NEVER TOO OLD
ONE day a number of years ago, I was deep into a game of draughts on holiday with my daughter, then almost four, in the small library of a beachfront town. Her eye drifted to a nearby table, where a black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures – many a future chess master has been innocently drawn in by “horses” and “castles”.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Chess,” I replied.
“Can we play?” she pleaded.
I nodded absently.
There was just one problem: I didn’t know how. I dimly remembered having learnt the basic moves as a kid, but chess had never stuck. This fact vaguely haunted me through my life. I would see an idle board in a hotel lobby or a puzzle in a weekend newspaper and feel a pang.
I had picked up a general awareness of chess. I knew the names Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. I knew the cliche about grandmasters being able to look a dozen moves ahead. I knew that chess, like classical music, was shorthand in movies for genius.
But I knew chess the way I “knew” the Japanese language: what it looks like, what it sounds like, its Japaneseness, without actually comprehending it. I decided to learn the game, if only to be able to teach my daughter.
It took a few hours, hunched over my smartphone at kids’ birthday parties or waiting in line at the grocery store, to get a feel for the basic moves.
Soon, I was playing, and sometimes even beating, the weakest computer opponents. Yet it soon became apparent that I had little concept of the larger strategies. I didn’t want to try to teach what I
