The Ruy Lopez Show

We want to podcast. We want to stretch out across the void into your little ipods and straight to the part of your brain that controls your chess thoughts and your indie music thoughts. But you must have patience. In the meantime, here’s the classic first chess tip (the one with the Indiana Jones reference).

Courage:
There comes a time in every chess game that requires courage. It is this aspect of chess that makes it a great game. Courage is a part of chess regardless of skill level. A player can carefully – even exhaustively – evaluate a position. The skill and accuracy of that evaluation depends on the experience, intelligence, and skill of the player, but a careful analysis is still never quite enough. There comes a time when the way the pieces have been placed on the board – the diagonals that are ruled by the bishops and the distribution of the pawns or the placement of the queen – that is completely unique to that game to that time to those opponents.

You look and you study and you concentrate and you see nothing but an impenetrable defense. You see pitfalls at every turn. But suddenly and unexpectedly you see that risky opportunity. Before you are a move or a series of moves that hadn’t occurred to you before and hopefully hasn’t occurred to your opponent either. It’s like that moment in Indiana Jones when the sun strikes the medallion in the Tomb of Souls at the right time at the right angle and there’s that bright burning beam of light in your mind’s eye on the board.

But then at the very moment of inspiration, there is also an equally strong cloud of doubt. Could it be, you wonder, that this clear path is a trap that has been laid for me by my opponent? Could it be that I am only seeing what he wants me to see? The role of the chess player is to wage the war between these two emotions – the intuition and the doubt. At some point in the game you are forced to make the dangerous move and to make the move you must have courage.