Why Play a Game Computers Have Already Mastered?

“Why would I play a game that computers are already better at?”

It’s a fair question, and one that hit me hard. I didn’t have a good answer on the spot, but deep down, I knew he was missing the point.

The man who asked me was a brilliant old engineer from my hometown whom I met while living in China. We became fast friends, spending long nights drinking and talking about science fiction. I assumed he’d love chess—most engineers do. Instead, he completely dismissed it.

His question took me all the way back to the early 1990s, to a local Swiss tournament where, for a brief moment, everyone thought I was the next Garry Kasparov.

The Master of Illusion

I was just a kid, obsessed with the early Chessmaster computer games. Even back then, the engines were mind-blowing. They were already better than the vast majority of human players on the planet.

But computers don’t control luck.

In this particular tournament, I somehow managed to start with a perfect 3 out of 3 score. In a Swiss tournament, winning round one is normal. Round two is tough. Winning round three means you just took down one of the tournament favorites. I had done it mostly on pure, unadulterated luck, but suddenly the room was looking at me differently.

Then came round four. My opponent was rated much higher than me, and he didn’t go easy. He suffocated me from the get-go. To survive the onslaught, I had to find a desperate, highly strategic Knight retreat maneuver right in the opening.

By the time I crawled out of the opening, I was down to my last five minutes on the clock. This was back in the days of analogue clocks—two and a half hours for the game, and absolutely no increment. If your flag dropped, you lost.

My opponent still had almost all of his time. He looked at my ticking clock, looked at the board, and did something baffling: He offered a draw.

The Lie That Caught Fire

For the first time in my life, I took the draw instantly. Afterward, I couldn’t help but ask him: “Why? I was completely dead on time, and the position was still incredibly complex.”

He just smiled. “It was an equal position. I don’t like taking chances against youngsters, and you’ve already proven you’re in a dangerous mood this tournament.”

That put me at 3.5 out of 4 points—an absurd score for a massive underdog. Suddenly, the highest-rated players in the room huddled around me. They wanted to know my secrets. One of them asked about the Knight maneuver: “Did you prepare that line with an engine?”

The truth was boring—I had just found it out of sheer panic. But telling them it was luck didn’t feel like it lived up to the hype. So, I lied.

“Yeah,” I told them confidently. “Chessmaster showed me that line. I thought it was strong.”

They nodded in total awe. They believed it without a shred of doubt. That’s how terrifyingly respected chess engines already were back then.

Of course, the illusion didn’t last. I lost the next game, the luck evaporated, and I finished exactly where I always did: right in the middle of the pack. But boy, did I enjoy the ride.

Chess is the Game of Life

Eventually, engines completely took over. By then, I had stopped playing competitively, so I didn’t care. It wasn’t until that night with the engineer in China that I finally understood why the computer’s perfection doesn’t matter.

When humans play chess, we aren’t just calculating lines. We are playing the game of life. Every move is wrapped in human frailty: a stroke of luck, a psychological edge, or the fact that your opponent has a headache.

On the 64 squares, your whole life is on display. The pressure, the self-doubt, the fear. Computers don’t feel that. They don’t live; they simulate.

This is precisely why millions of us would rather watch two grandmasters play a “bad” game of chess filled with chaotic blunders—like the infamous Ding Liren vs. Ian Nepomniachtchi World Championship match—than watch two super-computers play a flawlessly sterile, perfect game.

Embracing Our Limits

We don’t play chess to achieve perfection. We play to see how close to perfection we can get despite our human limitations.

A calculator calculates. That’s its job. But a human grandmaster has to calculate while the entire world is watching.

• Can he find the winning move while knowing professional chess might not even be the career he wants?

• Can he calculate accurately while planning to switch to law school next year?

• Can he survive the crushing weight of insecurity when his journey to the World Championship was so full of lucky breaks that he doesn’t even fully believe he deserves to be there?

That is what we want to see.