With Errol Tiwari
‘Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny’
Making those critical and irreversible decisions over the chessboard determines the outcome of our game. We win or lose by our decisions. When we lose our game we sometimes become bitter. Perhaps we should have consolidated on the queenside before launching an attack on the kingside.
We may not be aware of it, but intuition and instinct contribute greatly to our decision-making process on the chessboard and also in our daily lives. We don’t think about why we turn left on the road instead of right on our way home. We just do it. A chess player can just look at a position and without analyzing spot a checkmate if there is one. This is instinct.
But it takes more than instinct to make an intelligent decision. If we rely on instinct to make our choices on the chessboard, we may lose every game that we play. Fischer has taught us that we should search exhaustively for the right move before we commit ourselves. Kasparov’s view is that we should train ourselves to discern the weaker moves in a position and discard them so that we can concentrate on the few that are important.
The pawn is the most lowly piece on the chessboard, but we must be very careful how we move it. There is an old and popular chess maxim which says that pawns can’t move backward. Beginners and amateurs like to throw their pawns forward. And then they realize they can’t move them back. It’s much like making a decision in life. After we make it, we feel we want to reverse it. But we can only do so with great hurt to ourselves. Life’s rules are not as clear as those of chess; we cannot always know when a decision will lead to irreversible consequences.
Through chess, however, we can train ourselves by trial and error to ask the question: What will our alternatives be if things go wrong? If we cannot find a satisfactory answer to this question on the chessboard, we are heading for disaster.
Many games have been lost because a player finds himself in time trouble. When we are in time trouble the pressure to play a move mounts, and in nine out of ten cases, we make the wrong choice. We move because we are forced to find a move. This is what is described as an unforced error and has been the cause of players losing their games when in winning positions.
But by constantly playing the game, we learn to develop decision-making skills which we can use in areas of work, in our homes and in life generally. This is just another example of how chess helps us to sharpen our skills so that we can use them to our advantage at the appropriate times.
We all, none excepted, have to make decisions in chess or in life some time or the other. Some are more important than others. For the important ones, chess helps us to develop a formula for doing so. We learn quickly that the worst decisions are those which are made under time pressure. Those are quick decisions. And in the words of Sophocles, “quick decisions are unsafe decisions.”
