The Parallels of Chess and Sports
The lazy commentator will frequently compare their athletic sport to a “chess match”, hoping to sound smart about something they know only a little about, and vaguely intending to give a sense of the ‘outfoxing’ efforts of two competitors. While a chess game and a chess match are no more the same thing than a tennis game and a tennis match, there are indeed parallels between chess and a number of sports, when you dig into the finer details.
Magnus Carlsen, known as a huge fan of soccer/European football, has often offered comparisons between two of his favourite pastimes. He has a long history of meeting the sport’s most famous figures, including renowned manager Pep Guardiola, and has shared mutual admiration with star forward Mohamed Salah. Last summer, there was an excellent article in The Athletic titled “Why Guardiola, Maresca, and Salah love chess: Space, patterns, and ‘controlling the centre’”.
We can take a concrete example from a different sport: the 4 Nations Face-Off hockey tournament concluded on Thursday night, in a dramatic showdown between Canada and the United States (Sweden and Finland were the other participants). Like soccer – and chess – it is key to control the most important regions of the ice, namely, in front of the net, which is both central and can be considered nearest the king (the ‘goal’) which makes it dangerous. An attacker should never be left to themselves in that zone.
The winning goal in sudden death overtime demonstrates Canadian forward Connor McDavid, the best player in the world, exploiting a gap in the United States defence, and taking full advantage of the opportunity and the space he finds himself in.
The American captain, Auston Matthews (#34, the nearest player in blue), took some criticism for leaving McDavid alone in that space to receive a pass. A closer look shows that the mistake came a few seconds prior to the peak of the problem, with the two defencemen misidentifying a pattern of what Canada was doing and subsequently choosing their roles unwisely. That certainly resembles chess where an earlier misstep leads to scrambling to handle the consequences, and being unable to regain control leads to a loss.
This example shows an obvious difference to chess, which is a game of distinct steps, rather than continuous motion. That’s what makes it a thinking game more than a reacting game (bullet notwithstanding!) though there is still plenty of room for intuition and pattern recognition.
The best sport-to-chess comparison is actually the even more Canadian game: curling. “Chess on ice”, it may be called, and even a grump can’t disagree too strongly. It has the piece-by-piece movement and taking turns that chess does, including the requirement to consider your opponent’s moves ahead of time lest you get into trouble. There is a value to controlling the centre, between your own presence of rocks or preventing your opponent from accessing the critical areas, with points awarded by closest proximity to the centre of the painted rings. Each team gets 8 rocks per ‘end’, and there are 8 or 10 ends in a game (ie. 8 or 10 times points are awarded), and it’s even possible to ‘blank’ or draw an end, with neither team being awarded a point.
You can also pick out various patterns, or tactics, that teams will use, and particular ways of setting up at the beginning of an end, which can change based on the scoreboard. Of course, the biggest difference is the unique physical skill to place your rocks in the exact right place, launching them from some 100-plus feet away down the ice.
As it happens, the Canadian Women’s Curling Championship, known as “the Scotties”, concludes this weekend, followed by the Men’s Championship, “the Brier”, and then the respective World Championship in March. Seek them out if you’d like to compare the magnificent games of strategy.
