Zero Chance of Recovery by Andrew Schultz
This is very reminiscent of last year’s Walking Into It by the same author. Both pieces recreate a board game, and both pieces are less interested in winning that game than in exploring the space of possibilities it affords and tying this exploration to a narrative. Walking Into It dealt with tic-tac-toe. Zero Chance of Recovery deals with chess, or rather, with one particular end game study, the so-called Réti problem (named after Richard Réti, 1889-1929).
I must have seen the Réti problem before, but didn’t recall it. The idea is interesting. Black can trivially promote his pawn to queen and trivially stop the white pawn from queening. But black cannot trivially do both; and in fact, the point of the problem is that through perfect play, white can ensure that black cannot achieve both objectives. To do this, white must make ‘neutral’ moves that force black to commit to one or another path of action, and then white can react. Pretty neat.
I’m an okay-ish chess player myself. I used to play at a local club for about 15 years, from maybe 7 tot 22 years of age. I still enjoy the game, though I now rarely play it. (I am also kind of lazy as a chess player, in the sense that I never studied opening or end game theory at all thoroughly.) Given this background, Zero Chance of Recovery wasn’t hard for me to move through: I quickly found the paths through the position. Then I got stuck. Turns out that you need to really absorb the opening text in order to solve the ‘puzzle’; but I found the opening text confusing and clicked through it quickly. So that’s a point where the game and I failed to connect.
I had fun with the game for the short space of time it took me to play through it. It didn’t manage to rise to the same level as Walking Into It, which was just such a supremely nice picture of adult/child interaction, but perhaps that was a bit too much to expect.