balance

They say one needs balance in life. If you work with your head, you should play with your feet, for example. The works for me, but only to an extent. I play football most weeks, exhausting and exhilarating myself in equal measure. I don't think about work when I chase after a ball that seems to roll faster every time. I leave the post-game shower fresh and mentally ready to go, but all too often, the aging body weighs down my intellectual efforts for the rest of the afternoon.

At the other end of the spectrum of activities to counterbalance work is chess. There's no motion involved besides nervous rocking but like football, it manages to take my mind completely off work. It has a different place in my schedule, though. Football is squeezed into an hour at work, between a miniprep and gel electrophoresis or whatever fills the schedule on that particular day. Chess deserves its own day.

I play online some evenings – on the wonderful Schacharena server these days – but most of the time I'm too tired from work to pull off anything special over the board that would justify the time spent playing. You know where this is going already.

Every now and then, precisely six times since discovering this gem last summer, I hop on the tube and go up to Golders Green for the monthly rapidplay tournament. It takes the entire Saturday and I'm drained afterward – you wouldn't think this was the kind of thing to do to recover from a hard week at work – but I have great fun and that's what matters, isn't it?

Last Sunday, I walked up to Olympia, as I did the year before to play in the rapidplay tournament that's part of the London Chess Classic. I did much better than last time, winning the kind of games that I lost last year and swindling my way not only to a highly dubious draw when I had been losing for twenty moves already but also to a place in the final standings way beyond my most optimistic expectations. (This has less to do with improved abilities than with the pendulum of luck swinging both ways if you just wait long enough.)

The London Chess Classic itself is a grandmaster tournament with one drawn-out round per day, up to seven hours of tedium for the uninitiated but fireworks of creativity and skill and breathtaking action for those who know how to appreciate that kind of thing. It also looks to become a tournament for the history books.

Magnus Carlsen, the world's best player, is shooting for the highest strength rating ever achieved. By the way he's been playing so far, there's no doubt he'll get there. He's not where Bobby Fischer was at his best – winning all games in a tournament – but he's damn close. He's won all but one so far, an incredible performance against opponents who are all top players. The London Chess Classic are likely to confirm Carlsen as one of the best ever.

This week, the Financial Times ran a terrific profile on Magnus Carlsen, worth reading even if you're not interested in the game. One line in particular went a long way towards explaining top players: "Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it's just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check." The best of the best don't out-think their opponents. They out-imagine them.

Pieces of wisdom aside, I found the article most impressive for the joy it exudes. It becomes obvious that Carlsen doesn't play because he's the best and winning pays the bills. He plays because he has a blast on the board whenever he sits down. By that criterion, as ridiculous as it sounds, I'm just like him. Playing chess is fun. Unfortunately I'd need to work with my arms or legs to enjoy it more.