Dropping the golden apple

Find the best move! Once upon a time, I sincerely believed that was my overriding goal during a game of chess. Naive, but nowadays I know better. The truth is that dodging banana skins is more fruitful, so to speak, than the pursuit of golden apples.

In part, this is a simple story about experience and humility. After making enough bad moves, one comes to realise that there are always more lurking around the corner. But really, it’s not about me. The past decade or so has seen a fundamental shift in the way that games of chess are perceived, for which the near-omniscient chess computer has been the driving force.

The moves of the world’s best players used to be held in awe. They made mistakes, of course, but identifying them could take a considerable amount of legwork. These days, a chess engine will take just seconds to point out the errors in a game. For every position, the engine shows its preferred move and the resulting evaluation in hundredths of a pawn (e.g.