Chess and Happy 'Unreason.'

I have over the last few months begun playing chess with a friend back in England via e-mail using algebraic chess notifications. The horizontal lines on the chess board are alphabetised A-H and the vertical lines are numbered 1-8, so one notification for example may be, pawn moves to e4 etc. A system of beautiful simplicity in theory. Using e-mail is of course not as romantic as a game played by postal correspondence or, of course carrier pigeon, (or those owls in Harry Potter.) It's a shame really, this modern lack of romance, were everything is so coldly rationalised. The sociologist Max Weber talked of the Iron Cage of Rationality inherent to social life in Western capitalist societies. Now, in an ideal world (one where I wasn't apparently in a cage of rationality) I would have a poor minion run across the harsh, unforgiving surface of the world with my chess move tightly bound on a papyrus scroll, carrying my chess notification over dangerous land and tempestuous sea with bleeding heels like a Roman envoy from where I presently am in Sydney to my friend in Sheffield. However as the Rolling Stones rightly said, You Can't Always Get What You Want. We both had chess sets set up (see photo below) and would move the pieces as per the notifications we sent to each other, simple. You consider your move, type it in and click send, then move the piece accordingly on your board. Done. Couldn't be easier. In theory simple, that is what my friend and I thought till we attempted it.

Problems began around maybe 10-12 moves in. It's almost impossible to precise. It began with an e-mail where I was sure, nay, convinced I could take his Queen. I went over the move again and again, giddily and excitedly cackling at my opportunity and his erroneous over sight. Of course, I sent him an e-mail with my notification in a humble, conciliatory and gentlemanly tone. It read;

 “Before reading my next notification below I want you to take a few deep breaths and make sure you are sitting comfortably. Upon reading don't give in to too much self hate and loathing.....”

It actually transpired, to my dismay, the Bishop I had used to take his Queen was not where it was on his board, the move to take his Queen was impossible. His Queen would love to fight another day. The tin of worms was open, something had gone very wrong. Sure of my critical faculties I set up the chess pieces again as they were when you begin and began to pick through the e-mails, I would easily see where the error had arisen I thought naively. I spent a spirit sapping hour or so going through the labyrinthine e-mail trail to no avail. We had added moves as an after thought after lots of writing, or replied to previous e-mails with another move...I couldn’t work it out, it was utterly beyond me. My patient friend eventually worked it out , he'd accidentally moved a Knight instead of a Bishop previously. We knew the point where we had gone wrong and began afresh from there, even with an e-mailed photograph of his chess board showing exactly where his pieces were to cast out any further doubt or confusion. It was just a rock of the boat, no problem, it would be plain sailing from here on in.

5 moves later were both staring, across the world from each other, glassy eyed with confusion at our chess boards. He had moved a bishop into a place where it could be easily taken, it was obviously a mistake. After further investigation this time a typing error was seen to be to blame. The good old confusion inducing typo. No mistake it seems was beyond either of us! We hobbled on with the game. Literally a move or so later it became apparent that my friend had possibly got mixed up whether he was playing with the white or black pieces because he was using a chess set that had clear and opaque pieces. At this point we both decided to give up, throw the towel in and stat again. 

At time of writing I am happy to report we have managed to finish at least one game and are presently in the opening phase of another game, however the completed game was not without incident. I sent e-mails with untold numbers of typos in the notification. In one instance, I sent the notification for one move incorrectly not once, but twice whilst making some spaghetti bolognese. There are much easier ways of playing correspondence chess now. There are various chess sites where you play online and it saves the progress of the game, there's really no need to send a chess notification at all. None the less I think it's much more exciting to get an e-mail and read Nc3 and then to move the piece and see how the game is developing than to log on and simply see where the piece has moved to. I have just re-read this and realised to my utter dismay that I just wrote the sentence, 'it's much more exciting to get an e-mail and read Nc3 and then to move the piece and see who the game is developing..' (At this point I move away from the keyboard and hold my head in my hands, wearily, and wonder were it all went wrong.) 

Chess is famous for being an intellectual game that demands great concentration. It can be so draining on the mind they say, that it can make the mind crumble. The example of the grandmaster Bobby Fischer's break down into a world of paranoia is infamous. It has been suggested that it may be the infinite amount of possibilities and combinations being considered that eventually leads chess genius's minds to crack. AndrewAnthony wrote in a piece on Bobby Fischer; 

“His descent into wild and irrational behaviour is far from a unique narrative, particularly in chess. The history of the game contains many similar trajectories. As GK Chesterton noted in arguing that reason bred insanity: "Poets do not go mad, but chess players do." Akiba Rubinstein, the early 20th-century Polish grandmaster, would hide in the corner of the competition hall between moves, owing to his anthropophobia (fear of people), retiring from the game when schizophrenia got the better of him. William Steinitz, the Austrian who was the world's first undisputed chess champion, died in an asylum. Then there was Paul Morphy, the American who was said to be the 19th-century's finest player and to whom Fischer has frequently been compared: he quit the game, having beaten all his rivals, and began a decline into paranoid delusion. Aged 47, he was found dead in his bath, surrounded by women's shoes.”

My friend and I are lucky chess induced insanity is not an issue for us; if reason does breed insanity then we are both safe from madness, as we are both apparently, as we have seen, steeped in enough 'un-reason' to be happy and sane, with our bolognese, typos, moving incorrect pieces and confusion about which colour pieces we are. The lofty heights of chess are perhaps thankfully then beyond us, as is apparently sending an e-mail and moving a chess piece to it's correct place on a board! We are just lucky we do live in an age were e-mails are available, bless us both. To understate the issue, we would have both struggled with postal chess.