Little wooden armies by Keith Sands

“How can I reward you? Gold? Jewels? Perhaps you want to marry one of my daughters? Choose anything you like.” But Sassa said:

“Take a grain of rice and place it on the first square of the board. Put two grains on the second square. Keep going,doubling the number of grains each time,until you have covered all the 64 squares on the board.”

At first they laughed at Sassa for his modesty and simplicity. But then they discovered that the rice would exceed all the wealth in the known world.

A mystery

The game,if you haven’t guessed,was chess. It’s interesting that in all the various legends of the game’s origins,chess is always said to come from somewhere else. Chess has a number of known ancestors — the four-player Indian game Chaturanga among them — but its ultimate place and date of birth are still a mystery. India,China,Persia,Greece? Nobody knows.

What is definitely true in the story is the point Sassa was making with his rice. Chess is pretty much infinite. We don’t know the number of possible games even today,when a supercomputer can beat the world champion. There’s an Indian proverb: ‘Chess is a lake in which a mosquito can bathe — and an elephant can drown.’

Children like to command a little wooden army,and even adults like to play Napoleon. That’s how they get started. Later,players realise the technical complexity and finally,they see the game’s awesome artistic beauty. It’s a unique combination of war game,sport,science and art.

A mirror of history

In its long journey around the world,chess has borrowed from the cultures that took it in. The West plays with bishops,knights and queens,because they were powerful people in medieval Europe when chess became popular. But in the East,including Russia,these pieces are named the elephant,horse and ferz (minister),as in the Indian Chaturanga.

Chess moved west but it also moved east,and its Eastern versions — Chinese Xiang-pi and Japanese Shigo — also reflect history. In Shigo,some of the pieces can even change sides,like mercenary soldiers in the age of the Samurai.

The players,too,reflect the spirit of their times. Anatoly Karpov,who dominated the game in the 1970s,played Cold War chess — Iron Curtain chess. He was slow and defensive but almost impossible to beat. Garry Kasparov took the title from him in 1985,on the eve of great changes in the USSR. He played Gorbachev chess . . . perestroika chess. Radical solutions to problems,and risky moves with unpredictable results. His style was like a breath of fresh air.

An extreme sport?

In my passion for chess,I’m in good company: Charlemagne,King Henry II,Napoleon,Tolstoy,Rousseau,Nabokov and Che Guevara — chess players all.

The French artist Marcel Duchamp took his obsession further. He took three years off from art to become a chess master,and played for France in the Chess Olympiad. He was prouder of his chess mastery than all his artistic achievements.

With all these kings,artists and writers playing chess,you might get the idea that chess is the ultimate civilised pursuit. But you’d be wrong.

A Scandinavian manuscript,900 years old,tells of how one player,who lost a game,picked up the board and smashed his opponent on the head with it. Boards were made of stone in those days. Ouch.

Grandmasters have called it ‘a blood sport’,‘like a fight to the death with broken bottles’; and ‘very dangerous — you have to kill people’.

If you agree with the old saying that life is too short for chess,play blitz chess. Five minutes on the clock. Non-players think chess is slow and boring,but blitz is a high-adrenaline sport. And as aggressive as any martial art. In parks in Russia,where they gather in summer to play blitz,the players don’t just take pieces,they knock them off the board on to the ground. And in the classic game,even world championship players have been known to kick each other under the table.

From the boxing ring to

the chess board

With all this aggression,and the stories of nervous breakdowns among chess players,it’s worth remembering that chess can heal as well as harm. My own favourite chess story is that of John Healy. His autobiography,The Grass Arena,was made into a great film by the BBC. Healy was a failed boxer who became the most serious kind of alcoholic. He became homeless. The bottle nearly killed him. But in prison,he discovered chess,and managed to give up drinking completely. He became a successful chess player,journalist and writer.

Healy is played in the film by the British actor Mark Rylance. It’s the performance of a lifetime — chess makes surprisingly good cinema. There is a moving scene where Healy tries to find the words to describe how his life has changed. ‘It’s like boxing again . . . but not with fists . . . with the mind.’ King Kaid,fighting his imaginary battles,would surely have agreed with him.

Vocabulary

Five words/phrases from the text:

* board: the surface on which you play the game

* squares: the black and white areas that form the playing surface

* pieces: the things that you move around while you play the game

* defensive: a way of playing that means you don’t take any risks

* opponent: the person who plays the game with you

Exercise one

Vocabulary gap fill. Now use the five words/phrases to fill the gaps in the sentences below

He got so frustrated with the game that he smashed his fist on the ………[1

My usual ………[2 didn’t turn up this evening so I’m playing against someone else.

There are 64 ………[3 on a chess board.

I haven’t played for many years but I still remember how to move the ………[4

He’s not a very exciting person to play against. He has a very ………[5 game.

Exercise two

Comprehension: word order. Put the words below in order to make correct sentences about the text:

1. originally / is sure / comes from / chess / nobody / where /

2. the number of / there is / games / no limit / possible / to /

3. in different / pieces / parts / chess / different names / of the world / have

4. can sometimes / games / violent / chess / get

5. of his addiction / cured / playing chess / one person / to alcohol

Answers

Vocabulary

1. board

2. opponent

3. squares

4. pieces

5. defensive

Comprehension

1. Nobody is sure where chess originally comes from

2. There is no limit to the number of possible games

3. Chess pieces have different names in different parts of the world

4. Chess games can sometimes get violent

5. Playing chess cured one person of his addiction to alcohol

English and culture

We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England,because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners. This was George Bernard Shaw’s opinion of the English. Shaw was a famous dramatist and essayist. Perhaps his best known work is Pygmalion. Was Shaw right? Are clothes and good manners important in your country?