Foundations of Chess

Contained with a flow that breaks into chaos is all starting variables of that chaos. Every point in a linear flow continues on until outward dynamics turn the linear ordering of those points into something less so - the Reynolds Number in a literal flow, such as water or smoke. The original uniformity exists in anything which moves forward as a chain of deliberately sparked chaos. Games of billiards work by a cueball striking the balls arranged in an ordered pyramid, the micro-scale variables of individual inconsistencies and flaws in all the variables involved turning each game wholly novel. A game of cards has the deck shuffled before beginning, turning the drawing of cards into a slow revelation of the same sort of chaos struck onto with the billiard balls. In chess, the pieces are arranged in a courtly manner, with the largely predictable moves exponentially increasing the difference from the original parade-order of arrangement, until the true state of “war” has settled over in the mid-game.

It’s the manipulation of this chaos that holds all these games together. Each piece has a set of potential motions and trajectories which can be drawn from it via the various which the game has determined the pieces can move, the ultimate accumulation of which and the chain-reactions of their interactions with each other, makes the whole of the equation to be manipulated by the players in order to achieve victory. Billiards shows it most obviously, with the balls operating on literally textbook examples of cause-effect w/r/t laws of motion. But the others have the same. Card players attempt to control or predict the flow of the deck as it unfolds its chaos into their hands. In chess, the players are situated within frozen motions and allowed to attempt to direct their pieces in a proper directions such that the motion of the game is towards their benefit.

In zugzwang, this relation between chess and the chaotic mathematics of flows is realized. When the master traps their opponent in zugzwang, they’ve demonstrated a total control over the motion and status of all points in the game. They’ve fully redirected all possible trajectories such that any of them would benefit them. They’ve created a position which is, for them, antifragile, in the same way that certain financial instruments, with the opponent trapped in a subtle bind where they must find a way to make the least impactful movement in order to disturb (and thus feed) the system in the least amount possible.

The ultimate goal of all this manipulation is control of space. At the base of chess is go. As the game progresses, one player begins to gain more control of the board’s space by the threat of their movement, that movement guaranteed freedom via pseudo-ownership. The losing player loses via constriction, unable to defend against the maneuverings of the opponent, they find themselves constricted further and further until the center of their ranks is enclosed upon, until a state is reached where the King is completely entrapped within territory held by the other. The King dies automatically, not directly taken, but annihilated, its existence as a vertical signifier no longer abided by under the control of the other.

It’s this notion of territory and signifier that develops upon the go-foundation at the core of chess. Taking from go the two sides perpendicularly opposed by binary opposition, chess develops this further, turning the two sides into royal orders of their own, a court contained in the pieces like the face cards of chess. The player of black sees their opposite, themselves as the empty night snuffing out imposing day, the player of white sees their opposite, themselves as blank paper washing out staining ink. In further comparison to Go, the drawing of territories is this, the making-clear of these boundary lines, turning the board into a space of divisions, a presence and absence experienced as an opposite schema by each player.

These colors draw linkage to other opposing “teams” in games, notably with the court symbolism of the chess set, that of various forms of game-cards, tarot or playing. A spiraling into the center, to the innermost core of the suit. The chess team is based on the kingly center, as the suit is on the ace. Suits are divided along the same fundamental opposition as chess, white and black, spade and heart opposing as diamond and club do, or, sword and chalice, as baton and pentacle. These make up the corpus of the self in chess, with those of the other being the counter-self, the adversary. Chess is fully Hobbesian in this way, imagining the nation and the body as not only being like each other, but being made up fo the same fundamental composition, the organs composing a body to create its drives making up the humans, those humans composing organs of the nation. In all cases, there must be a superior intellect ruling, the Leviathan or the Ego. Chess in this way, is a form of Cartesian dueling, two bodies locked in combat, their “souls” fully removed from the body.