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There was a ninth-grade English teacher in Susan E. Wagner High School who insisted that students begin their essays with the phrase "In literature as in life..." and then go on to make some grand connection between the two. This policy was seriously annoying to the woman who taught 10th grade English because she inherited her students from that class, and they all thought that the proper way to begin an essay was with the words "In literature as in life." Fed up with it all, at the first sign of those evil words in a given essay, she would fail the student on the spot.

Recently, I have taken to playing chess, and while I have always known which way the pieces moved, I never developed any real game strategy. The more I learn about the game, the more I have been thinking about how appropriate it would be to begin an article on chess with the truism "in chess as in life..." because the way a person plays chess says a lot about that person's lifestyle.

Picture a guy playing chess who develops his position slowly and carefully. He takes a long time to put the bishops and knights into the open because he doesn't want to expose them to the other side too soon. If his knight is attacked by an enemy knight, he thinks only of running and not making a trade. A psychologist could make a lot of observations about this man based on his strategy. He's someone who does not like to take a lot of risks. He makes decisions carefully, after a lot of thought. He does not like to lose and is more concerned with preventing loss than achieving victory.

At the other extreme is the unrelenting player, who goes into direct attack the moment the game begins, going as far as sacking some of his own pieces just to get a good position from which to launch an assault. This player never hesitates to make a trade-off, losing one piece to capture an enemy piece of equal value. This player doesn't even mind trading queens at the start of the game. If one had dealings with this person in day-to-day life, one would find that his behavior is the same away from the chessboard as it is sitting at it. This is a gregarious risk-taker who wins bigger and loses bigger than his cautious counterpart, who risks little and neither wins nor loses much.

There are as many examples of the connection between strategy and personality as there are types of people. My grandfather, a chemistry major in college who had a very meticulous mind played chess in a way that was all clever tactics. He used intellectual strategies such as pins to limit enemy movements and nail pieces down. Meanwhile, someone who has lapses in concentration in class or while driving will have a lapse of concentration in the middle of a chess match that his enemy will exploit. (Assuming he doesn't get into a car crash on the way to the tournament.)

The best way to improve your chess game is to have someone show you where you're going wrong. How is a beginner supposed to know that it is critical to seize the center of the board as early in the game as possible if he isn't taught this? The same thing is true of life. A bad idea left uncorrected forces a person to make the same mistake over and over, still wondering what keeps going wrong.

The same mistake I always made was I sent the queen out way too early. I sent her charging into battle all by herself, without any backup support from the rest of the pieces. For those of you who don't know, the queen is the most powerful piece in the army, and one should not use her recklessly like that. Shortly afterward, my opponent would casually capture my queen with his bishop (it was almost always a bishop) and I would be defenseless when he launched a counter-attack. Why? Because all of my men were still stuck, undeveloped, behind a blockade of pawns, and my best piece was out of the game. And, aside from the tremendous, possibly unwinnable tactical advantage my opponent has at this point, I am also now too psyched out to even really offer a challenge. I convince myself it is hopeless, that I made a colossal blunder, and I melt without even giving my opponent much of a challenge.

Queen's dead? I'm dead, too.

Those who know me well in real life know that, as in chess, I'm bold initially, but I don't do very well once I suffer my first major setback. It takes a lot of sulking and licking of wounds before I rally for another attempt at ... whatever it is I was attempting to do when I got housed.

Though I discovered all this on my own, this is not news to veteran chess players who have played for years and read books like The Psychology of Chess. In fact, veterans would probably find this post self-evident, inaccurate, and just-plain-silly. Still, I may as well finish it at this point ...

Any way, the reason that the game is so intricate and complex is that it is a reflection of the human thought process, and that is the key to its enduring appeal and infinite variety.