everything else: you can blame anya taylor-joy for this
dear internet,
i. pawns move forward, one square at a time.
i ordered a chessboard two episodes into the queen's gambit.
ii. rooks move along the horizontal or vertical.
from my google search history, chronological:
chess app if i don't know anything about chess
what are the rules of chess
how does the queen move chess
how can a king move
can a queen kill a queen
can a king kill if not in check
how can a pawn move diagonally
what is castling
iii. bishops move diagonally.
my general attitude towards new skills is i will be great or nothing—an attitude that essentially guarantees never picking up new hobbies—yet, three episodes in, i was on the chess dot com app playing against the bot, with all the help features on. probably there's a more systematic way to learn; i know how the pieces function now, and can sometimes perceive threats and dimly glimpse strategy, but most of the game is still a mystery to me. when i try to play intuitively it does not go well, and humiliatingly, when i try to play cleverly, spending ages anticipating possible moves and traps, it goes worse.
iv. knights move in an L-shape.
one night in kodaikanal i sat on a balcony with two people whose names i cannot remember, and they tried to teach me how to play. i insisted on calling the knight a 'horsie', did not learn anything, and never saw them again. years later, i'd say no when my students offered to teach me. i knew i would lose and it would be embarrassing: my students had maths-and-music brains. they played chinese chess in the breaks between classes and could work rubik's cubes so fast the colours blurred. one time on a plane they played bridge across the aisle. the thing about teaching is that every day i was shown reminders of the capacity to be wholly interested in something.
v. the king can move one square in any direction.
what i still don't understand is the checkmate—which, of course, is the entire point of the game. my brain can't think in terms of if x then y, and then z, but if a then b and then c. i do something, and then i wait to see what happens next.
vi. the queen can move in any direction.
my favourite part of the queen's gambit is how much it made me want to understand chess despite never really talking about it at all. you watch pieces move across boards and players stare at each other and mention moves and openings and write down notations and shake hands and then go to hotel rooms and agonise about gameplay and do it all over again the next day, and all the while you never really know what they're doing at all, only how absolutely absorbing it is to them. and now—for longer than i expected, honestly, even though it's only been a week—to me.
love,
t