8: Chess as a Choice Awareness Practice

Chess, as a game of strategy, is an excellent choice awareness game: it offers substance use clients a practice of ongoing evaluation of choices in terms of their consequences.  Much of the behavior of substance use (and of the compulsive spectrum behavior) is tactical in its impulsivity, driven by short-term, immediate gratification.  Chess teaches delayed gratification and, thus, impulse control.  Chess, therefore, proves to be a viable anti-dote to tactically myopic compulsive functioning and prompts a player to evaluate the strategic ripple effects of any given choice.

Chess is also a rare interpersonal opportunity for silence and offers practice opportunities for emotional self-regulation of the emotions associated with victory or defeat.  Finally, it is one of the few games that offers more than a binary/dichotomous outcome of win or lose.  With its possible outcome of a tie, the game highlights the notion that not every form of competition is a zero sum game.

But above and beyond these already built-in choice-awareness and psychologically invaluable teaching moments, chess can be turned into a power-tool for choice awareness with a little bit of “tweaking.”  The following is a description of how chess was piloted as a choice-awareness enhancing tool in the context of the correctional/residential drug and alcohol treatment program.  Upon admission, clients were provided with a brief overview of the choice awareness enhancing properties of chess and were, consequently, encouraged to learn to play chess.  Chess, as a game of skill, was programmatically endorsed over such games of chance as cards.  Regular chess tournaments were held each week with the first and second place winners earning various program privileges or nominal gifts, in proportion to the resources, policies, and logistics of the correctional setting.

Having assured that the majority of the program clients have learned to play chess, the program staff introduced a Choice Awareness Chess Tournament which involved an arbitrary change of board rules.  For example, the knight and the bishop chess pieces exchanged functions.  As a result, the players – who by now had arranged themselves in a natural hierarchy of regular chess competence – were essentially equated in their playing power.  With the new set of rules, the most choice-aware player was the most likely one to win.  As the clients progressed through the program, they continued to be presented, from time to time, with Choice Awareness Chess tournaments with ever-unpredictable arbitrary modifications to the rules of the game, with each tournament being conducted on a set of new board rules.

Choice-Awareness Chess Modifications

A variety of modifications to chess rules are possible.  For example, it could be agreed, for the purposes of the Choice Awareness Chess tournament, that pawns are allowed to always move two squares, or that a pawn can take over a piece both diagonally and directly in front of it.  Furthermore, contrary to the classic premium on time during chess tournaments, Choice Awareness Chess tournaments would set time minimums to encourage clients to play “slow chess” as yet another way of leveraging choice evaluation, impulse control and strategic thinking. 

Choice-Awareness Chess Tournaments as a Follow-Up Intervention

Substance use programs may consider holding Choice Awareness Chess Tournaments as a form of clinical follow-up.  Such events may be held on an ongoing basis and follow the format of a chess club.  Such chess tournaments would be offered as a post-treatment self-help opportunity for the graduates and alumni of substance use treatment, and may be facilitated or autonomously run by former clients, with organizers surprise-announcing the modifications of the rules on the days of the tournament.