can’t find any of them. And I’m just really not looking forward to the next hour or so. I focus on the gentle tick-tick-tick of the clock and try to settle down, though I can’t resist rubbing the rough felt bottoms of the captured pieces.

    After all the other players have packed up and left, our game is still going. I’m still holding on to some degree, somehow. Eventually, the director declares that the day is over. I breathe a sigh of relief as he walks over to declare my game a draw, as I know is normal in this (relatively informal) tournament for games that run over time. But he doesn’t. He says “Hmm, this position looks interesting. We can leave it like this and you two can continue playing tomorrow.” 

    I’m devastated. I have no idea what he saw in the position. To me, it looks as if my position is just much worse. What’s “interesting” about it? There be something, some compensation I’ve overlooked, but I can’t see it. At this point, even a loss would feel better - at least I wouldn’t have to spend tomorrow being squeezed until I lose. I almost feel like the tournament director is trying to prolong my suffering. 

    In hindsight, I suspect that that position was likely a draw. If it really were easily winning for one side, I doubt that the tournament director would have called it “interesting.” But at that time, there was no way I could have figured it out. Chess is a game of pure logic. There is no element of random chance—it’s purely deterministic. But for the life of me, I couldn’t see what the tournament director saw, in the same position, following the same rules. I realize that both on the chessboard and off, even when the state of things is clearly visible, people’s understanding differs based on perspective.

    Chess is a game of pure logic, and yet… people are so bad at it. Even after spending countless hours studying the best moves in the opening suggested by computers, top level players sometimes are able to push through for a win with white, and sometimes even with black. Top-level chess is still somewhat drawish, but there are countless examples of one side pushing through to score victory over their opponent. Still, given the fact that the game should theoretically result in a draw, any game with a decisive result must be the result of at least one human error—someone deviating from one of the sets of moves that would have ended in a draw, something that changes the objective evaluation of the position. And games—even draws, and even at the top level—often have multiple of these sorts of mistakes. To say nothing of lower level play.

    The next day, after a few moves of play, I’m down a queen. The most valuable piece on the chessboard. No one could possibly consider this position “interesting.”

If I’m not able to play even decently well in a chess game, how badly must I be screwing things up in the real world? With pesky emotions clouding my judgment, with near-infinite positions rather than 64 squares, without the ability to play over and over again… How can I possibly trust my own judgment?

    I’ve always been something of a STEM person. I like the fact that there are clearly defined rules, correct and incorrect. When going through a curriculum designed for human students, I usually do at least decently well. But chess has taught me that there’s a lot I don’t know, and can’t know. Some people might like to believe that humans are rational beings. It’s nice to imagine things that way, that people are good at reason and can use reason to always, in the end, arrive at the truth. But the truth is that human brains simply aren’t very good at reasoning, especially when looking at complex issues. There’s a lot to be said for reason, and it is important, but it does have fundamental limits. No matter how “logic-based” the universe is, even if the entirety of it can be described by just four fundamental forces, it’s simply too complex to be entirely knowable to us puny humans. There’s just too much stuff going on. No matter how much logical reasoning and good-faith debate we use, we can never be sure we’ve arrived at the absolute truth.

    In the end, we have to accept that we’re not very knowledgeable, and try to make what we think are the best moves, even if we can’t possibly calculate every variation.