Someone in this blog says that nowadays, chess is getting boring; openings in tournaments are memorized to 20 moves or so. I would counter that sentiment and say that chess is more enlightening than it used to be. Sure there is less mystery, but there is more understanding. Is that not good? People who think chess these days is boring wish calculations in opening manuals were shorter-from my perspective.

Thank you for your article. I am not a Mormon myself, though my experiences with individual Mormons have been quite good, on the whole. I wish you and the members of your Church well.

I do, however, have problems with the portion of your article related to Chess. The notion that “Steinitz … is credited with discovering what is called positional chess” is one with which I take issue. Steinitz was a brilliant systematizer of ideas, but much of his work is based on an exceptionally careful study of the games of Paul Morphy. We might say that many Chess players see Steinitz as the Plato to Morphy’s Socrates.

Dr. Emanuel Lasker was World Chess Champion for nearly three decades. He won the title by defeating Steinitz. In the fourth book of his famous “Manual of Chess”, he describes the roles of Morphy and Steinitz thus:

La Bourdonnais [a great player, b. 1795 - d. 1840] died young in London, and the goddess of Chess, Caissa, very much grieved, mourned for him and forgot to inspire the masters with her sunny look. A dreary time then came over the Chess world. The masters played a dry style, without enthusiasm, without imagination, without force, and the Chess fraternity was full of the wrangles of the mediocrities. It is true, the goddess soon repaired her omission. She flirted – Goddess! pardon me this vulgar expression, but the coarse human language does not know the shades of meaning such as undoubtedly you would be able to express by means of Chess pieces – she flirted, I beg to say, with the English historian [and renowned authority on Shakespeare, whose name has been given to the style of Chess pieces we now use] Staunton and prevailed upon him to organize in 1851 an international chess tournament in London, during the great International Exposition of that year. And then – fickle Goddess – she gave her love to a young mathematician, the German Anderssen, and inspired him to superb combinations. And then — oh the weakness of her – she spied with her great sunny eye in far distant Louisiana a boy, highly talented; she forgot all about Anderssen, guided the steps of the young American, fell in love with him, introduced him to the world and said triumphantly: “Here is the young Paul Morphy, stronger and greater than master ever was.â€? And the world listened and applauded and cried “Hurrah for Paul Morphy, the King of Chess!â€?

In Paul Morphy the spirit of La Bourdonnais had arisen anew, only more vigorous, firmer, prouder. He never formed columns of Pawns for the purpose of assaulting a firm position as Philidor had taught, he always fought in the centre, only a few Pawns in front, and if he needed the lines open, he sacrificed even these few advanced posts. Should the adversary make use of Philidor’s maxims, Morphy’s pieces occupied the gaps in the oncoming mass of Pawns and opened up an attack, so as to leave the enemy no time for slow, methodical maneuvering. Paul Morphy fought; on good days and on bad days, he loved the contest, the hard, sharp, just struggle, which despises petted favourites and breeds heroes.

But then the Civil War broke out in the United States and broke the heart and mind of Morphy.

When Paul Morphy, despairing of Life, renounced Chess, Caissa fell into deep mourning and into dreary thoughts. To the masters who had come to ask her for a smile she listened absent-mindedly, as a mother would to her children after her favourite had died. Therefore, the games of the masters of that period are planless; the great models of the past are known, and the masters try to follow them and to equal them, but they do not succeed. The masters give themselves over to reflection. One of them reflects a long time and intensely on Paul Morphy, and gratefully Caissa encourages him; and the greatest landmark in the history of Chess is reached: William Steinitz announces the principles of strategy, the result of inspired thought and imagination.

Principles, though dwelling in the realm of thought, are rooted in Life. There are so many thoughts which have no roots and these are more glittering and more seducive [sic] than the sound ones. Therefore, in order to distinguish between the true and the false principles, Steinitz had to dig deep to lay bare the roots of the art possessed by Morphy. And when Steinitz after hard work had bared these roots, he said to the world: Here is the idea of Chess which has given vitality to the game since its invention in the centuries long past. Listen to me and do not judge rashly, for it is something great, and it overpowers me. . .

. . . . The world would have benefitted if it had given Steinitz a chance. He was a thinker worthy of a seat in the halls of a University. A player, as the world believed he as, he was NOT; his studious temperament made that impossible; and thus he was conquered by a player [Dr. Lasker himself] and in the end little valued by the world, he died. And I who vanquished him must see to it that his great achievement, his theories should find justice, and I must avenge the wrongs he suffered . . . .

[end quote]

I think Dr. Lasker is reflecting the opinions of the majority of experts in the Chess community on this subject.

Incidentally, if you would like to discuss Paul Morphy or play through any of his remarkable games, you might visit this site, which enables you to play through the games of Morphy by simply “clicking through” them and watching the pieces move on a nice interface. You may also post messages. Both these features are totally free of charge. (I post under the name “BishopBerkeley” at this site):

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=16002

Also, an outstanding website on the life and Chess of Paul Morphy is maintained by Serendipitous Sarah, a very talented writer. You may visit it at the easy-to-remember URL http://www.paulmorphy.com , or you may follow the full URL:

http://www.angelfire.com/games/SBChess/Morphy/Paul_Morphy.html

It is not only the best Chess biography site I’ve seen, it is also one of the finest biographical sites of *any* kind I have seen.

Incidentally, I also disagree with your notions that, “Today, grandmaster level chess is basically boring” and that “No serious chess player, however, actually plays like Morphy any more.” (My view is that, in most cases, the more they play like Morphy, the more likely they are to be serious!) But I’ll leave it at this for now.

Thank you, and please understand I hope to disagree without being disagreeable.

Good Luck!

Interestingly, however, I have heard some people argue that the computers end up screwing up more often in the late middle game and the end game. They tend to be overly focused on material advantage and don’t always have a good sense of the importance of positional advantage in the end game. In other words, when positional chess ceases to be about memorization and becomes about intuition and depth of strategic thinking the computers become weaker.

Of course, even in Hobby mode, Fritz always kicks my butt.

Small aside: Have things become so sanitized and establishment driven that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of “Dixie” is no longer available? If so, when did it drop out of production?

I’m curious. What is Space Doctrine?

Glen

Is this a cause or an effect of a scarcity of ambitious theological works?

Anyway, I’m not sure this has really happened. In what sense has anything been institutionalized? There haven’t been any modifications to the standard works sufficient to count as such an institutionalization. Perhaps there has been a reining in of GAs from propounding speculative doctrines, particularly since correlation. But this is not the same as an establishment of an orthodoxy. Rather, I think we’ve just made our discourse more common-sensical and theologically non-committal. A document like the Proclamation on the Family establishes a few doctrines quite firmly, but these are only a couple of fixed points in a vast theological space.

The reining in of GAs accounts for a significant fraction of the theological quiet. Our most ambitious theologians were GAs for a while and probably were made GAs in part because they were taking God and the gospel seriously, doing theology being one way of taking God and the gospel seriously.

In part, however, perhaps we as a people have simply become more complacent.

As a separate matter, perhaps a knack for working well in an organization has figured larger in GA selection in recent decades, particularly as the church has grown and there have been enough of us that we could be more selective about leaders!

Anyway, I don’t think there are impediments, not much anyway. There may be fewer of certain kinds of stimuli. Perhaps the high percentage of adventurous types in the early days (to be expected in a mostly convert church which asked you to move to the other side of the world) has been replaced by a more normal demographic. Mostly I think we just need to do the work!

Hand-wringing: easy.

Writing master work: very, very, very hard.

I’m pretty sure that the post- Roberts, Widstoe, et al. turn to caution and institutionalization was not an attempt to find a better way to expand the theology.