From The Wall Street Journal:
The act of sacrifice holds an elevated and sometimes sacred place in societies across the globe. While sacrifices may be rare in a person’s daily life, they happen as a matter of course in a large number of chess games. Many positions cannot be won or saved without something of value being given away, from a lowly pawn all the way up to the mighty queen. Certain types of sacrifices happen so frequently that to an experienced player they might be considered routine, almost boring, and it often takes an unusual sort of sacrifice to quicken the pulse of jaded grandmasters who have seen tens of thousands of them in their lifetimes.
In the introduction to his classic book “The Art of Sacrifice in Chess,” player Rudolf Spielmann wrote, “The beauty of a game of chess is usually appraised, and with good reason, according to the sacrifices it contains. On principle we incline to rate a sacrificial game more highly than a positional game. Instinctively we place the moral value above the scientific.”
It is this “moral value” that separates some sacrifices from others. Spielmann draws a clear distinction between what he calls a “sham sacrifice” and a real one. A sham sacrifice is one where one can easily see that the piece being given up will return concrete benefits that can be clearly calculated. Any player would be happy to part with their queen if they see that they can checkmate the opponent’s king within a couple of moves.
However, in the case of a real sacrifice, giving away a piece offers gains that are neither immediate nor tangible. The return on investment might be controlling more space, creating an assailable weakness in the opponent’s position, or having more pieces in the critical sector of attack.
In chess, we call these intangibles “compensation.” Having enough compensation for a sacrificed piece is a judgment call based on knowledge of similar situations or a refined intuitive feel based on thousands of games played. Of course, compensation doesn’t guarantee that you will win the game, and if these intangible advantages don’t pan out then that extra material you gifted to the opponent could come roaring back to overwhelm your smaller army.
Life is filled with examples of sham sacrifices versus real ones. When someone takes out a college loan, there is a reasonable assumption that, through future earnings, they will be able not only to pay off the loan, but also to earn more money on top of it. This assumption may not work out, but it has been executed so many times with success that many students feel safe taking on that debt. The fact that it may take years, or in some cases even decades, to see the sacrifice pay off doesn’t change the sense of confidence most young people and their families have when investing in education.
In contrast, real sacrifices promise no guarantee of a concrete return. My mother made an incalculably real sacrifice when she made the painful decision to leave my brother, sister, and me in Jamaica, where we’re from, to head to the U.S. in search of a better life. I was only two years old when she left. It would take her 10 long years to gain citizenship and be able to sponsor us to join her in this land of opportunity. She could not have known how those 10 years would play out and the infinite number of possible challenges we might all have to overcome.
In fact, the very first day after she arrived in the U.S., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.was shot and killed in Memphis, setting off riots all around the country. The way she tells it, she was in shock that her dream began in such a devastating fashion. But she understood that this wasn’t just about her emotions and fears; she had three young kids, being taken care of by her mother, who were relying on her to push on. And push on she did, with courage and determination and sense of purpose, and a decade later, she accomplished the task that she had set her mind to so many years before, and finally we were able to reunite as one family.
Her sacrifice came with unanticipated results. While she had dreamed that we would all get a college degree (we did), she assumed that we would end up in traditional professions with guaranteed pension plans. She could not have foreseen that I would end up making my living from chess, that my brother’s martial arts passion would lead to his becoming a three-time kickboxing champion, or that her baby girl would leave the world of business behind to win six world titles in boxing.
It did not have to turn out that way. It did because she was willing to stomach the key aspect of making real sacrifices: the willingness to take risks. For a chess player, risk is as much intuited as it is calculated. Due to the inherent complexity of the game, it is virtually impossible to assess with certainty whether a risky move will pay off in the end. It’s up to the player to decide if sufficient conditions have been met to take the chance on a risky move. Those conditions may be an aggressive, attacking posture, dominant pieces, weaknesses in your opponent’s position, time pressure, or the stress of the competitive situation. All these could add up to a certain degree of confidence in the chance of a positive result.
When it comes to risk, grandmasters are not a monolithic group. Depending on their personalities, top players have different levels of risk tolerance. On one hand, you’ll find the swashbuckling, dynamic attacking personality types like Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Tal, and Rashid Nezhmetdinov, who will take risks without much hesitation. On the other side of the spectrum are more conservative players such as José Raúl Capablanca, Tigran Petrosian and Wesley So. Tolerance for risk is very personal.
What we do know, however, is that the famous saying “No risk, no reward” is true in many cases. A skilled adversary is normally able to handle solid, conservative play and therefore able rob us of opportunities that may be inherent in our position. As Magnus Carlsen put it: “Not being willing to take risks is an extremely risky strategy.”
To be comfortable with risk is to be comfortable with uncertainty.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
From Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology: “Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.”