Martial Chess - An Article by Nevin Grimsley

While browsing through some old collections of mine, i came across this article published in some chess newsletter in the mid 1990's. I hope that I can reproduce it here without any problems. I do not recall the Newsletter, I have just saved the text and the author.

Chess is a great sport, but let’s admit it doesn’t offer much in the way of cardiovascular fitness.

So, hoping to expand my repertoire of hobbies a bit -- as well as to get some exercise and prevent a stroke before I turn forty -- I recently started checking into martial arts classes. What I learned about Karate also taught me something about chess.


Martial arts are very cool, don’t you think? As I researched a bit, I found that there are practically limitless schools and styles of fighting. If you are a straight-ahead power puncher, Karate, with its direct chops and strikes, might fit your taste. If, on the other hand, you are a smaller person, you might prefer a style like Judo, where you throw your opponents by using their own weight and momentum against them. Aikido is a method whereby you can control a larger antagonist strictly by the angle and pressure you apply against one of his wrists or elbows. Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do, Wing Chun, Jiujitsu.... the list goes on. Even for those of us who
have no intention of getting into a street brawl, these arts have a lot of benefit in exercise and self-discipline.

Chess has a lot going for it, but on the coolness scale it doesn’t stack up very well compared to martial arts! First of all, look at our terminally boring terminology.

Martial arts student: “Yesterday at my Tiger Crane Kung Fu class, a Black Belt taught me the flying roundhouse kick!”

Chess student: “Yesterday at the chess club, a B-player taught me when to fianchetto in the English!”

The kung fu student is going to draw a crowd at work with his statement. It rings of centuries of tradition and mystique; it speaks of action and fury. The chess student is going to wind up sitting by himself at lunch,  because he doesn’t seem to be speaking an intelligible language.


Terms like French Defense and Four Knights Game just don’t boil the blood. True, there are a few cool names in chess -- Sicilian Dragon and King’s Indian Attack come to mind, and “gambit” would be catchy if anybody spoke Italian.

Overall, though, we’re due for a terminology overhaul. (I vote we borrow heavily from professional wrestling and start calling chess maneuvers “the pile driver” and “the nutcracker”).

But the problem runs deeper than mere words. After some thought, I realized that most of these chess terms refer simply to openings or very simple strategic elements. What martial arts have -- and what I think chess desperately needs to regain -- is style.

Kung Fu is a style of fighting. There used to be styles in chess: Classical, Romantic, Hypermodern. A “romantic” player could be counted on to charge recklessly for your king, tossing trivial concerns like material equality or positional considerations to the wind in pursuit of checkmate. Classicists like Staunton always went for central pawn control and open center lines for doubled rooks. Hypermoderns like Nimzovitsch were happy to let you set up your Classical center so they could blockade and dismantle it with their wing pawns and fianchettoed bishops.

Alas, today’s grandmasters are purely “pragmatists”. Certain players might lean a bit towards attacking chess (Kasparov) or strategic chess (Karpov), but they are happy to beat you however you allow. Thus top-level chess has no players with distinctive, cool styles to compare to Tiger Crane Kung Fu.

Are you a relentless attacker (“the Heat-Seeker”)? An opportunistic swindler (“Blackbeard”)? What would opponents call your style of play?

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