Chense Concepts Vol. 1
Some of my favorite things from playing and viewing chess
Originally published on Cohost.org, edited and reposted here June 6th, 2025
“CHENSE” is what I call the things I personally like most about chess―things which, crucially, I don't claim are particularly rigorous or real chess theory. It’s a silly word, because I tend to get quite metaphorically serious about chess stuff, and I feel a need to downplay it somewhat so as not to fall into the trap of thinking that I’m being really smart. This is not simply a self-conscious abasement; it’s an intentional specificity. I genuinely believe that playing around and having fun can cultivate truly nourishing insights and ways of living, ideas that may forever elude those who take only the pragmatic tact. Thus, chense. (“I’m smarter than chess grandmasters, actually.” ―me)
So, most of these are not so solid or broadly applicable chess concepts, and they don’t really amount to playing chess skillfully at a competitive level; or, at least, I personally have not been able to make them confirmably bear fruit. Of the ones that are real/existing chess concepts, most players below a high skill level will probably never encounter them in their own games. They’re just interesting bits of strategic and tactical thought that pop up when one engages with chess spectatorship, analysis, and appreciation. This is an elaborate way of saying that the things I like most about chess are vibes-based, dramatic, or romantic (to use the chess word) in ways that often hinge on personal interpretation.
When I talk about chense, I’m trying to talk about playing the thing in a living, open-ended, mysterious kind of way, continuing to find out how it best moves with us and lives with us. I’m talking, maybe, about playing a different game (see PLIV below).
TGOL - Troubleshooting Goliath in Hell
Sometimes you’re down just slightly or facing a stronger opponent, you’re locked up in an intractable problem, and you know you might still have a chance, but one misstep could mean ruin. Or maybe a series of near-missteps brings a slower, dreading sort of failure. You know it’s coming, but you have to persist, because that’s what you’re here to do, and you might learn something from it. This basically never ends, as a chess player, and it’s also something we’re all doing as a collective human people trying to survive and fix and not implode the world. Keep rolling that boulder up that hill.
I don’t really want to be doing this, actually; like, on a spiritual level it’s one of the main things I have struggled to find peace with constantly, very consciously, perhaps too consciously, for now most of my adult life, so it’s both a strange and obvious choice of game to be playing.
Growing Tree Thing
A good way to think about developing your position is to slowly, almost passively (deceptively, perhaps) inhabit the board in a living, harmonious way. Irina Krush once said in some Chess Video Content that she sees the goal of chess as developing harmony among your pieces. I liked this a lot. It stands notably in contrast to the more popular and immediately intuitive concept of chess as a game about denial of your opponent’s agency. Granted, if you are indeed building harmony, it still has to be in consideration, and thus opposition, of your opponent’s equivalent and contrary intentions―so the conflict of wills remains functionally the same on the board. But it says something about your internal characterization of what you’re here to do, how you feel about it, what it’s doing for you.
Chess as it has developed into a symbol of rationality and uncompromising, Machiavellian intellectualism is unfortunately a thing that you can easily imagine “rationalist” type logic guys upholding. You hear this kind of sentiment a lot in chess talk. The rigid grid and the rules of the pieces have a sort of cold determinism about them, and only one can survive. But if these anti-feelings guys are not consciously in tune with their chess feelings, these undercurrents of their highly combative feelings of merciless logic, they may find themselves victims of their own stories. It’s one of Jonathan Rowson’s “Seven Deadly Sins of Chess,” to narrate and characterize what’s happening on the board even and especially when you’re winning. This becomes a kind of fiction, and leads to mistakes. The stress alone of reinforcing that kind of perspective through something you’ve dedicated your life to has famously led to many of the greatest chess players of all time into destroying their own lives for chess, becoming generally unpleasant people or adherents of bizarre and ridiculous ideas about the world. What are you doing here, guys? You want to play with chess pieces or be played by chess pieces? Be like tree.
Sandcastle Moment
Playing chess like you are building a perfect, beautiful, frozen thing is not a strategically sound way to go about it, but it is really satisfying to watch a game in which someone’s harmonious position, meticulously crafted, has overlooked one critical point of failure where it all comes apart after a trickle of moving water finds its way in. It sort of scratches the jenga-blocks itch, the dark impulse to knock a support out from under something decrepit and see what happens, to see it rejoin with entropy. If this is repulsive to you, I understand completely. Again, inside of you there are two wolves or whatever. The real thing, for me, is not about order vs. chaos but about the preference for seeking a harmony with change, one not so fragile as a castle.
*Colloquial misuse of the word entropy, I know, physicists log off.
“Knife Fight” unskilled endings
This is what I think of when my opponent and I have haplessly traded our way down into a roughly equal ending with few pieces left on the board and a lot of empty space to jab at each other. Maybe it should be a draw, maybe we’re not good enough to know that, or maybe we’re mad. Probably one of us will mess up. I don’t have anything really smart to say about it, but especially when you’re both low on time, it becomes a totally different kind of game in contrast to sitting there overthinking things.
Clown’s Gambit
I’m not totally sure what I meant by this one. I jotted these down all in one sitting a few weeks ago. Let me try to figure it out. I added here the words “Kind of like ’gasp’ and look up, miming danger―but is it real?”
This move will never be a real brilliancy, and that’s the whole point. Sometimes you recognize that you have no good options available to you, but it’s possible to play a move that looks foreboding, important, if your opponent doesn’t have time to think about it. They might second guess, assuming you’ve calculated something they’re not seeing. This is a real suspicion I’ve heard in review during/after GM games. When you do it at a wood-pusher level, there’s obviously not going to be anything genius going on, and you might be objectively making a huge mistake, but the effect is pretty much the same.
“Sending in the clowns”
idk what this is, why did I write this? I’m leaving it here in case it jogs my memory later. (Update: It hasn’t.)
ATTD - “They’re not really going to do that, are they?” (And Then They Do)
I have no firsthand experience with this; it’s only something I have seen in live analysis of games, but I have seen it at least a few times. This is where some very exciting things can happen.
Analysis of chess games (even with the now ubiquitous computer-assist) consists of hours of 2‒7 monomaniacs sitting around talking about the game exhaustively in all the possible ways it could go. But sometimes a line that has been utterly discounted seems improbably to be about to appear, and its execution reveals something nobody previously considered. The effect from there can take on any kind of character, obviously, depending on the game, but the general feeling here in the moment of the move is always, to me, as if we were all noses-to-the-board, and we looked up at a strange sound, and one player is suddenly holding a lit firecracker. Like, we knew you could do that, but nobody thought you would actually do it, and now anything is possible.
PLIV - Playing a different game / “Planet Ivanchuk”
When one player’s position is increasingly proving superior and repeatedly reveals new, unforeseen and advantageous complications, you’ll commonly hear someone say that they’re “not playing the same game” or something like that―the idea being that we think we’re playing chess against this person, but they’re actually playing something even more sophisticated.
There is a fun variation on this centered around the legendary Vasyl Ivanchuk, who is known for idiosyncratic and creative, surprising choices which can take games in strange directions, frequently leading him to a win. People will say that he’s “on planet Chucky” with regards to the unique choices he makes in a game. And yet, he also has an incredible memory for seemingly all opening theory, enabling him to play everything solidly from the start and then get weird with it. So, I think it’s not really the full picture to say that he’s on Planet Chucky. I think the real thing is that when you play him, YOU are on Planet Chucky too! He is Chuckyforming your planet. Sometimes, it seems that he just decides what game you are playing. The rules are the same, but somehow everything has changed. And he’s not even trying too hard about it. He’s just like that.
Ivanchuk was once considered to be potentially on a path to one day become World Champion. Some people say it could still happen. He is just that good; many have said he plays like a world champion, and he often baffles them. However, his style of play, his blessing and his curse, is just so off-the-beaten-path and apparently not aligned with the hyper-efficient, engine-powered, weapon-like mode of 21st century chess and chess training, it’s probably much too late.
But Planet Ivanchuk is forever.
Honor Fools & Cheating-Paranoia Culture
There’s this type of guy I’ve had to interact with a bunch in my crud job that I call (not to their face) the “honor fool.” I’m not sure I can succinctly articulate what this is, but I’ll try: The honor fool is, first, someone who enters into a process with poise and patience but also an expectation that everything be done to the utmost standards, that everyone else involved bring their most ideal selves and behave with honor to meet the example of the stately bearing that this person believes they themselves bring to the table. This posture later proves itself to be self-serving, defensive, and perhaps manipulative, but often crumbles in a kind of humiliated frustration when things don’t go well, nothing can be done about it, and the misapplication of their sense of honor fails to force things into alignment with their desires. Essentially, this person believes that these expectations are meritorious by merit of demonstrating passionately their want of good things for all, that if they demonstrate good taste about people and the world, they are then a good person and a leader in guiding others to be good. Or, perhaps what they believe is that it’s good of them to demand these things undemandingly? To be solemn about it instead of scolding? Whatever it is they believe, they are, of course, often disappointed. This is because of: World. When that inevitably happens, their supposed zen state totally fails them, they tsk and shake their head and lament that the situation has not gone ideally, and that it is so hard in this day and age to find honesty, and woe are they, and they sort of spirituo-histrionically die on that hill. It so grieves them that they can’t let it go, it becomes their personality, and they become all about this grievance, how wrong it is that they are trapped in this dishonorable world.
The point, in the end, is that this sense of honorable superiority leads them to behave actually quite dishonorably! Where it would have been much more normal and noble to be like “Okay” and find some other way to continue living with others in an imperfect world.
What does this have to do with chess? Well, it has to do with cheating. In our current age, when you’re playing chess online, there’s always an easy possibility that your opponent is separately using a chess computer to find the best moves, in which case you have no chance of winning. The biggest websites where chess is played online have integrated tools and a review process in place to help try and identify games where cheating probably happened, but they’re not perfect, and the cheating still has to happen before it can be identified, which can be very frustrating for players.
The not-so-bad part of all this is that most people don’t cheat at chess, and even when someone cheated against you and won, you still played chess. You may have even learned something. But, number go down!!!
There is currently a Whole Thing about cheating in chess. The popularity of online chess and the easy availability of chess engines on handheld devices have led to a trend (anecdotally, just by my observation) of endless discussion of cheating even at a very low levels; you’ll see it discussed in reddit threads: “I bet this player cheated against me. Look at this computer-ass move.” Sure, or maybe there are millions of games played online every day and you got one where a beginner-level opponent picked a weird, lucky move. It’s only worth talking about if you’ve already decided the half-imagined thing is true, but in truth you’ll never know. Just play chess or log off and eat bread. If you don’t chill out about it, you’ll do yourself wronger than the thing that wronged you.
I’ve written about this previously in relation to major chess cheating “scandals” (conjecture) and their truly abysmal-in-quality, sensationalist, shameful, wrong-headed, and tiresome journalistic coverage. I later deleted what I had written, because it’s sort of impossible to say anything about it without feeding into it. It’s really stupid. You simply cannot obsess over the dishonour of it all in a self-respecting way.
The only ways out of this problem are to A) just play chess, or B) don’t play chess. The simplicity of that says, I think, a lot.
Plachutta
HEY let’s talk about actual chess for a second. It’s Plachutta! It’s very cool. From wikipedia: “The Plachutta is a device found in chess problems wherein a piece is sacrificially positioned in blockade to deny coverage of multiple distant squares required by the opposition … in such a way that, even if captured, the previous defensive situation cannot be restored.” Here is an agadmator video on the subject with a representative game.
You hear a lot about zugzwang because it’s a kooky sounding German word and a neat concept, but what’s sad to me about the factoid it has become is that the game would be better, I think, or at least would be more interesting in zugzwang’s particular domain, if you could actually just pass. That’s probably not a popular opinion, but I think it’s true that Plachutta is a similar and leveled-up sort of conundrum of impasse in microcosm, but with probably more active participation in its inception. It’s very much throwing a wrench in the works. You might be noticing a trend in these concepts; this is a pro-sabotage account.
Muddying the waters, Deep Dark Forests and “Dark Ocean”
In a 2023 World Championship post-game press conference, Ding Liren was asked what he thought of a certain line he’d opted not to take. He explained that he’d calculated a bit and found that:
“It was some dark ocean kind of position, so I didn’t go further into it.”
This is a fairly normal observation that he chose to phrase in the coolest possible way. Maybe it’s a common expression I’m just not familiar with. Either way, it’s evocative.
It’s a nice pairing to Mikhail Tal’s famously grandiose saying:
“You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”
They are both invoking something about unknowing and navigation. With Ding’s dark ocean, he is seeing a glimpse of something unknowable and decides, with respect to the unknown, to stay in safer waters. With Tal’s dark forest, he is venturing into the unknown, making friends with it, just enough to use its spooky shadows to skew things in his favor―but he nevertheless clings to the path of the known in order to safely find his way back out.
These kinds of deep insights and magician’s tricks are certainly not within reach of most chess players in any given game, but even at a low level of play (assuming a roughly equivalent match), one can try to “muddy the waters” in a difficult situation and complicate things for one’s adversary, in a similar vein with the Clown’s Gambit. It’s a more dispersed and vaguer form of throwing a wrench. Maybe it will backfire. Maybe it will be fun.
That’s all for now. Apologies for the odd reference to FIDE-orchestrated events. FIDE stinks, but chess is not FIDE. Chess is not even chess.