Soccer vs. Chess

Soccer is simple to understand, but difficult to execute. You can’t use your hands, you want to get the ball into the other net, and you want to prevent the ball from getting into your own net. The complexity comes because the physical coordination, control, and endurance area highly variable. They vary across players, they vary across teams, and they vary within individuals. The strategy (and perhaps the fun) of the game comes not just in scoring – but in accurately assessing the state of all those variable factors on the field at a given moment, and using that knowledge to pursue your goal. The physical variability makes that game fun.

Just because a player wants to perform an action doesn’t mean that action will materialize. Knowing this, assessment is almost as important as execution. It’s important to know not only what a player may do, but also how likely they are to do it, based on any knowledge available.

Chess, by contrast, is extravagantly easy to execute. Moving a piece from one square on a board to another doesn’t exactly require the best human physique. Moreover, the rules are not very complex either. Each piece must move in a particular way that is, yes, more complex than soccer, but is not very difficult to learn. The goal is to capture the opponent’s king without allowing yours to be captured first in a turn-based format. On top of this, chess board configurations are much more precisely defined than soccer field positions. A chess piece must be in one of 64 squares, or off the board. There are no exceptions. Compare that to soccer, where the minutest stretching of a finger can mark the difference between success and failure.

What makes chess fun? Where’s the strategy? It is difficult for one soccer player to know where an opponent will be at a given time. A player could go in almost any direction, with tiny shifts and jukes highly relevant. In chess, pieces can only go to particular areas, but the total volume of possibilities leads to a combinatorial explosion that is difficult to grasp. In both games, there is near perfect information shared across both sides. It is never a mystery where the king is positioned, or where the goalkeeper is standing.

The difference in chess is in how well-defined those moves are. Given a particular move, the probable next move is suddenly reduced to a much smaller array of responses. These, now, might be anticipated. Chess players live off this. They live off anticipating the right response that may occur given a particular sequence of moves. Of course, people may not act the way one expects, so adaptability is also key, but that is adaptability within a game space that feels just on the edge of comprehensible.

In soccer, the complexity comes in mentally assessing an opponent and physically executing a plan in response. In chess, the complexity comes in mentally anticipating an opponent, and adaptively executing a plan in response.

What do you think? Am I right? Wrong? Missing something? Let me know!