Abstract
Gary Alan Fine is a grandmaster of the everyday leisure worlds that middle-class Americans inhabit. In careful case studies of fantasy role-playing games, Little League baseball, mushroom foraging, high-school debate, and self-taught art, he depicts such worlds as “tiny publics,” communities of elective affinity with their own internal dynamics, status structures, and shared landscapes of collective memory and meaning making. In Players and Pawns, he turns our attention to the hypercompetitive and storied world of chess—or more appropriately, worlds of chess played on black-and-white grids in elementary schools, at national tournaments, and in neighborhood parks and city plazas. Enjoyed in the United States and around the world in hotspots such as Russia and Eastern Europe, Cuba and Argentina, chess is a global game of intellectuals and introverts, street hustlers and nine-year-olds.
Like other domains of leisure, chess worlds are soft communities that welcome those committed to its rules of play and styles of interaction. This openness means a high tolerance for odd characters and eccentric behavior. The major exception to this inclusivity is women, who appear largely absent from these otherwise diverse environments—even though girls account for up to 40 percent of all elementary-school players. Fine points out the rampant sexism in male-dominated chess worlds: men often demean women as naturally and biologically unfit to successfully compete at chess and sometimes refer to checkmating an opponent as a kind of symbolic rape. In this matter chess may be as unwelcoming toward women as more normative men’s sports.
The comparison between chess and athletics does not end there. While we do not typically consider chess a physically taxing activity (hence its low status relative to other sports), Fine describes the stamina required to endure the exhaustion of tournament play, with its six-hour games of intense concentration and stress and high frequency of games over a short duration of time. (Some chess competitors even “carbo-load” in preparation for lengthy games, just like marathon runners.)
Moreover, just as in baseball or boxing, chess players and aficionados steep themselves in the game’s rich heritage and tradition, sharing a “sticky culture” composed of heroic icons (Bobby Fischer; Reuben Fine—no relation to the author), commemorated bouts (Adolf Andersen vs. Lionel Kieseritzky, 1851; Fischer vs. Donald Byrne, 1956), and a seemingly endless variety of classic openings and other moves with the most wondrous names—the King’s Gambit Declined, the Queen’s Pawn Game, the Caro-Kann, the Nimzowitsch Defense! A vast annotated literature of chess provides the scriptural source material for the followers of the game and its collective historical past. Players pore over texts such as Modern Chess Openings (1911), David Bronstein’s Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953, the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (1966), and Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games (1969), each contributing to a regenerative social dialogue among the members of a shared community. Like sociology itself, chess is a collaborative enterprise with its own canon, grand theorists, terminology, repeated experiments, and shared social rituals and practices.
While chess may be fun and games, it is nevertheless an accomplishment of social organization and creative labor. A student of the structural underpinnings of fun, Fine explores how competitive chess is temporally organized at every level of play, from macro to micro. In tournament play single chess games may be lengthened or shortened with rules that place limits on the duration of gameplay, enforced by the tyranny of double clocks that measure each player’s deliberation time between moves. With fixed temporal limits on games—for instance, “game/60” matches allow sixty minutes of clock-time per person, while bullet chess may give players just one or two minutes each—the decisions that tournament organizers make concerning playtime impact how many total games can be scheduled and how many people of varying competencies can be accommodated over so many days. Presumably, a four-day round-robin tournament requires more endurance and commitment from players than an afternoon match, just as bullet chess requires a level of skill that most novices lack. At the micro level, players experience chess matches viscerally according to the time pressures they exert, and therefore the quick tempos of sped-up games may prove more exhilarating (or anxiety-producing) than a more thoughtfully plotted two-hour contest.
Of course, the most recent social realignment of chess owes much to the rise of digital technology and its cultural consequences. With the introduction of computer chess and then Internet chess, more games are played today than ever before, although perhaps not face to face, or in real space and time (or “over-the-board,” in the words of one of Fine’s informants). Yet some friendships made through online play and extended via social media carry over into the more embodied world of tournament action, thus enlivening the sociability of otherwise introverted loners with challenged social skills.
Perhaps even more consequential has been the proliferation of online databases that archive millions of games, past and present. Increased instant access to this networked library can only further democratize the game, although for some members of the community it has transformed chess into a laborious pursuit that prioritizes memorizing and recalling the routine opening moves and defensive tactics of specific opponents, just as successful intercollegiate and professional football players must today prepare for matchups by watching endless video reels of their opponents. (Technological change has also led to accusations of cheating as competitors occasionally mobilize the assistance of advanced computer chess programs during gameplay.)
Ultimately, the immediate recording and uploading of games played by top chess champions forces them to devise endlessly innovative variations of well-honed moves, thus improving game quality for contenders and fans alike. And so it is with Players and Pawns—another terrific piece of ethnography by a King of his craft, one who continues to reveal to his readers the sociological underbelly of everyday life and leisure in fresh and surprising ways.