NEVER TOO OLD

Learning a new skill can be hard at any age, and it gets even harder as you get older, but Tom Vanderbilt was determined not to let this hold him back. When his daughter expressed an interest in chess, he also decided to learn how to play – and as he progressed to competing in tournaments, he made some surprising discoveries about himself and others

ONE day a number of years ago, I was deep into a game of draughts on holiday with my daughter, then almost four, in the small library of a beachfront town. Her eye drifted to a nearby table, where a black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures – many a future chess master has been innocently drawn in by “horses” and “castles”.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Chess,” I replied.

“Can we play?” she pleaded.

I nodded absently.

There was just one problem: I didn’t know how. I dimly remembered having learnt the basic moves as a kid, but chess had never stuck. This fact vaguely haunted me through my life. I would see an idle board in a hotel lobby or a puzzle in a weekend newspaper and feel a pang.

I had picked up a general awareness of chess. I knew the names Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. I knew the cliche about grandmasters being able to look a dozen moves ahead. I knew that chess, like classical music, was shorthand in movies for genius.

But I knew chess the way I “knew” the Japanese language: what it looks like, what it sounds like, its Japaneseness, without actually comprehending it. I decided to learn the game, if only to be able to teach my daughter.

It took a few hours, hunched over my smartphone at kids’ birthday parties or waiting in line at the grocery store, to get a feel for the basic moves.

Soon, I was playing, and sometimes even beating, the weakest computer opponents. Yet it soon became apparent that I had little concept of the larger strategies. I didn’t want to try to teach what I knew only poorly.