First Moves / Chess News from Around the U.S.
The Politics of Chess Players
As we elect a U.S. president this month, one writer asks, “Do conservatives play chess differently than liberals?” By ALEXANDER ROBINSON
O
ver the past decade, I have played over 50,000 games of chess online. This isn’t quite the feat it sounds, since many of the games have been
“speed chess,” where each side has a maximum of five minutes to make all of his/her moves (speed chess is both good and bad: good for exploring many “threads”/plots, bad for playing good chess.) However, in the course of these 50K games, I have been able to compile a mountain of data, both from the games themselves and, typically at the end of the game(s), by asking my opponent a few quick questions.
First, I type “asl?”(age/sex/location): nothing statistically surprising here: 90 percent of the players were male, but all ages were represented roughly equally. As history would predict, I found a larger number of players, including the best players, from Eastern Europe. However, any serious player knows that chess is a very international game, played by all races (perhaps because the game provides a true “level playing field.”) Income level and religious affiliation are hard subjects to get people to talk about, but I’ve always noticed that a great number of chess play- ers are political, and many were happy to answer when asked if they were “very/somewhat Liberal/Conservative/ ”Centrist”? With chess not being particu- larly popular in America compared to many Socialist/Leftist European and Asian countries (from everything I’ve heard and observed,) one might expect that Liberal (LP) chess players would signifigantly out- number Conservatives (CP), but I found this not to be true. One possible explana-
8 November 2012 | Chess Life
tion for this evenness is, in my opinion, a certain “Libertarian” strain among chess players as, unfortunately, many of the best players do fit the stereotypically shy personality.
Nor did I find a correlation between chess skill and political leanings: CP’s tend to have just as high ratings as LP’s, an evenness that doesn’t change as ratings improve. In other words, there are about as many CP’s rated 1500 as LP’s, and also an equal number, albeit obviously fewer, who have a 2000 rating (note: I’m using the rating systems calculated by the various websites I play chess on, not the official USCF ratings which most players don’t have on these sites. It’s not a perfect sys- tem but, over the course of 1,000 games or so, a pretty accurate ranking can be generated, in my opinion. I didn’t include players below a 1500 rating, an arbitrary threshold I chose to make sure I polled “serious” players only.) To be clear, while I do have a bachelor’s
degree in psychology, this is not a scien- tific study. In my opinion, there is no way to precisely define most of the terms I use. For example, how would one quantify exactly what constitutes a “closed” or “open game”? However, it’s not all just nonsense either: what I present below are observations based on data I have jotted down over the years in a systematic way, filling several notebooks. In addition to the questions I was able to ask many of the people I played around the globe online (although of course many wanted no conversation at all), I also got 100 players to complete questionnaires, mainly players I met locally in New York City.
DATA:
• CPs play more speed chess than LPs, who tend to play more 20+ minute games.
• CPs tend to look to exploit an oppo- nent’s weakness, while LPs tend to create
plans and list concepts like “balance/ imbalance” more than do CPs.
•CPs tend to play more gambit-type open- ings (e.g. the Evans Gambit, the King’s
Gambit) where the player, usually playing the white pieces, gives away material (m), usually one of his pawns (p) or minor pieces (knights or bishops) to gain an early posi- tional advantage, to be used (generally) for an early attack. CPs also prefer king’s pawn openings (where you move the pawn in front of your king as your first move) which, tends to lead to faster-developing games. In other words, since CPs are willing to give up pieces early in the game for a positional advantage, if Black can stand firm and hang onto his/her own pieces, time is likely more on their side, the longer the game goes, i.e. the more moves that are played. By contrast, LPs play fewer gambit open- ings with more queen’s-pawn first moves, which generally lead to more slowly-devel- oping games. So, as would be expected, LPs tend to play longer games (over 40 moves
• First, I must make the point that ques- tions like whether “CPs are more ‘aggressive’ or ‘sympathetic’ than LPs” are, in my view, inapplicable to chess. The point of chess is to capture your oppo- nent’s king and protect your own in the most effective way you can, so “aggressive- ness” is good, no matter what “kind” of player one is. However:
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