"Chess holds its master in its own bonds--fetters and in some ways shapes the spirit, so that under it the inner freedom of even the very strongest must suffer."
-Albert Einstein
The game of chess is a curious activity. Reduced to its simplest level, modern chess is a war game, with two opposing armies of royal hierarchies arrayed on a battleground of black-and-white squares.
For millions of people around the globe, chess is a simple pleasure, a leisurely diversion played with friends on sunny afternoons in the park, in small outdoor cafes, in neighborhood clubs. More games of chess have been played than any other game.
However, for some, chess is not simply a friendly pastime or even just an absorbing hobby. This group succumbs more completely to the siren call of Chaissa,, the goddess of chess, and is composed of those who willingly devote their entire lives to the unique attraction of chess.
But chess is more than a game. It is really a cerebral sport, stoking competitive fires. At the tournament level, chess can require many of the same preparatory devices employed to achieve success in physical sports: training, practice, strategic sessions, and even physical exercise.
Some may scoff at the labeling of chess as a sport, but in the Soviet Union, where chess probably is the national pastime, the Soviet Chess Federation is a branch of the Department of Physical Culture and Sport, and in Yugoslavia, chess players have won that country's Sportsman of the Year award.
If chess is more than a game, it also is more than a sport. Stefan Zweig addressed the boundaries of chess in has novella The Royal Game, written during World War II shortly before his own suicide:
Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science, too, a technique, an art that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth...at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever-new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space, though boundless in combinations; ever-developing, yet sterile; thoughts that lead to nothing; mathematics that produces no result; art without works; architecture without substance; and nevertheless...more lasting in its presence and being than all books and achievements, the only game that belongs to all people and all ages...to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit.
It does seem that--at its advanced levels, at least--chess is something of a science, subject to principles, recorded data, and hypotheses that lead to an ultimate proof: winning or losing.
Then again, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia describes chess as "an art appearing in the form of a game." And there is a certain artistic splendor produced by the fertile imagination of a chess master who ignores the shackles of classical theory with bold, daring, and creative
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