Chess: The joy of sucking

Or how being terrible is good

I’ve gotten obsessed with chess. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve played endlessly, devoured YouTube videos, and gobbled up podcasts so much that I’ve dreamt about it several nights in a row.

But here’s the thing. I suck. Like, I really, really suck. I’ve come to the conclusion I have subterranean levels of natural talent for chess.

And you know what? That’s absolutely fantastic.

Like a lot of people, I learnt how to play chess as a kid. Even though “learnt” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

I was introduced to it through Battle Chess, a PC game I played while being utterly unaware of concepts such as “rules” or “tactics” or “what the hell even is that.” I just liked watching the the pieces slaughter one other.

Time marched on. Eventually, I learnt how the pieces moved, and would sometimes play my granddad, getting utterly annihilated along the way. There was a brief resurgence as a teenager where I decided to get good at chess, bought a book about it, and then never got past the first page.

That, friends, was my life in chess. Until a couple of weeks ago when my partner passed the hobby on to me like a virus.

Lord, have things changed.

As aforementioned, when I last tried to get a handle on chess it involved getting an actual book and trying to work out what the hell “d4 d5 bf4 Nf6” meant. Now sites like Chess.com and Lichess are overflowing with classes and puzzles designed to make you better. With endless blogs and podcasts, and an unbelievable amount of amazing chess content on YouTube — there’s a wealth of information at my fingertips.

Shame none of it helps, because I still suck.

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I simply cannot play a game of chess without laying out a buffet of stupidity. Somewhere, deep inside, there’s a part of me that seems to hate my own pieces and wants to send them to hell.

Losing is the norm. My ranking is nosebombing alarmingly. I may become the first person to have a negative chess rating.

I hate it. Oh my god I hate it. I get so frustrated when I lose I shout and rant and rave and swear at bots and people alike. The feeling? I have? Terrible. It’s horrendous being into something and striving to learn and putting in effort and still being shit.

But on the other? It rocks, dude. Sucking is fantastic.

Learning anything new is great for brain health. That’s science. Beautiful, beautiful science. And it goes deeper.

As we age and move through life, we engage with fewer and fewer things we suck at. It’s not because we’ve become incredible examples of humanity. Instead, our lives have become more controlled and, in most cases, settled into reasonably comfortable rhythms.

Think about work. If you’ve been in the same industry or job role for a few years, you’ve progressed, picking up all this base knowledge along the way. When something challenging does arise, there’s this huge bank of information you have to draw on to solve the issue.

It’s repeated across other aspects of our lives too, from where we go to get coffee to the type of exercise we do. Slowly, and without being totally aware of it, we get more and more specialised. This isn’t a bad thing, but it can give you an unearned sense of security in your own self.

But if you want to grow? To progress as an individual? You need to be uncomfortable.

That’s why sucking at chess is excellent. It’s a reminder that I don’t know shit about shit. I won’t ever be great at most things, and there’s both a freedom and a challenge to that. I hate it. But I love it. It’s the junkie’s paradox.

All I want to say is thanks, chess. You’ve made it clear just how much I suck. Appreciate it.