A Little Chess is a Less Dangerous Thing

When I was five or six years old, we had a chess set that folded into a slipcase, and fit on the bookshelf. Also on the bookshelf was a thin paperback on how to play chess. One day I got them both out, setting up the chess board according to the diagrams in the book, and beginning to figure out how the pieces moved. When my dad got home from work that night, my mom nodded in my direction and said, “If you want to be the one to teach her to play chess, you should get started.”

My dad did teach me to play chess. I was never all that serious about it—never played competitively, never had a rank, nothing like that. At my best I was only a middling chess player, but yet: it is one of the most valuable things I ever learned. The main lesson I took away from chess, I have used all my life in every situation, and it is this: chess teaches you to think clearly, and in detail, about what could happen as a result of your next move.

I think that habit may have spoiled me for TV dramas. My daughter and I recently started watching one (Chicago Fire, if you’re curious) together. I spent the first three seasons of our binge frustrated with the characters in the show, who never seemed to see beyond the present moment, and whose go-to move in any situation was a brute face-to-face confrontation. Each time one of the firefighters would march into someone’s office—or their home—and get in their face, yelling—I would wonder, “How do they think that’s going to work out?” In most cases, it worked out just as you’d predict: in a tit-for-tat that escalated into increasingly irrational behavior and little in the way of happy endings. Lots of drama—as advertised, I suppose—but not much in the way of good sense or productive outcomes. I’d watch them get in one another’s faces yet again, and I’d think: did none of these people ever play chess? Have they really not thought about what is likely to happen as a result of what they’re about to do?

Unfortunately, it’s not just characters on TV shows who choose ill-considered heat-of-the-moment confrontations and tit-for-tat escalations without ever looking ahead to the next likely move—and in the real world, those failures can have consequences that are far more serious than they are for characters on TV. I get my personal drama fix from true crime – the Crime Junkie podcast is my standing Monday afternoon date – and the same story comes up over and over again. It’s the story of a woman, in a relationship with a violent man, who decides that she’s going to see him tonight and tell him it’s over.

These stories—these true stories—end the same way, every time: gruesomely. Every time, my stomach clenches when I hear these women’s friends, their sisters, their co-workers, report their fateful words. The women themselves aren’t around anymore to tell us what they were thinking, or whether they bothered to look ahead. I don’t think they could have; any chess player would have seen what was coming, and made another play.

I feel very lucky, to have had something these women apparently did not: I had a father who taught me chess.

It has served me well. When I was a teenager, I worked the five-to-nine shift at a card shop. There were three of us teen girls there, every night. The owners told us it was for “security.” Not that we were expected to take down badguys, but if there were three of us, then nobody walked to her car alone in the dark after we closed. If there were three of us, the register was never unattended and the doors were never unobserved. We couldn’t have withstood a determined attack, but our numbers may have discouraged casual criminals looking for an easy mark.

One of the girls was very cavalier about the job—she seemed to care little for either safety or honesty. She would come to work and clock in, working alongside the rest of us until the manager and store owners were gone, about six p.m. She’d wait fifteen or twenty minutes, and then tell us that she “just needed to run a quick errand.” She’d get her purse and leave, often coming back only to clock out at nine. It was theft, and it wasn’t safe for the two of us who stayed.

I went to school with this girl. She was a cheerleader, popular, wielding social capital I would never have. Confronting her would have done me no good; she would have laughed in my face. If I reported her, she was probably capable of making my life at school miserable. But how do you not report a brazen thief?

I wrote a note, signed it, sealed it, and quietly put it in the manager’s desk.

The next night, the manager left at her usual time, but came back to the store around eight p.m., claiming that she’d forgotten something in her office. The cheerleader wasn’t there. “Well, where did she go?” the manager asked. “How long has she been gone? If she was going on break, why didn’t she clock out? Does this happen often?” The cheerleader was fired, and I was in the clear.

Checkmate.

Later, at another workplace, a co-worker unexpectedly locked me in a room with him and tried to kiss me. Once I had escaped, I had to consider what to do. I could report him…but then what? There were no witnesses; it would be his word against mine. He was well-liked; I was new in the job. If it came down to him or me, I might have to go. I decided I could live with that—but I could not live with not reporting his behavior.

Sometimes in chess, you have to be willing to make a sacrifice play.

I went to my boss, and told her what had happened. She was shocked; like me, she had not expected that kind of behavior from that particular man. She dragged me to her boss—he was, as it happened, the company’s EEO officer. I told him what I’d told my boss, right down to my understanding of how this could go: “I understand that it’s his word against mine, and he will probably deny everything, and there may not be anything you can do. But I’ve decided I’m going to tell you, and this is why: If it ever happens again, I will get my purse, and I will walk out of here, and this is the only explanation you will ever get.”

It was a forced draw, not checkmate, but the outcome surprised me: he confessed. And apologized. And took the hit to his record. He wasn’t fired, but he was put on notice. I never had any further problems with him.

I’ve not been in a violent relationship, but I have been in a dicey one—one that I felt could turn on me at any moment. One where I did not feel safe. Again, I thought through moves, and countermoves, as many moves ahead as I could reasonably predict: if I do this, what is likely to happen next? If he does that, what’s my best play? Fraught confrontation is seldom the best option; it leads to escalation, and in the real world, escalation can be dangerous. Sometimes, slipping away quietly at your first opportunity is your best play. Sometimes ghosting is the safest way to go.

If your model for interpersonal interaction is drawn from soap opera characters and their manufactured drama, I recommend that you take up chess. I haven’t played in years – at least, not on a board with pawns and rooks and queens – but I use those lessons every day in my real life, and as a woman, I believe I’m safer because of it.