Monday, January 18, 2010

How real life doesn't imitate chess

Here's a chess quote that surely deserves to be better known, on the subject of how real life doesn't imitate our fantastical game. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 3rd edition, page 98, if you must know) put it like this:
the problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net.
And to those like Kasparov who argue that in fact life does imitate chess, all I can say in reply is - game, set, and checkmate.

3 comments:

Mark Weeks said...

Kasparov's book gets one of my nominations for 'Bad Chess Book Titles'. - Mark

an ordinary chessplayer said...

Perhaps for the 4th edition it will be updated to "moving one's knight to c3".

Tom Chivers said...

Alas, I think the updating policy in this case is to add but not edit.