Since I was a young boy, I have always aspired to consider myself a chess master. An inherent reason for this aim stems from my highly competitive nature and personality. However, a more external reason for this derives from the fact that I enjoy the strategy-based structure of the game to such a great extent, that I’ve wanted to produce a seemingly indestructible defense for what I interpret as my own castle.Although the common principle of practice and consistent play with others is known to be a normative approach to attaining this goal, I have found that an effective method to identify and strengthen your weaknesses is by playing against the very person you see in the reflection of a mirror, yourself.
This may seem unreasonable and definitely a bit uncanny at first glance, however my belief in this outlook follows that in order to improve as a chess player, you must be able to recognize your shortcomings in strategy and execution. A normal response to this approach would be that it is seemingly useless to play against yourself, when you know exactly what your “opponent” is going to do, and therefore there is no element of surprise or what would be an otherwise different move set then what you yourself are aware of inside all the possible strategy’s you are knowledgeable of. Whereas playing against others provides a greater expansion of these various techniques within your world, facing off against yourself allows you to experience firsthand what you would respond with in a game facing your own strategy.
When I started this idea, I noticed I would identify the real “me” more to one side of the board, white or black; it wasn’t me vs me, it was me versus the evil oppressors on the opposite side led by a leader who has the same mindset as I. In this regard, there was a slight bias towards the side I chose to identify with, however the principle still remained. The element of choosing a side only created a fiction within my mind. In responding to moves against myself, I gained insight into how I would react against my own offensive. Holes and otherwise fragile advances in these offensives would be responded to with the full force of a newly constructed strategy that I made on spot to counter what was originally my own attack mechanism. This gave the effect not of changing my usual tactics to the game, but of providing reactionary measures should these tactics not have their intended result. The narrative part that I created within my own mind only made it that much more bearable.
This principle of self-evaluation need not apply to only chess. In other areas of my professional and personal life, I have found that gaining deeper understanding of your own limitations can be achieved through successfully identifying different reactions and measures taken in response to your own actions. In fact, what a privilege it is to be able to see yourself on the opposing side of a debate or game, and able to see the magnificence of your own creations, yet also able to objectively create your own opinion on the subject matter. It is this kind of assessment that allows an individual to overcome plateaus in life; peaks that have formed from the inability to see past one’s own limited range of view. I might not be that chess master that I always dreamed of as of yet, but if there’s one guarantee I can make, it is that even at mastery level I will still be fighting my own castles again and again until I’ve used every narrative.
