On Chess

Recently, I was hanging out with my homies, and we were watching My Cousin Vinny. In one scene, Joe Pesci starts flailing in Herman Munster's office and accidentally knocks over his chessboard. While a nuisance, I purported that Pesci's faux pas would not interrupt the game as Mr. Munster could easily reassemble the board. A dear, dear friend of mind disagreed, claiming that there are too many random variations available (64 squares, 16 available pieces) for a person to have memorized their location. But I am right, and here is why:

* Chess is not a game of randomized location. Unlike Go, you can't put a piece just anywhere; specific emergent patterns exist within piece placement as a result of pawn movement, castling, square color, etc. With a rough sketch of what a board looked like, you can fine tune piece placement to how it was before based on what choices you were pondering before. "Was this bishop under attack from that knight? No, but it was on a black square so it had to be this one."

* Mr. Munster was not playing against anyone. There was no one else in the office. This means one of three things: either he was playing against himself; playing through puzzles in a book or replaying transcripts of famous matches; or playing by correspondence. People who genuinely enjoy playing chess against themselves during court recess are people who play a lot of chess. They know the game, inside and out, and at this level, a board assists thought, but isn't totally necessary. Obviously, in the other two cases, he could easily check his mail/book to recreate the board.

* Experienced chess players play chess in their heads, sans board, all the time. "Blindfold chess" is an exciting exercise, and anyone who's made a lifetime of chess playing has attempted it at least once. As to capacity of the brain to memorize piece location, several high-ranking players such as Miguel Najdorf and Janos Flesch have staged exhibitions where they played blindfold against upwards of 50 players at once, all of whom had boards. Miguel Najdorf had an impressive single loss while playing forty players in 1943. I'm not suggesting that the judge character was an international grandmaster on par with those I've mentioned, but clearly the requisite mental ability to memorize a board exists.

* I've been able to do it since middle school. It's not that hard really. Leaning over a chessboard during recess isn't cool, but knocking over said chessboard is. It's a survival skill any young chess player develops. Furthermore, I've been known to solve chess quiz puzzles from the newspaper fifteen minutes after walking away to do something else.

In summary, I am right and my dear, dear friend is wrong. And that's what blogs are all about.