Chess Flavoured Peanut Butter

It lay open on the table across the room from me, an untidied remnant of lunch. But this wasn’t just a jar of peanut butter. This was the jar of peanut butter, within which was contained the perfect metaphor for this entire article.

This particular jar of peanut butter had a distinct flavour. A truly unique flavour. It was in fact, a one-of-a-kind peanut butter. On the label the name was written: Schaak-Smaak which translated from Dutch means: Chess Flavour.

Whilst I’m sure this jar of peanut butter brings up many questions for the reader, not least of which is: what exactly does chess taste like? I’m afraid I will only be answering one question today: how did I, a mid-shelf chess content creator, come to possess the only known jar of chess flavoured peanut butter known to mankind?

To answer that question we have to go back in time. Quite a bit back in time and follow the series of unlikely events that led up to it.

ALEX

We join our story years before I came to own the mysterious jar of blended chess flavoured peanuts, as I gingerly attempt to descend a steeply sloping track down towards our little Spanish farm.

I’m gripping tightly to the handles of a wheelbarrow within which a 50kg solar battery rests. I am trying not to think about the fairly likely event of me slipping on the dry dusty dirt path and being dragged downhill on my belly, desperately holding the handles of my wheelbarrow as I descend faster and faster towards a particularly spiky looking patch of brambles. And for some reason (as if this treacherous descent wasn’t tricky enough) I’m also trying to focus on a conversation in my ears between NM Ben Johnson and Adult Improver guest Alex Crompton.

After about an hour of slow descent and some not insignificant uphill bits, I arrived at the farm with my battery still miraculously intact. But I was far less impressed by my own feat of dexterity and strength, than I was of Alex Crompton’s seemingly effortless training regime and ridiculous rating gain. I was so impressed that I decided that as soon as my solar system was connected and my portable router was powered up and sitting pretty in the corner of my big tent, I was going to email him. Because I needed more details. I needed to know exactly how someone did just 20 minutes a day of simple tactics training and went from beginner to a rating of 1500 OTB in a single year.

So that is what I did.

Not only did Alex respond, but he did so in excruciating detail. I can’t imagine how long it took him to write that email. It was full of graphs, a system for selecting which puzzle books to do, how often to repeat them and in which order. This wasn’t a copy paste job. Alex had written this for me.

And back and forth we went, eventually we talked together on the phone. We got to know each other. We had a surprising amount in common including us both having dutch wives, (possibly) unhealthy levels of obsession, and a love of chess.

All of this led to a moment three years later, when there came a knock on my front door. I opened it and reached out to shake the hand of the man who’d been talking in my ear as I moved a giant solar battery along a hilly dirt track all those years ago. And, as a gift, Alex presented me with the world's only known jar of chess flavoured peanut butter.

So as I sat and pondered what I could possibly write about for this blog, the peanut butter inspired me.

This wasn’t a jar of peanut butter, it was the story of how chess had brought two people together.

CHESS DOESN’T BUILD COMMUNITY, YOU NEED IT TO SURVIVE

I feel that chess is oddly unique in this regard. I don’t think chess builds community, I think chess requires it. We need each other to survive this mindsport.

I had a student nervously admit the other day that they sometimes found themselves down a piece and weren’t exactly sure when or how it had happened. The relief they expressed when I explained that the same thing used to happen to me when I first started playing chess was palpable. They were almost crying.

There is nothing wrong with you. You are normal. It’s okay. It won’t always be like this.

We need to talk to each other, we need to know that we are normal as we progress on the adult chess journey, on which we have irreversibly embarked.

Our experiences in chess are strange and confronting. Emotions we thought we left behind in childhood come back, the things we do and feel are at times bizarre, but they are human experiences that we all share, despite their bizarreness. And we need to know that they are shared for the sake of our own sanity.

It is cathartic to swap hard experiences and have other people say: I get it. It’s okay. We all feel this way. Whether it is mistakes you know you're better than, or a lack of rating progress, sometimes you just need to hear you are not alone. That this isn’t a you experience, it’s a normal human experience, if we accept chess players as normal human beings that is (which I get is a big if).

But more than just feeling less alone, we sometimes require a good friend to point out the things we miss in ourselves. And it does often need to be a good friend, because we can get defensive about our own flaws.

“Hey Ono, have you noticed you tend to get a little bit too down on yourself when you make a mistake and open yourself up to further errors. In fact I think you might, on some weird subconscious level, be making those other errors deliberately to confirm your own negative sense of self-worth that you derived from your first error?”

Who said that? Fuck, I’m losing my mind.

FINDING YOUR COMMUNITY

A lot of my chess journey, particularly in the first couple of years when I was living on the aforementioned isolated Spanish farm, was online.

I am grateful for all of the experiences and relationships I have made that helped me to feel less alone playing this game during that time, and whilst I have an offline community now, I still maintain and value those online friendships.

There are many online communities out there you can become a part of. There are many Lichess Teams that I know have great cultures such as Think where my friend and fellow blogger Rosie found a home.

There is the #chesspunks community on Twitter or X which is still going strong despite Elon’s best efforts.

This community has many sub-groups with a fantastic and supportive culture such as the tactics group founded by my first coach and friend Fionn O’Donovan and now run by another online friend of mine Ev Clark who I chat with regularly at my bi-weekly patron hangouts.

There are countless online spaces you can go to feel less alone on the path of chess improvement and I encourage you to seek those out.

A NEW CITY

When the decision was made to return to society from Spain, I moved with my family to my wife's home city in the Netherlands.

After three years spent largely in solitude on my small remote farm, I was apprehensive about city life. But I was excited to be around people again.

Aged in my early thirties with a young child at home I had forgotten exactly how humans made connections in a new city.

Luckily I had chess.

And the city had chess clubs.

OFFLINE FRIEND ATTEMPT ONE

“Do you want to go to the playground with me?”

“What?”

“You have kids right?”

“Yeah...”

“So do you want to go to the playground together?”

“Erm...”

“I also have a kid.”

“I’m actually quite busy at the moment...”

It was probably not a social interaction laced with finesse, but us chess players are not known for our social prowess.

Thankfully after I proved myself to not be a lunatic, my now friend Simon and I sometimes do go to the playground together on weekends and talk about chess whilst our kids play.

OFFLINE FRIEND ATTEMPT TWO

“Can I have your number?”

“Erm...”

“I have a wife,”

“Right. I erm, I also have a girlfriend.”

“Excellent. I’m not asking you out. Just if you want to hang out sometime, or play chess, or whatever then erm, you know, no pressure.”

“I left my phone at home I think...”

Turns out my friend Jesse (and Leon who I didn’t accidentally try to date yet) are also into climbing which is something I used to do a lot in my late teens and early twenties. I now go climbing with them sometimes.

OFFLINE FRIEND ATTEMPT THREE

“I listened to your podcast, I’m actually going to become a father as well in June,”

“Oh that’s so cool. Can I come round to your house and do some dishes?”

“What?”

“Oh I mean after the baby is born.”

blank stare

“And cook food and stuff?”

Bram did let me drop off some food after his daughter was born and I decided we were probably friends when he finally returned my tupperware last week.

THE YUSOPOV GROUP

I have a theory that you tend to make close friends by going through some kind of adversity together, then come out the other side of that with a shared experience that somehow bonds you.

I think that is why so many people make their “friends for life” at university. For most people it is their first time away from home, away from family, and that experience feels significant. That adaptation is adversity and through it friends are easily made.

As a kid and a young person these opportunities to experience new and exciting things with others, to make new friends as you tackle exciting challenges together are abundant.

But as you age these opportunities become less frequent.

So at the age of 32, alone in a new city, I sought to engineer an opportunity for friendship.

That’s why I decided to light the chess club on fire.

What better way to create adversity in a group of new people? But then I realised I didn’t need to go to such extremes. Because a single game of chess can be as traumatic as being trapped in an inferno together. And we humans bond through shared struggle.

Whilst chess is a solitary pursuit, the experiences we go through as chess players are shared. They make us vulnerable, and they open us up to making friends as we share them, not out of a desire to share, but out of a need to survive the emotional turmoil that this great game forces us to endure.

And so despite my awkward social fumblings, it was quite easy to make friends at the chess club. Before long I had assembled a ragtag group of chess players who (as Sara Herman poetically put it on my Podcast) I had shared a long conversation with, both over the chess board as their opponent, and literally during the analysis.

I became close to my clubmates through the game, and a grown ass man made new friends at an unlikely stage of life because of chess.

It’s something I had forgotten I missed.

It’s something I am grateful to have rediscovered.

And it is something that I owe to chess and this bizarre game's unique ability to bring people together.

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Thanks for reading.

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