I watched the movie Pawn’s Sacrifice on my flight back from Seattle. It brought back memories from the time I used to play chess. Oh I was a terrible player but still liked playing.
I was more of an intuitive player who knew how to use his resources well on the board and got by without much formal education. I had realised that my schoolmates used to find it very difficult to strategise without their Queen so exchanging our Queens used to be one of my tactics to weaken them. But the same approach never worked against either my uncle or S. B. Gupta (my dad’s colleague).
Dr. Gupta always exposed my naiveness brutally. Chess belongs to the category of problems in which you need to search for the best move in all the possibilities. The number of possibilities grows very quickly in Chess which makes it so difficult. As a kid I always used to go for local minima and Dr. always managed to punish my short-termisim. He was a good teacher. He taught me how to think about pieces controlling the squares and how to increase my influence/power over the centre.
But as with anything else academics got the highest priority and Chess faded out. I briefly started playing chess with a few friends at Kharagpur but that didn’t last long.
Fast-forward 4 years and one of my teammates at FICO was an ardent fan. He used to follow the Grandmaster matches and excitedly explain us over lunch the beauty of the moves played by them. He used to tell us to look for patterns in the board to understand what’s going on.
It’s been 6 years since FICO days. I watched the movie Pawn Sacrifice. I started thinking of Chess. I have created an account on chess.com to study Chess and test myself again. But will it last? I don’t know.