Thursday, May 30, 2019

Are all Eastern Europeans and Russians good at chess?

Obviously not. But if I'm not mistaken, that general part of the world has the highest number of chess grandmasters per capita. So maybe, just maybe, I can be forgiven for assuming this.

Why am I even talking about this? Last night, I drove up to Idaho Falls (about 40 minutes from where I live) to play at the local chess club. My opponent was this late-30ish/early-40ish gentleman who spoke with a thick Eastern European/Russian accent, and whose name was Yuran; sounds Russian or Ukrainian to me, although I cannot be sure.

Anyway, I immediately assumed that since he is Eastern European or Russian, he must be a strong chess player who has come to the local chess club to assert his dominance over us puny Idahoans and teach us a thing or two about the royal game. Adding to this perception was the fact that he carried himself with a certain self-assurance in his body language. So I sat down and buckled down for a tough game.

I had the white pieces, and he played the Dutch Defense. Which made me even more apprehensive, since the Dutch requires quite a bit of daring, panache, and careful study to pull off. After the first 6 or 7 moves, however, it became clear that he had no idea how to play that opening. His pawns were getting in the way of his pieces, which were in turn tied up in knots in his first two ranks. I quickly made short work of his army, and sent his king to the gallows (i.e. checkmate, from the Persian Shah-mat, "the king is dead"). To his credit, he graciously accepted the loss, and we played a second game, which I won as well.

So what's the moral of this story? Not much, really. I had subscribed to a stereotype, and that stereotype led me to overrate the strength of my opponent.

To all of you haters out there who think that I am being shallow in subscribing to stereotypes, well, consider this: While stereotypes can often lead us astray in our judgments of people and things (like it did here in my case), it is nevertheless a fact of life that most people employ stereotypes as a representativeness heuristic: When you are in a situation where you have very limited information to go on and have to make quick decisions, there is a tendency to latch on to a handy mental tool to quickly process what limited information there is and come to a decision quickly. Sometimes, this leads to tragic consequences (think police shooting), sometimes less so (think chess game against Eastern European/Russian man). But it is a fact that people employ stereotypes in navigating through life.

As you can see, this post has nothing to do with yoga. But I don't have any other venue to write about my random musings on life. So I write about it here.