Lilly and Chess

Lilly’s at-home education continued apace over the weekend. That’s not the same as home schooling, which purports to take the place of institutional schooling. At-home education isn’t really education in any pedagogic sense, it’s just the stuff you pick up along the way, at home.

She’s taken a sudden interest in learning chess as it’s actually played, rather than the preschooler approach, which is to move the pieces around and take pieces at random. So whenever Ann was sleeping—Ann has a pre-preschooler approach that wrecks the board—Lilly would come to me and want to play. Play we did, about a half-dozen games in two days. I showed her the Fool’s Mate. I let her checkmate me that way, once. But in the other games, I showed her how to play by winning. “Someday,” I said, “you’ll be able to beat me.”

And she will. I was a decent player as a youngster, but never got to be really good—I never quite overcame a tendency to make occasional foolish mistakes, no matter how carefully I studied the board. That’s still a problem.

My brother Jay taught me how to play, maybe when I was about the same age as Lilly. In the fifth and sixth grade, I’d go with Tom T. to the high school chess club and play there, occasionally even winning. We must have been inspired by the victories of Bobby Fischer. Tom and I and a fellow named Paul organized a chess tournament in the sixth grade, held one Saturday in covered patio sort of space that the school had. If I remember right, we structured it as best two out of three games goes to the next level—and somehow came out with three finalists, one of whom was me. We never bothered with playing a championship game or games, though.

I didn’t play much in high school, but had some good opponents in college—Steve P especially (a co-host of the party I wrote about yesterday), who could use his bishops like knife blades between the ribs, and his teams of knights to hook into his opponents. Later, in Japan, I played a Scotsman whose talent for game was roughly equal to mine, so our games tended to devolve into trench warfare. Somehow, metaphors of violence come with this game, at least in my conception of it.

I’m not under the illusion that skill in chess and high intelligence necessarily go together—look at what a disagreeable crank Bobby Fischer turned out to be. Still, it’s a good thing for Lilly to be familiar with.