This post is a promise to Kanjun. I told her that she should write something without worrying whether her subject matter was interesting. But then I realized that I didn't quite have the courage of my convictions, because there's something that I keep wanting to write about, but don't, because I suspect you'll find it boring.
If you'd like to read about something boring, please continue. If you'd like to skip what's essentially a personal exercise, check back tomorrow.
In Keith Johnstone's visionary book Impro, he suggests that status is a key element in every social interaction. At every moment, humans are trying to raise or lower each other's status, to supplicate and appease, to boast and brag, to assert and defend. There is no harmless compliment, no motiveless exposition, no purposeless tall tale. It's all one big status game, whether or not you're in a Harold Pinter play. (Your friends are people with whom you can play these games for fun.)
Viewed with this lens, almost any prolonged social interaction can take on the characteristics of a drama, however minor. Today, we'll be looking at one of these minor dramas.
This one takes place in the aftermath of a chess game. Traditionally, following a game, players analyze the game together, turning their adversarial energies towards a collaborative understanding. They examine unplayed moves, point out each other's blunders and oversights, and discover, together, more about the truth of what just occurred.
When it goes really well, and the players are all-time greats with frighteningly refined cortices, it looks like this.
It's a convivial, collegial intellectual sport.
When it goes less well, that's what I'm going to write about: a Testy Little Chess Time at a post-game press conference, which is sometimes where analysis occurs.
Before we get into it, we have to talk about the two players in this drama. But to talk about them, we have to talk about the two kinds of advantage there are in chess: practical advantages, and theoretical advantages.
If I have a theoretical advantage, it means that, given perfect play, my position is superior. Maybe I have one winning move. That winning move might be nearly impossible to find over the board, but it's there. That's why the advantage is theoretical.
If I have a practical advantage, it means that my position is easier to play than yours is. Sure, you might have one move that repels my attack and wins the game. But if my attack is bafflingly complex, and your time is running out, and you have ten obvious moves that all lose the game instantly, who's winning? Probably not you.
Okay, now. The two players.
One is Alexander Morozevich, the Dark Prince of chess. At his peak, he was the second-best player in the world. He's a player who lives for practical advantages. He creates maelstroms on the board, dazzles you, and takes your king's head off, or loses spectacularly. For this and other reasons, he's a fan favorite.
One is Anish Giri, an absolute genius with a somewhat more dry style of play. Third-best worldwide at peak performance. Although Giri is certainly capable of attacking ferociously if he wants to, he prefers a cold, calculating kind of game in which he risks nothing and slowly gains the advantage.
Morozevich is a magician who casts beautiful spells, and Giri is a vise grip that's very difficult to pry open.
In this particular game, Morozevich bested Giri. and, at the press conference, Giri begins by leading the discussion, which makes sense energetically. Giri is a chatty guy, and Morozevich has a grimly laconic manner.
But, interestingly, Giri says little to nothing in praise of Morozevich's play. Instead, he talks about the game as a misfortune that befell him. This position shouldn't be so bad, but he misplayed it. The structure favors his side, but the advantage never materialized. There's a dismissive energy to it—the vibe you get is that he felt the game was his to lose. He's trying to save face, essentially, by explaining away his defeat.
Relevant fact: he was 18 at this time, and Morozevich was 35. Gracefully accepting loss is difficult at any age, but especially in the teen years.
Anyway. Eventually, witnessing this Giri-centric dynamic, the press officer, Anastasiya Karlovich, asks Morozevich if he was satisfied with his position out of the opening. Morozevich says "of course," and is about to continue, but Giri interrupts him. Giri questions his middle-game decisions, which were very Morozevich-like: the Dark Prince gives up a central pawn to create a practical advantage, in exchange for giving Giri a theoretical advantage. Giri suggests this is unwise."It's a very unclear position," he says, "it could even be that I can just be better." (Saying 'I'm better' in chess lingo means 'my position is better.')
Giri is doing two things at once. He's clinically analyzing the game. But he's also doing a status move. He's saying: yeah yeah, you won this crazy game, because you played crazy like you usually do, but your decisions were fundamentally unsound, and if I had my wits about me, the game would've gone differently. Giri is making light of Morozevich's way of playing when he says that Morozevich had "no control" over the position, and that it "wasn't necessary" to take the game in such a messy direction. He's declaring a kind of intellectual superiority.
Morzevich begins to tire of this. At 3:20, he briefly gets this expression on his face that Slavs excel at. It's an expression that says, "it would be beneath me to explain how stupid you're being."
He continues analyzing the game with Giri, but he starts to speak up for himself, finally praising the messy position that Giri had been so dismissive towards. "I thought I turned one kind of winning position into another kind of winning position, which I liked better," he says.
"Do you really think you have an advantage here?" Giri asks, in response. His intentions are now clear. He wants to say to Morozevich: you just tricked me, right? You weren't really playing good chess, were you? "Practically," Morozevich responds, "yes of course. Theoretically, I don't care." He's subtly responding to Giri's status move as well as participating in the broader discussion. He's saying: all of this whining you're doing about how you were theoretically better doesn't matter. What's really going on is that you're coping, trying to explain away my convincing practical victory.
Giri, however, still trying to steal the upper hand, attempts to conclude the discussion by saying that the position, despite Morozevich's insistence to the contrary, is "completely unclear." In response, Morozevich finally enters the status game in earnest, with naked intention. He says "[It's] completely unclear, but you'll be very lucky to hold a draw. I don't know what is so unclear."
Giri, visibly flustered, pulls up an alternate position on the screen—the position that would've resulted if Giri had parried Morozevich's play more deftly—and issues a challenge: "but how would you play here?"
And then Morozevich pulls the conversation-ending masterstroke: he declines to answer. "I don't know," he says. "No idea." He completely rejects Giri's framing of the situation, which is that Giri is the impartial investigator of the game, showing Morozevich that his play was dicey. He refuses to participate in Giri's attempt to seize authority. Giri shrinks and directs the rest of his remarks to Anastasiya.
There's so much in this brief moment. It's a shining example of one of the most classic status moves: refusing to speak your opponent's language. It's a camouflaged referendum on gamesmanship and aesthetics, a pointed discussion of what chess should be. It's an example of how the most infantile activity—in this case, being a sore loser—can be cloaked in an extremely intricate and artificial language.
But there's not that much. It's a press conference about a chess game. That's, finally, what I love about it. It's a primal conflict locked inside the most genteel Euro social context maybe ever.
So, there, it's over, that's my boring post. Now get out.
I really like "now get out" as a closing.
That was NOT boring! Liar!