Do the pawns really go first in chess?
- Introduction
- Do the pawns go first?
• THE pawns
• The smallest fighting unit
• Good strategy?
• The economy of pawns - Real chess in Harry Potter
- The movie
- Conclusion
In the world of storytelling, (screen)writers throughout history have richly used chess as a metaphor for conflict. It's not too difficult to understand why that is. The design of the game is one team of sixteen units wearing white shirts against another team of sixteen units wearing black shirts. The contrast between these two colours is at its largest (unlike other games such as Risk or Chinese chequers), and this dual linear conflict can easily be interpreted as a battle between Good and Evil. Other than that, chess contains strategy, tactics, sacrifice, attacks, captures, kings, queens, and so-so-many other aspects that bear a strong reminiscence of real warfare.
It often happens in fictional literature that the author is sold on the richness and profoundness of the metaphors, but is insufficiently well-versed in the game to depict something that accurately describes what chess is really like.
Let's have a look at a small phrase:
In chess, the pawns go first.
- Magneto
The quote above is from the movie X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). Sending his infantry into the battle first is part of Magneto's strategy to collect information about the fighting strategy of humanity (the enemy that Magneto's Brotherhood is facing). The line of text is beautifully concise, and has become iconic in the universe of X-Men, which is part due to the exceptionally powerful delivery of Sir Ian McKellen.
Towards the end of the excerpt above, Magneto underlines the statement by the results of the battle that the mutants see unfold before them. It makes it sound like he's really found the perfect analogy for his battle strategy. It's a QED in a movie, aiming to underline his boldness of "Look how clever I am!"
But is it true? Do the pawns go first? Or is it just some pompous line?
The answer to this question is quite complex.
First of all, "the pawns" doesn't specify the number of pawns that go first. At bare minimum, "the pawns" would mean two pawns, but usually when a plural form is preceded by the prefix "the" and the specific set hasn't previously been defined, it tends to mean the lot of them. But this is a very rare phenomenon and gets even rarer as the level of play increases. It rarely happens that all 8 pawns have been moved forward and ordered to fight to the death before the big guns come out, and although I'm no military mastermind, even I can foresee that sending all of your infantry to the front line is a recipe for disaster. Even in the world-record Pawnmower game, which started with no less than 17 pawn moves by white, one pawn remained behind for the entire game.
Emil Joseph Diemer, whose name is connected to the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, was a chess reporter for the German Nazi party. As such, it's highly unlikely that Magneto (a Holocaust survivor in the Marvel universe) would appropriate anything that Diemer would've done. And to add insult to injury, the move that concluded the game above was also a pawn move.
In the vast majority of games, at least some pawns stay behind to provide the king with shelter. An overload of pawn moves early on can prove to be fatal. Black is typically ready to prove this point in the Alekhine Defence, and sometimes white players don't know when to stop shoving their pawns in the King's Indian. See the following game:
If we presume that "the pawns" doesn't mean "the lot" but rather a significant amount of them, we can consult the database to see to what extent the statistics support the statement. About 90% of all games start with a pawn move by white, but one of white's four main moves is 1.Nf3. Against the three main non-1.e4 opening moves, black's most common response is 1...Nf6. So while it is true that many games are opened with a pawn move from both sides, this is certainly not the rule.
The next point about "the pawns go first" is that the bigger pieces are considered to be more precious and should be preserved, while the pawns are worth rather much less. This is based on the fact that their value as fighting units is the smallest among the six different pieces. Besides, half of the total amount of pieces are pawns.
The idea that pawns would be somehow more expendable than any other pieces is ludicrously inaccurate. Yes, it often hurts your position more to lose a rook instead of a pawn, but it's quite common that the win of one pawn is preceded by a liquidation of a significant portion of the army. In warfare, such a heavy investment of manpower and material for only a very marginal gain is considered a Pyrrhic victory, while in chess the investment of material scarcely matters, especially when it involves equal trades. There is one notable exception to this, which is the reason why I started writing this blog in the first place.
Because captures in chess aren't influenced by any piece's individual strength, the attack of the "lesser" piece becomes more serious. After the moves 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5, black's queen is attacking three pawns, yet none of these pawns feels threatened in any capacity. On the other hand, if white were to play 3.c4, the attack against the queen is much more serious than any of the attacks by the queen.
Very often the outcome of the middlegame is decided by whether or not a specific pawn move can be carried out. Going even further on this train of thought: many of the piece moves revolve around pawn breaks: either to facilitate a pawn break or to fight against it. A very typical topical line is the Mar del Plata variation of the King's Indian:
No pawn exchanges, no file-opening, no attack.
- Aron Nimzowitsch
The next aspect of the metaphor "Pawns go first" is that the big guns are supposed to be the surprise weapon. You hope to use these only very infrequently, so as to force a capitulation quickly and with minimal waste of resources if and only if it can't be achieved by any other means. Whereas it might be true for warfare that you prefer to use your material as economically as possible, in chess this is often not the case. On the battlefield, you'd rather not exhaust the use of your strongest surprise-weapons too early. In chess, the stronger pieces typically do a lot of the weightlifting, and a lot of this is connected to pawn breaks.
But to be fair: there is a lot of truth in the Nimzowitsch quote. In the Mar del Plata variation of the King's Indian, white prepares the c5-break to open up the position. That's to help infiltrate with the pieces. Pawns are often sacrificed to make room for the pieces, who have a larger attack range. Gambits are the obvious playground for these sacrifices, but the same goes for mainline systems: most if not all of the Open Sicilians have at their core the battle for the d5-square: whether or not black will be able to carry out the d5-push is very important in determining the outcome of the game.
The right placement of the pieces is closely intertwined with the placement of the pawns. If we take the above position of the Mar del Plata variation and scramble white's pawns, the pieces will look weird:
In the normal Mar del Plata position, the engine gives white an assessment of approximately +0.6, which constitutes a small advantage to white. When I fed the above nonsensical position to my Stockfish engine, it gives black a significant advantage (-1.3).
Or compare the following positions, both coming from Rock Solid Chess Vol.2 by Sergei Tiviakov and Yulia Gökbulut, Chapter 1: "The effect of moving one pawn on the assessment of the position" (the chapter title should say enough):
Whereas the first position is not better for white and might practically even be slightly favourable for black, the second position is virtually winning for white. The only significant change in the position is the move of the pawn from c2 to d3. This shows that pawn moves are almost never neutral. Every pawn move is irreversible.
The result of the endgame in which a direct mating attack is off the table typically hinges on the question whether or not a pawn can be promoted. The position below is a draw because even though white has four extra pawns, none of them will be able to promote as the king is unable to assist them:
By the pawn's specific rules of movement, both sides have a total of 48 potential pawn moves at their disposal for the entire game. Captures and two-square moves from their starting square diminish this amount significantly, and in practice it rarely happens that one side makes more than a total of 30 moves with their pawns. This means that more moves will have been performed by pieces in the vast majority of games that reach move 60. The Pawnmower game saw white play 22 moves with pawns, so even in this game more moves were made with pieces than with pawns.
Sacrificing some units to force a breakthrough can be useful in warfare as well. But to stay within the same quote: SOME pawns and not THE pawns.
The smallest unit in chess deserves credit, and Philidor already coined the phrase "The pawns are the soul of chess" centuries before most of contemporary authors and screenwriters were mentally and physically conceived.
In chess, pawns and pieces each have their own role. Their play is interwoven, and the possibilities and placements of one affect the effectiveness of the other.
The line "In chess, the pawns go first" admittedly sounds cool and clever, but using it as a metaphor to justify offering up your entire infantry division as cannon fodder is, to put it mildly, rather uncouth.
The pawns are the soul of chess.
- François-André Danican Philidor
Upon being asked with which of her characters she could relate to the most, J.K. Rowling has once said this to be Harry. The reason for this is that Harry seems to be in the middle of it all but basically has no clue of what is going on, or what would happen next. Unfortunately, Rowling and Harry share a characteristic that I don't really like. It's said best by Ron in Philosopher's Stone: "Don't be offended or anything, but neither of you two are that good at chess."
I love the Harry Potter books, so I don't want to bash Rowling for her writing of this particular scene. But as this is the single element of the entire narrative that should have resonated with me more than anything else, it's unfortunately inaccurate, and this is one of my least favourite bits of the entire series. Rowling's lack of chess-knowledge can be seen from the first line of the chess game in "Through the trapdoor." Believing that their potions teacher Severus Snape is after the Philosopher's Stone, the trio set to pursue him in an effort to stop him. In one of the rooms they encounter a gigantic chess-board. As the best player of the trio, Ron takes charge and appoints Harry to the role of one of the bishops and puts Hermione "next to him, instead of that castle."
There are two errors in this like of text that almost certainly go over the heads of the non-chess-playing audience. The first is that in the starting position in chess, the rook and the bishop are not next to one another. This can only happen in Chess 960, and that's impossible: Fischer Random Chess was introduced in 1996, a year after the book was finished and a year before it was published. It's unlikely that Rowling was aware of this development in the world of chess, and it's certainly impossible that McGonagall's chess-set in the dungeons of Hogwarts would have been implementing this version of the game years before it was invented.
The second inaccuracy is the use of the term "castle." In English chess jargon, "castle" is a verb assigned to a specific move rather than a piece. English literature beyond children's books rarely if ever call the piece a "castle" these days.
British chess-players call the chess-piece a rook. The term is derived from the Persian word for chariot ("rukh"), which was the original role of the piece. By the time Deathly Hallows came out, Rowling had learned about this: when they arrive at Luna's house, Ron calls it a rook. In this moment there is a small element of flashback to the chess-scene from Philosopher's Stone that's too cute not to mention: Hermione is so bad at chess throughout the series that she doesn't even recognise Luna's house as the chess-piece that it is and is confused as to the bird she's not seeing. If I'm in a good mood I can overlook that it's a consistency error at Hermione's expense; it is all the more iconic that it's precisely Hermione that is to play the rook on the chess-board in the first installment of the franchise.
"[Ron] himself darted around the board taking almost as many white pieces as they had lost black ones." Chess is a turn-based game, and only one movement is happening at any moment. It's not an open melee in which individual strength of the pieces has any correlation with their chances of survival. One single piece cleansing the board of the opponent's pieces only happens in two types of scenarios. The first is a windmill combination, which is unlikely given Rowling's chess expertise at this point. The second is the scenario in which the opponent is playing so poorly that the win is trivial from the start (which in turn would've made Ron's self-sacrifice almost certainly unnecessary). As such, Ron's reprisal rampage only makes sense in terms of its sounding quaint and heroic, but it has little to do with chess.
The book depiction of the chess-scene in Philosopher's Stone can be glossed over as "just a scene in which chess simply happens to take place." And that would make it acceptable to me.
The movie adaptation of the chess game was much better than the book scene. Even though the mistake of calling the rook a "castle" carried over to the screen, the game of chess was very much on-point. This isn't surprising, given that the chess portion was thought out by someone that's known to most of us. The person who composed the finale of the game has passed away on 21 September 2023 at the beautiful age of 69. Several of his books are canonical, including his Endgame Course, his work on imbalances in Reassess Your Chess and The Amateur's Mind. He wasn't credited for his involvement in Philosopher's Stone, but he saved the movie from becoming unwatchable for chess-players:
Silman had to work off the basis that each of the three members of the team had to take the place of a specific piece, in line with the book. He composed the position thus that white's queen is menacingly and pontifically in the middle of the board, acutely threatening to capture Bishop Harry. The position also had to involve another important detail.
This is the position that Silman came up with:
In this position Ron is the knight on g5 (yellow), Hermione is the rook on f8 (blue) and Harry is the bishop on a3 (green). It's white's move, and white takes the pawn on d3.
1.Qxd3
Here Ron has the idea to offer the rook on c3 as bait for the queen:
1...Rc3
It looks like a way to safeguard Harry from attack, but it's more than that. It's clearance of the c5-square, which will become important in a few moves.
Harry's abhorrence is written on his face as the white queen takes the black rook:
2.Qxc3
This is the final move that's played before the action draws to a halt. The queen turns menacingly slow towards the opposite side.
This is where the most important psychological point of the chess-game comes into play: Ron announces that he'll sacrifice himself to enable Harry and Hermione to carry on. Harry and Hermione protest that he can't do that, and that there must be another way. Yes, there is another way, and an even quicker one. But this would involve Harry to sacrifice himself, and that would've meant an untimely end to the story.
Ron's response to the objections by Harry and Hermione is very persuasive. To Hermione he responds: "Do you want to stop Snape from getting that Stone or not?" as a reminder of why they're there in the first place. And to Harry: "Harry, it's you that has to go on. I know it. Not me, not Hermione, YOU."
Ron's sacrifice shows more than just the bravery that makes him a true Gryffindor. It also displays his loyalty to his friends and to the good cause, which would've also made him a great Hufflepuff. (If you want to know how the story would've turned out if that were the case, check this video by SuperCarlinBrothers.)
This sacrifice was very important in many different ways. Apart from allowing Harry and Hermione to proceed, it also shows that in this larger Wizard's Chess battle against Voldemort, no-one is safe. Even your loved ones may die, and their plot armour doesn't safeguard them against all evils. It set the tone, and it made the reader perpetually uncertain whether or not their favourite characters would make it to the end.
2...Nh3+
"Check," Ron says meekly.
The queen slowly turns 90 degrees to her right until she faces Ron directly. She stares him directly in the eye and begins moving over from the c3-square. With a menacing soullessness beneath the helmet, the queen approaches closer and closer. d3. e3. Only seconds away. Everyone knows what's coming next. No-one dares to breathe. The terror of the inevitable is cascading down Ron's face. f3. He can smell the cold marble stone of the queen's blade, and all the pieces that she has impaled upon her sword. Halfway crossed the f-file. Ron's last breath for air.
The queen halts on g3. With a resolute relentlessness she takes her sword and plunges it straight through the body of the knight's horse, which disintegrates upon impact and falls to the side. Ron falls down and ends unconscious on the ground.
3.Qxh3
Hermione screams and almost makes to run towards Ron, but Harry catches her in time. "DON'T MOVE! Don't forget we're still playing."
3...Bc5+
Harry announces "Checkmate!"
The king drops his sword, which falls to the ground with a mundane finality. They had won.
I've always wondered why this position would be checkmate, because it seemed incorrect to me. I couldn't fathom how a bishop would be able to checkmate a king on g1 while the queen had just captured a check-giving knight on h3.
The answer is that my hunch was correct all along. It wasn't mate. Silman had intended for Harry to capture the evil queen at the end of the game:
4.Qe3 Bxe3#
Only now is it checkmate.
Upon looking at the scene again today, I only just discovered that Harry was in the e3-square in the end after all. So the game did end in checkmate, but the movie never saw the last two moves performed. From what we see, Harry just walks to c5 and then to e3, even without the capture of the queen visible on screen.
Silman expressed his regrets that the capturing of the evil queen, this moment of emotional satisfaction, never made the cut. I agree with Silman that it would've been nice to include the capture of the queen, but I'm not on the same page with regards to its necessity. The queen isn't really a side-villain, but rather an obstacle in the way.
The whole game sequence:
To recapitulate: chess is very often used in fiction as a metaphor for conflict. Unfortunately, the writers have insufficient understanding of the game of chess to make it accurate. Sometimes writers will make a comparison with chess that's very nonsensical if you know how to play the game, and in this blog I've tackled a very iconic one. "In chess, the pawns go first" is a truism at best, but it's not entirely accurate.
The portrayal of chess in audiovisual media tends to be almost as problematic as the portrayal of chess in AI-generated images. Doggers has a special subsection in The Chess Revolution in which he mentions a few key examples of chess portrayed on screen. Naturally, The Queen's Gambit is among them. Hilariously, he mentions the book Chess in the Movies by Bob Basalla, which describes chess in about 2000 movies, and judging from Doggers (I don't have CitM yet) Basalla works with an index system to indicate which mistakes have been made in which motion pictures. Some sort of ECO code for chess movie mistakes.
I have to acknowledge that the movie scene, and the tense music in 5/4 leading up to Ron's capture, are absolutely phenomenal. This is one of the few improvements upon the book canon that the movies have been able to manufacture. Thanks be to the late Jeremy Silman for saving the chess in the Harry Potter universe.
One final thought: in the Harry Potter movie, two of the pawns did go first.
