Your (Chess) Personality

I’ve always thought watching chess was quite difficult. I still don’t really understand many of the moves played at the top level unless someone like David Howell or Jovanka Houska are on hand to explain them to me. So when I first heard about chess styles, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to distinguish between them, let alone develop my own. But that changed. And it started with a choice.

I sat down one day and decided to bore the shit out of my opponents. It was a deliberate choice based mostly on my fear of children.

I blame this phobia on Ben Johnson. He and his Perpetual Chess guests kept telling me that children were dangerous. Children were agents of chaos. And frankly, having recently become a parent myself, I can confirm that this is true.

So I chose my chess style accordingly. I set out to become a positionally strong player because the kids were tactically strong, I set out to love endgames because the kids found them boring, I set out to copy Keith Arkell’s non-theoretical opening repertoire because my memory couldn’t match that of the pint-sized sponge-brained humans.

As so, from this choice I became more comfortable in those types of positions. The more I studied, the stronger I became in those aspects of chess compared to others at my level. Over time my love has simply grown. I have found role models in players like Keith Arkell, a philosophy in his hierarchy of pawns (around which my entire opening repertoire is based). I have big plans to study the games of Akiba Rubenstein, Capablanca and Smyslov precisely because I share their love of endgames and rook endgames in particular. But again, I sort of decided I was going to love them before I even began to study them.

I believe that if you can convince your mind something is real, it sort of becomes real. I believe that you can choose to become someone you aren’t right now. Not in the woo-woo “I’ll just be a apple if I want to be a apple” kind of way, but as a psychological trick to try and improve as a person. I find if I can tell myself something enough times, if I can really convince myself of it, it becomes real. Real-life example: I used to hate doing the dishes. But I started joking out loud that I loved it and you know what? Now it's the absolute best part of my day. It’s me, one scented candle, a hot and bubbly little hand bath and the soothing sounds of my favourite chess podcaster. What could be better than that?

Point is, like a lot of players, I took a look at the endgame and thought it did look a bit boring, but I just decided it wasn’t going to be. I decided it was going to be exciting. I decided I was going to get really good at it, so good at it that my opponents would stare down the barrel of a queen trade in a game against me and quake in fear. And if they avoided it? No worries. Because I love queen endgames too. You can’t run from me.

So I decided one day that I was going to learn how to play chess in a manner that would put my opponent in serious danger of falling asleep. And then I directed my learning and picked my openings in a way that sent my chess in that direction. I think you would imagine that things happen the other way around. And maybe it works the other way around for some people. But not for me. They say the wand chooses the wizard. But I walked straight into that spooky dude’s shop and chose my own wand.

I recently interviewed Grandmaster Jesse Kraai about the Chess Dojo Training Program. Omitted from that article was a really interesting conversation we had about play style and your personality. During the interview, Jesse called me a taxman when I described to him how I like to play, and he himself claimed he was a boring chess player.

I told him about one of my friends and training partners whom I was higher rated than, and yet was consistently defeated by. I put this down to our opposing styles. His style is maniacal, insane and frankly destabilising. I cannot handle being attacked with such ferocity. And my inability to attack, my lack of knowledge of attacking patterns and motifs, also means I’m fairly shite at defending. Although this weakness is a hole I do plan to plug very soon.

Here is what Grandmaster Jesse Kraai had to say on the matter:

“It’s always really interesting to think about personality and player profile. One of the things about it that I find fascinating is that playing style has nothing to do with your personality. It’s an interesting statement, because a lot of people really identify with who they are and their political stance, but long experience has taught me that it has nothing to do with your politics. If anything it has something to do with your appetite for risk, how much risk are you willing to hold in your hand? You can see it for example with investing styles. Investing styles really match with playing style. That is just one area where I see a clear correlation.

In addition to appetite for risk, there is kind of like appetite for paradox. Right? There’s lot of decisions you can make in life and over the board that are not necessarily risky or unrisky - because everything is risky, there is always a risk - but are just weird. Just some weird situations and there are some players who go for those weird situations and I am pretty sure it is also in life, that there is a correlation there too.”

According to Jesse’s theory about the correlation between play style and appetite for risk, I should be living in a nice four-bedroom house in the suburbs with 2.4 children and a stable job as an accountant. And yet I am a man who moved to Spain at the start of a pandemic, with no understanding of the Spanish language, with my pregnant wife, in order to attempt our dream of self-sufficiency starting in a field of brambles that we hoped would one day become a thriving permaculture farm. That farm was only accessible by a 20-minute walk on a muddy path through a forest full of wolves and bears. We got a puppy, we had our wonderful son, and lived in a tent while he was still a baby. We installed our own electricity and water systems, tried to build a house with no prior knowledge of construction, all whilst trying to survive on freelance online work month to month.

Suffice to say this wasn’t the safest move I had in the starting position. In fact, about a year after we moved onto the farm, I found myself wading through waist-high water inside a half-crumbled building wondering which of my life possessions I should try to salvage first. We had in short, been checkmated by nature, and are now in the process of trying to return to civilization and follow our new dreams. But those years, the whole experience, is not something I regret. It’s a risk we took. It’s a risk I’d take again.

The point is that when Jesse said that play style might correlate to an appetite for risk, I initially disagreed. I thought that in life, I was a risk taker and in chess, I was risk-averse. A lot of people talk about having a ‘one day’ dream. “One day, I’ll quit my job and buy an ice cream truck.” “One day, I’d love to take up skydiving.” I threw everything I had at this ‘one day’ farm dream. One of the reasons I’d do it all again, is because the worst really did happen - and you know what? We are all fine. We just start again and take the incredible experience and growth the project provided us, and apply it to the next thing we go after. The next risk we take. Certainly, neither of us will be building a career in accountancy any time soon. For us that would be settling. And partly because of how this experience shaped us, I don’t think we will ever be afraid to follow anything less than our dreams again.

So initially I thought I had to disagree with Jesse, because on the chess board I am the opposite of the man I am in life. In chess, I put a lot of stock in long-term positional advantages. I would much rather play against the IQP than with it in an equal position. Give me the IQP and I wouldn’t know what to do. I would much rather play a strategic manoeuvring game than find myself entrenched in chaos with pieces hanging left, right and centre. I am what most people would call a safe chess player, I’m certainly not a risk-taker.

So my chess style and my lifestyle don’t quite match up. But is that really true? The more I thought about it, the more I considered that maybe Jesse was right. Because really, my risky farm move wasn’t really that risky at all in the sense that I was (or at least I thought I was) playing for a long-term positional advantage.

With practically zero starting capital, I was building a mortgage-free home, a place I could live without water bills, without electricity bills and with massively reduced food bills... for life. That was the ten-year plan. And I felt a lot safer living in control of my own destiny in a more and more uncertain world than I did in the city, relying on someone else to grow, rear and stock my food, provide my electricity and clean my water. And whether that was a correct risk assessment or not is irrelevant, because it is what I believed to be true at the time. Living on that farm, many people thought we were crazy, but I had never felt more in control in my life.

So in many ways I was playing for a long-term static advantage. The position felt entirely under my control. If the electricity went out, it was my solar system to fix and I knew I could fix it. If the water stopped running, there was a problem with the pipe in my mountain stream. It was all under my control. The situation felt safe, albeit with some short-term dynamic risks that ultimately resulted in an unfavourable early checkmate. But that one defeat doesn’t mean I’m going to change my style.

And I haven’t. I have launched myself into another endeavour - chess. I am coaching now. And I am very aware that whilst my progress is not guaranteed, it is sort of required to prove my method. There is no stronger, more powerful ‘why’ to chess improvement than other people depending on it - these other people being both my students and my family. And of course it’s not my rating that keeps my students coming back each week. They stick around because they believe I am providing them with value that supports their chess journey. They don’t pay me so that one day I’ll become a super-GM (thank fuck), they pay me to be the chess coach they need to reach their chess goals.

But for me, there is always that voice lurking in the back of my head, feeling like the success of my business is somehow intrinsically linked to my Lichess classical rating. And of course there is no guarantee of success, but just like with the farm, my chess and my chess business feels like it is within my control. I choose what and how to study. I put the hours in. The process is mine, even if I can’t guarantee results.

So I am willing to put myself at risk for long-term static gain. I’ll take that pawn on b2 and try to catch up in development. I’ll isolate your d-pawn and defend. I’ll take a risk for long-term gain, on the chess board, as in life.

So maybe you, like a machete-wielding party guest, feel your chess is in line with your personality. Maybe you make sense, just like another friend of mine, a friend who likes to get down to the beach early to write hopeless messages in the sand. She’ll scribble away all morning and then plant a towel down further back from the water and watch as parents and their children walk by and stop to read words like ‘Death Comes to Us All’ scribbled in the sand. She’ll lay there and laugh at the confusion and chaos she sows. She’ll just laugh. She has never resigned from a game before. And she plays the Petrov. Does that make sense? Does she make sense?

And what about you dear reader? Do you make sense?

Maybe the question we can answer about ourselves when we play chess is not what kind of player we are, but who we really are.

And so, who are you?

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