Forget self-help manuals — all you need is chess

ADDICT IONS can come in all guises, some more lethal than others. But, take it from me, one of the most impossible to shake off is a chess addiction.

So it was with mixed feelings that I picked up this book. Its author, Stephen Moss, is, like me, in his late 50s. Like me, he became besotted with the game as a schoolboy but stopped playing shortly after leaving university, when the irregular and late hours of journalism were incompatible with a game that requires prodigious amounts of time (and mental energy).

But a few years ago, Moss decided — in what seems to have been some kind of mid-life crisis — to devote himself once again to his youthful obsession, and to see just how good at it he could become.

This engaging and at times self-lacerat-ing book covers three years in which Moss travels the world playing in weekend tournaments.

This costs him many thousands of pounds — and the sum total of his winnings is £ 200 — but, of course, it’s not about the money. How could it be, when only the world’s top 200 actually make a living playing professionally? And Moss, by his own admission, is a pretty useless player. Well, not completely useless, but by the end of the book, after all his efforts at self-improvement and with the help of a tutor (the chess journalist John Saunders, who at one point tells him: ‘ Let’s get you a replacement brain’) he is still ranked no higher than 2,800th in the country.

not that I have much to brag about, being ranked around 600th — far below my best year when I got up to about 280th.

Yet it is precisely because it is all too difficult for Moss to realise his ambition to become an expert- standard chess player that his book is so engrossing. There are countless volumes that recount the narrators’ onward and upwards march to pre- eminence. This is a book about learning to accept one’s own mediocrity.

Since mediocrity is the space the vast majority of us occupy, The Rookie is actually a life lesson much more relevant than all of those self-help books of fatuous and unrealistic optimism.

Psychologically, the most interesting question is just why people such as Moss (and your reviewer) become so dedicated to an immensely difficult game for which we have no special aptitude or gift.

Or, as H. G. Wells, a likely fellow sufferer, declared in his essay Con-cerning Chess: ‘It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excres-cence upon life. It annihilates a man.’

This, actually, describes what a chess- obsessive feels when he loses a game that he should have won. That happens a lot to Moss over his three years on the road, and he describes going for a series of nights without sleep after losing one such tussle.

While I never actually lost sleep over a badly played game, my wife can confirm that the only thing that makes me low is if I blunder away what seems (if only to me) an important tournament chess encounter.

It creates a sense of real pain: agonies of remorse and self-reproach. Still, I am in good company. Moss quotes the late Dutch Grandmaster Jan Donner after he had lost to his local rival, Hans Ree: ‘After I resigned this game with perfect self- control, and solemnly shook hands with my opponent in the best of Anglo-Saxon traditions, I rushed home, where I threw myself on to my bed, howling and screaming, and pulled the blankets over my face.

‘For three days and three nights the Erinyes were after me. Then I got up, dressed, kissed my wife and considered the situation.’

You might think this is unusual behaviour for a grown man — and Donner was a giant of 6ft 6in.

But the difference between chess and other sporting conflicts is that you are for many hours in extreme proximity to your opponent, experiencing increasingly deep feelings of animosity about his various annoying little mannerisms, but with no physical release for this suppressed anger.

Moss admits, with characteristic honesty, that he remains a bad loser. This confounds one of his original objectives: he’d believed that immersing himself in chess culture might make him a more mature and rounded human.

Why he should have thought that, I have not the least idea. Chess is a great aid to keeping a middle-aged brain active, but it has no moral content at all.

THAT, as Moss recog-nises towards the end of the book, is one of the main reasons for its attraction to a particular sort of person (most commonly male).

It is precisely the game’s her-metic nature, with its limitless possibilities within a rigidly logi-cal code, that is so liberating.

The players, when doing it right, become lost in pure thought. This allows us to float free from all the puzzlingly irrational compromises of the real world. It is an absolute release. Until you stop.

Or, as Moss concludes his not exactly Homeric odyssey: ‘I may not yet be an expert, but nor am I any longer a rookie. I am on the mountainside, still inching upwards, trying not to look down for fear of failing. In chess, as in life.’

Dominic Lawson is president of the English chess Federation.