STONE KNIVES AND BEARSKINS – WHAT
DID CHESS PLAYERS
DO BEFORE COMPUTERS?
Many present-day chess players find it hard to imagine what our game
would have been like without computers. Speaking as someone who remembers those days, I can tell you that things were a lot tougher then.
I don't mean to sound like the stereotypical “old guy who used to walk
barefoot to school through three feet of snow uphill both ways”, but...
“Back in the day” if you wanted to play chess, you had to find someone
to play with. When I was a kid in the 1970's we didn't own a chess computer, so if I wanted to play a game I had to corral someone: my dad, a
friend, some kid at school. More often than not, there was no way to get
a game – none. Nobody wanted to play, or there was no one around, or
it was ten o'clock at night and my folks wouldn't let me leave the house.
So if you wanted to do something marginally chess-related, you'd most
likely just crack open a chess book and do some studying. You might
solve some tactics problems, or go over a particular endgame, or play
the moves of a certain opening. And then you'd go over it again. Then
again. And you'd hope that you'd be able to remember what you'd studied the next time you played a game. But there was no real way to practice your chess unless another person was available and wanted to play.
The closest I'd get to a game if no one was around was a book called Solitaire Chess, written by I.A. Horowitz. It was basically a “guess the next
move” book in which you'd go through a classic game, taking the side
of one of the players, and try to anticipate the opponent's next move.
Horowitz would award you points if you guessed correctly, the number
depending on how hard the next move was to figure out. It was fun, but
it could only take you so far. (More recently, Bruce Pandolfini revived this
same idea in his column in Chess Life magazine, paying appropriate tribute to Al Horowitz.)
I'm sometimes asked, “If studying and improving at chess was so hard
back then, how could Bobby Fischer become world chess champion
without a computer?” That's an excellent question, and I attribute his success to a variety of factors.
First of all, the great players of the pre-computer era frequently lived in
metropolitan areas which were regarded as major centers for the game
of chess. During the mid-1800's, London was considered a chess center,
and quite a few strong players (most notably Howard Staunton) lived in
or near London. A few decades later, a coterie of strong players (Brey-
25
chessking.com