Dominic Lawson on Chess

I’ve always been intrigued by the image chess has in the West as this indicator of extreme, logical intelligence. It really irritates some of my Russian friends, who say, “What a load of nonsense! It’s just a game.”

I don’t think it’s true that chess is a touchstone for the intellect or that it requires an astonishingly logical mind to be very good at it, though it probably helps. Mikhail Botvinnik, who was world champion on and off from 1948 to 1963, said that if music was “an art that illustrates the beauty of sound”, then chess was “an art that illustrates the beauty of logic”. It’s interesting that he used the word art. Chess does correspond, in some ways, to what we see in art ­– it does have a kind of beauty, and the appeal is very strongly aesthetic to those who actually have eyes to see it. But it’s also a sport and a game – it can be played just as a game, and just as a sport.

Do you have to be very clever to be good at it?

It would be difficult to be strong at chess if you had a subnormal IQ, but you certainly don’t need an IQ of above average. I’m sure you could find very strong grandmasters with IQs around about the 100 mark, which is the average. It was always said that [late chess grandmaster Bobby] Fischer had an IQ of 180. I don’t know if there is any evidence for that. It wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t know what the proof is.

What I have noticed in very strong players, though, is an extraordinary degree of concentration. You really do have to concentrate very hard for long periods. There is a very boring phrase for that, which is hard work. That’s often underestimated, while the idea of effortless genius is greatly overestimated. And if it is hard work – and it is – then you must get something really quite special out of it, to put yourself through it. You need to really hate losing. Someone once said, “Chess is a battle between your aversion to the pain of losing, and your aversion to the pain of thinking.” Because hard thinking is stressful and difficult. Quite often, the reason why, as we get older, we lose more games of chess – certainly in my case – is that you begin to get more pain from thinking than you do from losing. Also, if you’re a young person, you’re probably rejecting other ways of occupying your time, which most people would think are more pleasurable, whether it’s watching Teen Idol or playing football or having a drink. It has to really excite you, so motivation plays a huge part. That’s often described as natural ability, but it may actually be a description of something that is more like desire, a really huge desire.

Bobby Fischer claimed he was a genius who happened to play chess, but if you look at his life history he was absolutely obsessed and playing chess constantly from age six.

Fischer became American champion at the age of 14, which is astonishing. But if you think about the amount of effort he put in between learning to play and becoming American champion, it was a huge amount, because he dropped everything else. This partly links into the idea in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers of the 10,000 hours [needed to succeed], which he borrows from various psychologists. I think there is a lot to that. There are exceptions. At the very, very top of the distribution, you get people like Magnus Carlsen, the 20-year-old Norwegian who is the world’s strongest player at the moment. I remember speaking to his father, and he said that at the age of three Magnus would sit for hours doing 50-piece jigsaw puzzles – very unusual behaviour for a three-year-old. Or you have [José Raúl] Capablanca, who was probably the most naturally talented chess player that ever lived. He learned the game at the age of four just by watching his father play. He then beat his father at four and went on to become world champion. He clearly had something very, very special. There was something in the cast of his mind that grasped these concepts with amazing rapidity and very naturally. I don’t know whether the word innate is right, but there’s clearly something there that isn’t normal. But it’s statistically so incredibly unusual that you can almost disregard it.

For people reading this, who might know you as a British newspaper editor and columnist, do you want to explain your connection to chess?

Chess is my particular passion. I became reasonably good at it and I still play for my county, Sussex. I also write a monthly column in Standpoint on chess. I learned the rules of chess when I was eight, at school. Then I lost interest completely. I didn’t come from a chess-playing home or family. In fact, I think I had to teach my father to play. I didn’t really get interested again until my mid-teens, which perhaps ties in with my first book. This is when Bobby Fischer was mounting his assault on the World Chess Championship in the early 1970s. For someone interested in politics, there was a context which will never be repeated – the American loner against, as it seemed, the might of the Soviet Union. The Soviets had made it almost the national sport, and every single world champion since World War II had been a Soviet. I wouldn’t say Russian, although they were described as Russians. One was from Latvia, another from Armenia. Many of them, in fact, were also Jewish, which was never mentioned.

That period was the first time I really got to grips with it. I remember Nigel Short, who was phenomenally strong as a young player, saying to me, “Oh well, Dominic, that was too late!” He said he was lucky, because he was much younger when the Fischer phenomenon hit the West. You had to be much younger to get the bug in order to become very strong. When I won a cash prize at a tournament my father said to me, “That’s good! That means I don’t have to give you any pocket money. But it’s a mistake to think you can make a career out of it.” Of course he was quite right. Very, very few people are especially good at it. I discovered when I was at Oxford, and I was up against people who became very strong grandmasters, like John Nunn and Jon Speelman, that I had no real gift. Their mental hardware was simply miles better than my mental hardware – they just saw things that much more quickly and their powers of visualisation were so much greater.