A discipline masquerading as a game

I often have difficulty explaining my obsession with chess to people who know that I don't enjoy playing other games. For most people who play and follow chess it is first and foremost a competitive game. There's nothing wrong with that; competitive chess has a rich history. The sporting elements such as ratings and time controls are not intrinsic to chess, however, which at its core is a set of positions, and the study of the relationships between those positions is a source of mysterious interest and great beauty. I would enjoy studying chess even if I never played another game. For me, to paraphrase Maurice Ashley, chess is a discipline masquerading as a game.

Are quicker checkmates better? Someone recently asked this question in the forum. For several people the answer was no: a win is a win and you don't gain bonus rating points for mating in fewer moves. From a sporting perspective this is completely true. Yet precision has long been admired in chess. The beauty of certain checkmates is a different but related question. Physicists and mathematicians have noticed that deep ideas in their fields often have a precision and beauty which they term elegance, and I think it's no accident that chess has been a rich source of metaphor for physics and subject matter for computer scientists.

There's something special about mating with a pawn or mating in the center of the board, but they are not necessarily beautiful. If we consider common checkmating patterns, I find striking beauty in mates involving the rook and a bishop or knight, such as Mayet's mate, the Arabian mate, or Anastasia's mate, whereas ladder mates and blind swine mates seem rather brutish. The composition of other pieces on the board can affect those assessments and they might all be refined as my chess sophistication develops.

I think that giving a beautiful mate is a good reason for choosing a longer sequence, but a particularly interesting question arises when you have two equally long mates and it's unclear which is more beautiful. This often happens with queen and rook mates, but the difference in aesthetic value is minimal. Consider the following legendary game between Edward (not Emanuel) Lasker and George Thomas played in London in the fall of 1912, which has been the subject of much debate.

The queen sacrifice and magnet combination which forces the king step-by-step from the eighth rank to the first is itself beautiful, but I want to focus on the final moves. First of all, white can mate in seven moves, but Lasker used eight moves, and I would be tempted to think that he did it on purpose for the beauty of his sequence, except for his own remark:

"A year later, Alekhine called my attention to the fact, discovered in Moscow, where he went over the game with Bernstein, that I could have mated in seven instead of eight moves by playing 16 Kf1 or O-O, as then Black would have been unable to prevent mate by 17 Nh2."

In the penultimate position, however, white has the choice of two unusual and extremely beautiful mates. Lasker himself describes his decision making process:

"Instead of checkmating with Kd2 I could have done it by castling, which would perhaps have been more spectacular, as no player has ever been mated that way before, as far as I know. I actually considered castling, but the efficiency-minded engineer in me got the better of it and I played Kd2 which required moving only one piece."

It's interesting that Lasker focuses on precision—efficiency-minded—rather than beauty, but I have difficulty in deciding which option is aesthetically superior. On the one hand, there is something pleasing about long-castling, although perhaps that is more true of the graceful swipe we make online than the clumsy maneuver over the board, and so strictly speaking that is not a feature of the chess itself, but a feature of the sport. Since castling is technically a king move, both of these options constitute an incredibly rare king mate, and yet they are drastically different. To have two such rare options is almost incredible. There is something very appealing about mating with a defensive move, but in the end, I think Lasker's Kd2, quietly stepping the king aside to end the game, is probably the better mate, but in any case it seems clear to me that the question of elegance in chess is one of its great joys.