Building Hope Through Chess

“Hope is the ability to envision a future in which one wishes to participate.”

R. F. Jevne, 2005

 

Why would Freedom's Gambit include a page on “hope” on its website? One of our main missions at Freedom’s Gambit is to show how learning and studying chess has relevance beyond the 32 pieces and 64 squares. We believe that hope is an important concept both on the chessboard and in everyday life. 

 

Freedom’s Gambit reaches out to places where hope might be in short supply due to circumstances such as incarceration or proximity to incarceration that continue to widen the socioeconomic and racial gaps prevalent throughout NYC and beyond. So, we ask: What can we do, as chess players and as concerned citizens, to expand the promise of hope? Our experiences teaching chess in NYC have demonstrated many vital opportunities to incorporate hope-building through the game of chess.

 

Here, we want to explore how chess can serve as a valuable tool for learning how to overcome obstacles, identify goals, and find ways to achieve them. Examining these possibilities “over the board” (our language for “in person” or “in real life”) will provide the means and methods for connecting chess skills to concrete issues that we all encounter daily. Namely, we can inspire people to engage in hope-building activities by highlighting in our chess instruction the aspects of the game that mirror these activities.

 

To begin: What do we talk about when we talk about ”hope”?

 

At the outset, let’s propose that hope is something that is built, not taken for granted. It is an outcome that one experiences after successfully repeating a set of activities aimed at envisioning success. For instance:

 

• Identifying achievable goals

• Engaging in “pathways thinking” to reach them

• Detecting obstacles and finding pathways around those obstacles

 

According to hope theory, the more one successfully navigates these moves, the more one builds hope. Hope is not wishful thinking. It is an outcome of a set of interrelated actions and activities that, if successful, help to achieve promise.

 

Despair, by contrast, derives from a frustration of these activities. There is no complete list of such obstacles, though most responses would gravitate to terms such as “fear, anxiety, anger, shame, guilt, sadness and …hopelessness.”  

 

One might say, then, that despair results from the frustration of hope-building activities–when goals endure as unsatisfied, pathways to them remain unidentified, and obstacles persist.

 

We believe that we can illustrate fundamental hope-building activities through numerous examples from chess. Experiencing hope-building over the board can help illuminate how we might build hope in our daily lives, a premise that informs our commitment to bringing chess to communities in which hope has been compromised.

 

Identifying Achievable Goals

 

In life, as in chess, some goals are achievable, and some are not. For example, I can look at my schedule and see that fitting in a twenty-minute, daily physical routine is a reasonable, achievable goal. However, if I convince myself that nothing less than two hours of daily exercise will do, I only need to consult my schedule to see that it doesn’t fit. Hence, it is an unachievable goal. But the twenty minutes per day, if sustained, will have empowering, invigorating benefits, and the additional satisfaction of meeting the daily goal will inspire me to continue.

 

In chess, achievable and unachievable goals exist in similar ways. For example, I might aspire to win more than 50% of the games that I play . . . for the rest of my life. Let’s put this into perspective. Magnus Carlsen, a 34-year-old Norwegian, is currently the highest-rated chess player in the world, and many consider him the best player of all time. Yet his professional record shows that he has won only 43% of his games, while drawing 42% and losing 15%. Chess is not always a matter of winning decisively; it’s as much the experience of playing solidly, or creatively, or riskily, or defensively—sometimes all in the same game! An achievable goal, then, could be to maintain focus, avoid blunders, and hope to learn something from the postgame analysis (though all of this is sometimes challenging, even for the best players!)

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"Pathways Thinking"

 

After identifying an achievable goal, we still need to find a way to reach it. Returning to the exercise example, we need to think of a way to schedule a daily routine that is reasonable but also effective. 

 

“Pathways thinking” is a proven, effective way to meet that goal. For example, I may notice my mornings have a forty-minute window between 10:00 and 10:40. That gives me enough time to get dressed before and clean up after my routine. It’s a clear pathway to meet my goal of exercising twenty minutes a day. Obstacles may arise that make it difficult to meet a goal, but “pathways thinking” aids in identifying obstacles and navigating a successful path around them. For example, someone may invite me to grab a snack at that time of the day. Since I enjoy this person’s company and like snacks, the invitation could be an obstacle to my achieving that day’s exercise target. So, I do pathways thinking and suggest an alternate time to go for a snack. My friend suggests a few other times as well. We check our schedules, see a slot that’s free for us both, and schedule our coffee for that time. I can still do my workout and also satisfy my craving for friendship and a tasty treat!

 

In chess, mindful use of pathways thinking can be time taken to evaluate our position and consider options for the next moves. Pathways thinking might include identifying vulnerable pieces and finding safe squares to move them to or counterattacks to protect them. Our decision-making mechanisms rarely are linear, but if we take a few extra minutes to breathe, gauge the options available, and then determine a conscientious path forward, we can help to avoid the impulsivity that often gets in the way of success.

 

The Following chess positions can be used as a teaching resource to demonstrate pathways thinking and nurture hope:​