The Game of Chess in God's World

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The Game of Chess in God's World

August 24, 2022

Noah and I discuss the game of Chess and the parallels inherent within to the Christian worldview. We know this may not interest all, however we had a ton of fun filming it! If anyone is wondering I lost on time to Noah after this podcast (however I knight forked his queen and he was well on his way to losing mind you). Thanks for listening!

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Transcript

But yeah, so this is the beauty of chess. It plays on God's world. It's a game based on God's world.

Based in God's world. Something we haven't talked about yet, I guess as we wrap up, the queen sacrifice. That idea.

So we talked about always trying to keep everything safe and do even trades and try to get them on top. But there's a moment where these beautiful moves can happen. Where it is more advantageous to sacrifice your most precious peace.

Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do. Jesus Christ is Lord of your life.

Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life because God has given him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

[Music] Hello, welcome to the For The King podcast where we proclaim the edicts of the king, namely, chiefly, and ultimately that Yahweh reigns. Amen. Can you amen that? That's a big amen.

Thank you. So I'm joined again with Noah. This guy just keeps sticking around.

And we just got done just bawling hard. So we're dehydrated, sweaty. Noah beat me.

I beat Noah. It was a nice time out there playing. We had a good time.

But that's not what we're here to talk about today, is it? Also, we're sipping on some milk, by the way. Raw, unfiltered, unpasteurized, soul, milk. High in protein.

I'm a mammal, dude. I like milk. I can't stop drinking that.

I know. You said it down. He just picked it right back.

Here, let me get a sip. Dude, I didn't even do, like when I went, I didn't mean to. It's a natural response.

I didn't mean to. It just happened. It came out of me.

It slipped out. I don't get how people don't drink milk. If anybody that's listening to this hasn't dranken, drunken, whatever the word might be, if you haven't drunked, if you haven't drunk raw milk, get yourself a glass of pet raw milk.

Most states you have to buy this pet milk, but buy it and drink it. And then right after you drink that, get a glass of pasteurized milk, drink it, you might spit it out. The taste is actually that different.

It's insane. It's also ridiculous that raw milk is illegal. It's not even used in Indiana and in a lot of other states.

Why don't we pasteurize like mother milk when mother's breast milk and why don't we add raw breast milk? Women are mammals with bacteria and they can make that milk all sickly, can't they? You're going to make the baby sick. You're going to make the baby sick. We need pasteurized breast milk.

It actually does blow my mind. It's crazy. But that is besides the point.

That is adjacent to the point we're trying to make. What we're actually here to talk to everybody about today, we're going to do a little lighthearted discussion. We're not going to go deep into some political issue or some theological topic.

We're going to just talk about chess, the game of chess. Noah and I play chess on the reg. We're always playing each other, which is cool.

It's a great way to stay in touch. It's a great game, beautiful game. Noah is a lot better than I am.

I can get him every once in a while. I feel like I'm getting better, but usually Noah will win about 10 games and I'll win one. That's usually how it goes.

That might have changed more recently. That's exaggerated. Anyways, we really like the game of chess.

Noah, do you have any initial thoughts about the game? Because obviously you were playing before I was. Why do you enjoy it? Well, I've been playing on and off since early grade school, but I didn't start taking it seriously up until about a year or two ago. But now that I'm getting into it, I really like it.

First of all, the community aspect of it, I like. Yes, the community is great. Meeting different people.

It's like, "Oh, hey, you play this game too." It's such an old game. So many different people play it. Then I also like how old it is.

I think that speaks to how good of a game it really is. Exactly. It's lasted for so long, it must be a good game.

Otherwise, it wouldn't have lasted for so long, it wouldn't be such a huge game around the world. There's a world chess championship that a ton of people will keep up with. I like the community aspect of it.

I like playing my brothers and we can build camaraderie over this game. We can practice strategy. That's a big thing.

Big theme in chess, obviously. I like how fair the game is. It's no luck.

You get a slight, ever so slight advantage when you play white. But besides that, it is virtually who is the better tactician. The only advantage is first move for white.

Even then, it's like you're up. When the AI evaluates the game, you're only up like 0.4 or 0.2 or 0.3, just by playing white. Whatever that means.

I think you have the initiative to start out. Besides that, you're right. It is the most fair game.

There's a lot of games we play that are based on luck, per se. In God's universe, there's no such thing as luck. There's providence.

There is a sense in which there's probabilities. You can play a game that the probabilities are unknown to you, but obviously God knows how the die are going to roll every time you play a game with dice or cards or things like that. The game of chess is explicitly strategy in the mind of a human.

It is beautiful. It's a beautiful game. I agree.

It is. In terms of the community, it is internationally played. Every culture recognizes it as an admirable game to play.

It's an honorable game. Yes, very formal. There's a lot of manners that go along with it.

Respect. You shake hands. Even in international tournaments, you shake your hands to offer a draw.

You offer things off a draw. It would just be like actually going on a battlefield and acting honorably against your opponent, even though your goal is to kill them in battle, but still have an honor and war. There's chivalrous and something in the game.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I think most men ought to be able to play chess just because if you can get good at chess, it's going to dramatically shift how you think about competition.

There's so much to learn from it. I still feel like I have such a base level knowledge. Think about some of these moves like forks, pins, a skewer.

These different ideas of how or like a forcing move, danger levels, all these different ideas in chess, they do transfer really well into real life. For instance, danger levels. If somebody is going to threaten you or try to ... I don't know, let's just take it into the business world.

Somebody's trying to win over on a promotion for you. They're doing the X and YZ task. When you think about danger levels, you might try to do something even more important than take on more responsibility to win that exchange.

All these pins, things like that, these are just making somebody a mobile, doing something to force your opponent to do something. You have to balance the pros and cons of every decision that you make. Exactly, yes.

If your opponent is threatening something, you can either use a defensive tactic to deal with whatever he's trying to do for his efforts to defeat you or you can just make an attack and force your opponent to respond to you instead of you responding to him. You can see that play out in a lot of different areas of competition. Yes.

Yes, definitely in business. Why do you think it's stuck around so long? All the things we've been saying so far, but if you had to pick out one specific thing. All these are factors on why it's stuck around, but what do you think is the most important lesson learned from the Nino Chess? Or maybe just into your experience.

That's a tough question. It's really simple. I think that's a big part of it.

Anybody can grasp the game. I know that there are still new games being played to this day. There's so much variation in the game that even at tournaments, you'll be playing and somebody will do a bunch of book moves and an opening and then all of a sudden somebody pushes a pawn that's never been pushed before.

There's no recorded game. Maybe it's in someone's basement someone's played it, but as far as what's known in the game of chess, this is a brand new game. We don't know what's the strongest move next.

The engine can figure it out. It's true. There's a lot of variation.

It's infinite. I think there's an infinite amount of games you could play in terms of it being a new game with the orientation of the pieces, which makes it a unique game. That's true.

Every time you play it, it's going to be a different game from what you played before. That's really cool. I like the lesson of you addressing... If you're playing chess and somebody's doing something to you, you're figuring out how to get yourself out of a tough situation.

There's strategy in attacking, but also I like the defense in the game because I think I play best in chess. I don't know what you think this would play a lot. I think I play best when I'm attacking.

I agree. When I'm playing on defense, the opponent has a better position and is controlling more spaces, I play a lot worse. I don't know if there's just something inherent in the way I think that I'm much worse on defense.

I'm an offensive kind of chess player. I don't really know how that translates into my psyche, I guess, the way my mind works. I don't know what you think about that, but the defense thing is a good lesson to be learned there of really analyzing your opponent.

What are they trying to do to me? When you're attacking or playing defense, you have to be aware of what your opponent's doing, but they are completely different mindsets that you need to have. When you're playing defensively, you're focusing more on what are your potential weaknesses that your opponent can exploit. It's just a matter of trying to cover those and basically just build up a fortress and then eventually the one who's attacking with a surround of resources.

That's the answer of putting together an attack is if you don't have enough resources to complete it, you're going to end up in a worse position at the end of it. You'll be overextended or blunder. I think that's one of my biggest ... When I initially started chess, it's just interesting.

I was playing my buddy, Palmer, last week. We were playing chess and I destroyed him. I wiped the floor with him.

It was funny because he's like, "Oh, I didn't see that." He did out the gate. Everybody always does this. They get their queen out the gate.

The queen's so powerful, they have so many options with the queen. They say, "Well, look, I'm safe here. Let me go there." Then an experienced chess player knows you don't want to bring your queen out that early.

You don't want her to be supported. You don't want her to go by herself. You use her to be the dagger, the spearhead of an attack.

Yeah. She's extremely powerful. Exactly.

Palmer took his queen out, overextended, and then I punished him bad. I think I've got a fork. I got a check fork on his queen and won the queen.

Yeah, which feels really good. Again, it's lessons to be learned there in your own life, like what you're saying. Gather your resources and if you're going to make an attack ... Palmer wanted to make his attack with the queen, I punished him big time.

That's a good lesson for all of you. For Christian men, as a Christian, what's that proverb, "Build your garden," or sorry, "Plan a garden before you build your house." Remember that one? Prepare for what you're going to do. Christ says, "Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back is worthy of the kingdom." That's perfect.

There's that basic biblical principle of wisdom where if you don't have the resources to complete it, if you haven't thought through it to the point where you know that you actually can't complete it, then I mean ... What good is a half-built house? That's foolishness. Yeah, a half-built house, like a full-built house is a blessing. A half-built house is a burden because you've already put so much into it and it's not providing you anything that you intended out of it.

Same thing with the attack and chess. I put my queen, my knight, and a bishop in a coordinated attack and I actually just got my queen stolen. Now I'm basically ruined.

You have all these pieces of involvement attacked, but then your opponent has four pieces attacking your king and you have nothing to do now and you can't get your pieces back to help out. You probably lose. What do you think in terms of lessons to learn about king safety? That's a big word tossed around in chess.

You can develop a lot of pieces really quickly in chess, but if you don't have king safety, you can be punished very quickly because they can get a chess when a piece gets your back rank, win the rook because you never ... They can win both rooks. Say you have an empty back rank and they take a pawn on B7 or something and then they take your rook on A8 and then they check you and then run across the whole board with the queen and take the other rook. That's happened before to somebody.

You've seen that happen before to a newer person in chess. It's king safety so important. Maybe there's a good lesson to be learned in terms of ... Maybe here's the word.

Rankings of priorities. For instance, you care like self-government, family government, church government, civil government. There's rankings and hierarchies of what the king's for, what the queen's for.

There's a ranking of a man ought to care for his family first before he tries to care for his friend. You have to account for your family, account for yourself before you try to do anything external. Take care of your king first before you try to go on an attack or develop your resources.

Sure. If you put too much priority on one, on the wrong piece, you're going to end up the worst for it. Yeah.

Hey, yeah. That's a good point. If you put too much priority on keeping your queen safe and you forget about your king, you're ruined.

I think just with how the game of chess is set up, the king is the most important piece. You have to understand when you're playing that you have to keep the objective of the game in your mind the whole time. You want to capture the opponent's king.

Yes. You want to capture all the other pieces on the board, but if you're unable to get a checkmate, it's... Yeah. You get a stalemate, then you win it, you lose on a draw.

Yeah. You can stalemate so easy. Yeah.

Now it's just vanity. Yeah. It was vanity.

All the hard work you did. Right. All the toil.

Yeah. Sorry, continue on your point. But yes, it would be vanity.

There is wisdom and prioritizing correctly. In the game of chess, that's the king, but then you can expand that to other areas of your life where you ought to prioritize Christ above all things. Yes, exactly.

The king, literally. The king of Jesus. That's such an easy one.

Man, there have to be so many others. It's a basic principle of right prioritization. Exactly.

Yeah. Well, again, it's like, why is... I've talked about art on this podcast. I've talked about story and literature.

I've talked about Bryce and I are going through the gospel scope and the hard sciences and the soft sciences. What do all of these things have in common? If anything we do in life is going to work, if the game of chess is going to be a useful, fun game, then it has to be embedded in reality. It's quite important to the rules.

Yeah, there's got to be rules that are like God's rules because a game that doesn't correspond to reality isn't fun. So chess has... Well, I don't know. Maybe I should walk that state of the bat because there's fiction games.

There's fiction novels. I guess, but even in the midst of the fiction, they're still abiding by the laws of gravity or something. You're going to make a story where people are using language and actually communicating.

You're not going to make a story where nobody communicates, then it's not a story. So there's still going to be things built into it that are real and true. So I guess maybe that's my point.

It's just chess has embedded in it all these principles that are in the proverbs and God's word, prioritization of pieces, strategy, danger levels, all that kind of stuff. And we can learn. That's why the game is good, I guess is the point.

It's an amazing game. And just like any other game, there's a community that's literally built around the game itself. And I guess I talked about that a little bit earlier.

I mean, another game you and I have played League of Legends. Oh, yeah. The community was just awful.

Yeah. People talking to each other would say like kill yourself. Yeah.

Be like, that's so vulgar. Although Xbox Live back in the day, it was probably pretty comparable. Yeah.

Okay. Well, that's a good, the proverb where you put fools with fools and you'll get more folly or whatever. I forget what the Trump actually says, but it seems like with the nature of the game of chess, it seems to cultivate a better community because that's a great point.

That is a great point. Like chess, the fool won't enjoy chess because they're not good at it. They're not able to play by the rules.

They hate it, right? They're not willing to learn, but the people that get really good at chess are usually very smart, intellectual, respectable people. That are very good. So that's interesting.

It's like, what does that say about certain video games, the kind of community that cultivates like League of Legends is, yeah, there's a lot of strategy involved with League of Legends, but it also, for whatever reason, has cultivated a community that's extremely toxic. But chess is very respectful and people are very nice. The grandmasters are always very smart, well-rounded people.

Everybody wants everybody else to play better chess. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, good point.

There's something to be said there by anything in life. If it attracts the wrong crowd, then it's probably built on shaky foundations. Oh yeah.

In the first place. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the kingdom of God will, it'll draw repentance centers into it.

Exactly. You know, the humanist culture will draw and the socialist culture will draw extremely selfish people. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It says a lot about the foundation of ideology, if anything.

Exactly. Yeah. It is like chess is a language in a way that anybody can speak.

You can have people that don't even speak the same language playing that game and interacting with one another and sitting across the table from one another. It really is a very classy pastime. It's a very fun, it's an enjoyable, classy pastime.

Sitting across from another person and just the battle of the wits. It's great. Yeah.

Do you have a favorite chess player? Favorite chess player. Do you watch like Agameter and stuff? Agameter? Agameter or whatever. Is that a grandmaster? He's not a grandmaster.

He just reviews chess games on YouTube. It's like Agameter or something like that. I've seen a couple of guys like that.

Yeah. I just watched a lot of games on this channel. I didn't know if you had watched him.

I've watched some of Eric Rosen. Yeah. I like, he's very good.

He's just an I am though, right? Yeah. Hikaru Nakamura. Yeah.

He's very good. I really like how, so he's a Twitch streamer. Yeah.

So that's how it gets the majority of his revenue. But I think the way he goes about it is really smart. I mean, not only is he very good, but he's leveraging his skill to build this.

I mean, once he's building the community of chess around people watching him play. Yeah. But I think, yeah, it's just, he talks about how, or he has said the thing he enjoys most about life is streaming.

I mean, I'm trying to figure out how to say he, man, now I'm losing my train of thought. Well, what I've noticed about him, he really was kind of the trailblazer for streaming and building the community of chess online. He was a trailblazer for it.

He really got popular. I remember over COVID when he really, when he really shot, I remember when he hit a million subscribers. Like I was watching him back then.

I remember when he really first started coming around and he, again, he's an amazing chess player. He's a grandmaster. He's an American grandmaster.

The only probably American player that's better than him is Fabiano, Caruana, or whatever his name is. But I, Carcaro was great, but he, he really did kind of set the pace for people streaming online. And then you get guys like Eric Rosen, Gotham chess, you know, they're getting really popular now and it really was like, they say it was my car.

So he does like, yeah, he loves the community. When you watch his stream, he really engages with people and he enjoys it. And it just like anything in life we're made, we're made in the image of God.

We're made for community. God is triune. He's made us for community.

We mimic him in the sense of community, you know, community. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I really like, there was a chess player. I don't know how old he is, but his last name was Murphy.

He was a very, very good player. American. I don't know if he was American.

The picture, they always show him as black and white, but his, his games are super cool to watch. He was a very interesting player. And then, what's the Americans? It was the Americans in the seventies that took down Kasparov, Bobby Fisher.

Bobby Fisher's games are really fun to watch. He was, he was a very creative player. Everyone says like he wasn't like, obviously he was a grand match or sorry, a world champion.

So he was amazing in chess, but in terms of all the world champions, he was like one of the most creative and then Gary Kasparov was super creative. Yeah. Everybody knows about Gary.

Oh, Gary. Oh, Gary. Watching his games.

I mean, yeah, he was, I think he, he held the world champion, like the longest train. I'm not sure. For very long.

He had a very long run of holding his title. And then right now, it's Magnus. Magnus is very good Norwegian fellow.

Oh, Maggie. Yeah. So do you have a favorite player? Yeah.

I know you said you like Nakamura. Nakamura. Yeah.

I mean, no, not really. Eric Rosen's really entertaining and he teaches well. Yeah.

There's nobody in particular that I really just enjoy watching. But there aren't that many people who I have watched. Yeah.

So that's more fun just to play. I guess I was just thinking like when I'm learning, I usually do Gotham chess or I was watching a lot of Eric Rosen for a while there. But it's, I guess one other thing we haven't mentioned about chess, how much memorization there is.

So it's not all about patterns. Yeah. Yeah.

It's memorizing patterns, checking, checking nets, things like that. Yeah. And there are some more.

Doing some of the lessons on chess. There are some interesting tactics that you can use in end game scenarios where it's like you have a pawn in a rook and your opponent just has a rook. And there's like this really basic thing you can do where it's like you move your rope to the six thrain, can hassle the sixth thrain for some specific reason.

So it's like, I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's just kind of interesting that over the years people just figured out these little tactics that you can do in these situations. Like if you, I could guarantee you win if you know them otherwise. Yeah.

It's going to be really difficult to find. Yeah. No, that's true.

But then there are a lot of patterns that you just figure on your own just by playing a lot. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, to improve your chess game, you do have to learn openings. I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of one of the most basic things to really help you set up at the beginning. I want to say you have to learn openings.

It's useful in that if you know an opening and you can play into it consistently, it'll get you through to the mid game and then you're going to start learning the mid game a lot. But I think if you just memorize openings, you're going to miss out on a lot of things that you can learn. I guess that's true.

Like the situational stuff. Yeah. Like you just, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. We just had a game recently, remember where I like to play the London system and you, because you know, I do that, you had learned to push that rook pawn. Remember that? And so Noah, I moved my bishop out, my light square bishop.

No, I'm sorry, my dark square bishop. And when I get that out, Noah pushed his rook pawn. So he would trap my bishop because when you develop in the London system, you don't try to move that bishop back.

Your only option is to move it towards your side pawn structure there. So Noah ended up trapping my bishop and winning a bishop for two pawns. So he was up material.

Yeah, it was right off the beginning. Right off the bat. So now I learned in the future, if he pushes that rook pawn to attempt to trap my bishop, then I should respond differently, you know? So he punished me for that.

It's good. Probably won't get away with that again. That by me now I know.

So it is learning patterns and repetition and even learning an opening, if you just learn one and you try to stick with it, well, then your opponent can learn the opening that destroys that opening, you know? So you have to be good at chess. You have to play a lot. Yeah, so that's kind of, I mean, I wouldn't call it downfall.

I mean, it's just like, just like with any game, there are unique things about it. And it's not unique to chess. You have to play a lot to be good.

But the more you do play, the more of a foundation of knowledge you have to play. So it's like how maybe like how computer AI will make decisions based on a ton of data that it has. So the more games you play, the more experience you have, yes, generally the better decisions you'll make in the future.

So I mean, that's why GMs who have been playing since they've been six years old and younger, whenever they first learn how to play, Rocky and I have no chance of ever being able to compete with them. No, but we can't compete with each other. That's the fun of chess.

Right. Oh, yeah, you go. I thought you were gonna go.

I got something. Oh, you do? You got something? Well, I was just gonna I was gonna circle back to something you said at the beginning of our whole conversation that men should be playing chess. It's good for men to play chess.

Why is it better for men to play chess than to sit and watch TV and snack or to play a video game or to, you know, obviously, there you gotta be balanced. It's not like you're just saying just play chess, never read books, never read your Bible. You're not saying that.

But so what are you saying? What is like, what do a lot of men opt for sometimes that they would actually be benefited more by just like maybe sitting down and playing a game chess? Sure. Yeah, video games would be a big one. I mean, instead of this interest, you're playing against somebody who they're gonna make decisions that you can't predict.

So there are a lot of benefits to that kind of competition where if you're playing a video game, maybe you're fighting a monster that you fought before and know exactly what it's gonna do. And you just do the same basic tactics and you just roll out of the way it's of its attack. Whatever in chess.

Yeah, it's like, like we said, no two games are similar. So you're going to be forced to think differently every single time you play. And you're actively having to think and make decisions and moves instead of just running around in a video game doing endless repetition.

Exactly. Leveling up. Yeah, this is grinding away.

Well, you know, World of Warcraft, have you ever played that or seen it? Never played it. So I used to play it. You get to a point where you max out and level.

And what you do is you try and get the best items in the game kind of thing. So you do these things called raids where you go into a dungeon, I guess, or whatever, or a place and you fight really big monsters, and then you get to a final boss and people will run through those raids over and over and over again because the final boss has a point 001% chance of dropping this very rare item to get that item. So those kind of games, it gets to a point where it tugged at the heart string of mandibles that you want to explore.

Like that's what RPGs do. Yeah. MMO are massive multiplayer online.

Those role-playing games. It tugs on the heart of man to fight, to explore, to conquer, and level up and gain. But then it gets to a point where it does become vanity.

It becomes like you are, you're not learning anything where you're just doing the same thing. And then chess is this never-ending learning curve, which is what's beautiful about it. So I don't know how much is interacting with what you're saying, but there are so many games like that that become mindless and numbing and a waste of time.

And I would say even a majority of video games are a waste of time. Some of them can, like League of Legends, did really play on a lot of the same things. Chess plays on strategy, knowing your opponent.

But then working with a team, teamwork was a little different. But the problem with League is these extremely long games of repetitively doing the same thing in each game. So, and then the toxic community.

So it was more of a time drain. You could sit down and play a 10-minute game of chess and really stimulate your mind when you might get the same stimulation of your mind after three or four hours of League. It takes a lot longer.

Because think about it, you just sit there and farm minions until a team fight. A team fight is kind of like chess the whole time. Like a team fight's the only extremely strategic heavy, like there's strategy throughout the whole game of League.

But when you get to the team fights, when you gotta be very, very careful, if you make a mistake, you can lose the game. Chess is like that the whole time. You have to be on your game the whole time.

Right. If you make one blunder, you could lose the game. Yeah, exactly.

So I guess that's kind of my point. A lot of video games don't really pick up on that very well. Which is why chess is awesome.

Another thing. Should we go to the point? Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe less, then. Yeah, we can kind of wrap up here. That sounds good.

I just want to talk about the beauty of the game of chess. So I've watched some professional players, professional games, when they have professional commentators. And they're pretty interesting to listen to.

But they talk about how it's like a really sharp point in the game where one move can really decide the outcome. And maybe somebody just finds this incredible, what they call beautiful move. Maybe it's a move.

And behind this move, there's an idea of some kind of attack that they're trying to make. They're trying to target a specific weakness that's really hard to see. Or they have some kind of idea that's kind of far off in the future.

Yeah. So can I interact or did you keep running with that? No, go ahead. What's so cool about these beautiful moves, these excellent chess moves that have this huge idea behind it.

So right when it happens, everybody else can see it. But nobody else discovered it. Just the guy that found it.

So when I go back and I watch these grandmaster level games, and then those moves happen. And then this happened. Sometimes, Agamator, he would stop.

He says, pause the video and look for the best move. And then obviously, I would never find it. And then he would play it and say, so he played this and here's why like this just like totally disarmed the opponent entirely.

And it's cool because that's the guy that finds it. And then everybody else, it's like, oh, that's so obvious. You see it, right? But it's not obvious when you're playing because you only have so much time in the time games.

So I don't know that that is really, that is a very beautiful, pretty thing. It's like when you're watching somebody accomplish something that you couldn't do. And you're like, that was good.

That was impressive. Or say something in a way, like say something about God that you've never put that way for you. Like, you know what, that was a beautiful way to put that.

So yeah, chess does have that "ah" factor when somebody makes those kind of moves. Especially a move where, I mean, you could try to make a move like that and it could turn out good or bad. So it's really cool when it turns out to be like the deciding factor in the whole game.

Yeah. Well, something we haven't talked about yet that I guess as we wrap up, the queen sacrifice, that idea. So we talked about always trying to like keep everything safe and do even trades and get, try to get up on top.

But there is a, there's a moment where these beautiful moves can happen where it is more advantageous to sacrifice your most precious piece and be down on material where technically they're up. But you have such a strategic position and advantage from that sacrifice that you win. You can get a mate off that.

And those are so beautiful when you see those like queen sacs, somebody sacks the queen to win. I mean, those are insane. He loves seeing those.

I saw one where Hikaru had three queen sacks of one game, I think. Have you seen that game? That's like one of his better games, I guess, apparently. But he pushed pawns down and he like, just the way the game worked out.

He sacked the queen like three times because he kept getting him out of pawns. And it just was the winning move for him. And they're beautiful when you catch those.

Yeah. Yeah. Every piece, including the king is essentially a tool.

And the concept of a sacrifice is such a basic component in a chess. Yeah. And it's so biblical.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a good point. I mean, whenever we're talking about strategy, it's, we can also liken it to, or we can consider how God is also strategic. Yes.

And the fullness of time, he sent forth a son strategically. You have to gain the victory. Yeah, exactly.

Like what, what his people thought was like a sacrifice that would actually put God in a losing position. Like Satan literally thought he won. Exactly.

Christ died. But that, that itself was the victory. That was the queen sack.

That was the son sack. The son sacrifice. But he did.

That was his, that was his checkmate on, on Satan, which is beautiful. It was the beautiful move. It was the precious move.

No one saw it. Then you look at it. It's like, Oh, and then in retrospect, you're like, Oh, a told it for sin.

Of course. I needed a sacrifice. I prefer in the Bible.

Exactly. Yeah. You realize if it did three, you're like, duh, you're going to cross, but the Jews didn't get it.

You know, but yeah. So, so that this is the beauty of chess. It plays on God's world.

It's a game based on God's world. It based in God's world. Yeah.

Any last thoughts? Chess is fun. I think I'm just out. You want to go play a game? Yeah.

We're going to go play right after this. Also, we're going to do this. Let's do this.

Let's toss our chess.com profiles on the podcast notes. If anybody wants to challenge us, we would be happy to play. That's a good idea.

Yeah. We'll throw our, we'll throw our usernames in there. And, uh, and if you really want to, you can look back at my games and see how much Noah beats me.

If you can see if it's 10 to one or not, you can fact check it. Interesting. But yeah, I'll, I'll put our usernames in there.

And if you want to challenge us on chess.com, I also have lead chess. If somebody prefers lead chess, I can do that one too. Yes.

You got the chess. Yeah. All right.

Well, Hey, thanks for listening. I hope this was encouraging and helpful in some way. We just really like chess and, um, wanted to just have a conversation about chess.

We love it. I think it's based in God's world. It's a based game.

It's very based. It's very based. Well, say the king of the ages of mortal invisible, the only God be honored in glory forever and ever.

Amen. Solely day. Oh, Gloria.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

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