Hillary! When Is the Game Over?

HIGHLAND, UT | 2 April 2008 | Chess is one of my great passions. My father taught me to play chess when I was five and that game quickly became engrained into my soul. Growing up, I was always looking for a game. I was fortunate enough to have some cousins my age and a few neighbor friends who also enjoyed a good game of chess so a game was somewhat easy to find. After a couple years, however, the opportunity to play grew less and less frequent, due both to the distraction of other activities and the fact that fewer people wanted to play against me. I think I went through my entire high school years without playing a game. Swimming and girls were much more interesting, if you know what I mean. Still chess was there, buried in my heart somewhere, patiently waiting for the opportunity to surface.

My father gave me an electronic chess set as a high school graduation gift. I enjoyed playing against it, but soon became disillusioned because every time I turned it on it was like Gary Kasparov or Bobby Fisher had just sat down at my table. A few years later, PCs hit the market and one of the first video games was Battle Chess. I have used a number of other computer chess games over the years but they just never seemed to fill the void of having a real, living, breathing human opponent to play against. My chess play was spotty and infrequent. And yet, still, my heart yearned for the board and a good sit, thinking about the strategies of those 64 squares.

With the advent of the Internet I found I could play games with people from all over the world right from my own living room. And this past winter I stumbled upon chess.com, the mother of all chess sites. Games, news, learning opportunities, and community—all wrapped up in one dot com. What a thrill! Most of the gaming opportunities on the site are turned-based correspondence type games where a player can log in to the site and play multiple games at a time. The player makes his respective moves and then can leave to take care of other items. The opponent then has 3 days to respond. Games go on forever, it seems, but since one plays several games at a time, the excitement level is always quite high.

Correspondence play brings in a curious dilemma: when the game is obviously decided, what is the moral (?) responsibility of the losing player? Does he just play on? Does he resign? Many discussion threads have discussed this dilemma. And still the nearly twenty thousand registered members have not reached a consensus. A clearly won game could go on for days, weeks, or maybe even months, depending upon the number of moves it would take for the winner to combine forces and reach checkmate. Many players argue that it is most courteous toward your opponent to resign and congratulate. Yet, to the annoyance of many of the members of this site, some players play on, forcing the game into extremely lengthy finishes. This is also a great discussion on over the board (OTB) games, even at the Grand Master level. Many games among these highest level players end in resignation. It is simply a part of the culture of the game.

But when does a chess game really end? When one player’s forces are so overwhelmingly advantaged the everyone in the room—including the opponent himself—knows the other player has no hope of a comeback? Or is it when checkmate is finally achieved? Is the losing player somehow cheating if he continues to play? Is he somehow threatening the breakdown of the structure of the game by insisting to play on? No, such ideas are absurd. Each chess player has full right to continue the game until the bitter end. A game is not officially over until the king has no legal move left to make. Resignation is just a common courtesy to the other player: “Look, I’m so far behind; I’ll just resign from this game and you get the point. Then let’s move on to the next game.”

Resignation would be the same as two tennis player getting to the point where one player has won two sets and is leading four games to one on his way to winning his third set. Everyone knows who is going to win the game. Everyone starts pressuring the other player to drop the balls and take his seat so the winner can jump the net while he still has energy to do so. But this is ridiculous. The tennis player has every right to complete the game. In fact, it seems out of place for the tennis player to quit at that point. It would be a sign of poor sportsmanship to resign. Yet in chess, it is expected to resign; it is the cultural norm. In fact, some try to consider it unsportsmanlike to continue to play at that point. Funny how culture dictates opposite responses from similar actions.

Politics is the same as chess in this respect. We have watched as nearly every Republican Presidential candidate has resigned from the competition, some as early as shortly after the Iowa caucuses back in the first week of the year. Many of the Democratic candidates have done the same. Yet, Hillary Clinton hangs on. She hangs on with the fierceness of a bulldog. Some say her tenacity when she has clearly lost this competition is beyond “good sportsmanship” and that she threatens the breakup of the very structure of the Democratic Party.

Nothing is further from the truth. Healthy debate and many good, strong candidates only strengthens the political process. And the fact that by the end of this summer both parties, and the many third parties, will emerge with their respective nominees is a testament to the strength of this nation’s political theories. The fact that we can engage in such debate—even as ugly as things get with personal, ad hominem attacks and “dirty politics”—should reveal to the world that we have the best system known to man. We can have these conversations with our neighbors, throughout the country. And we can do it without killing each other and without destroying each other’s property. This is a sign that we are healthy, that we—America, American INDIVIDUALS—can govern ourselves. And we should celebrate this process.

When is the game of candidacy over? The week after the first primary election? Half way through the elective process? No, the game is over when the votes have all been counted and officials have certified the election. And every candidate has every right to stay in the game until it has ended. As long as the candidate has not broken any rules, as long as the candidate does nothing to warrant disqualification, the game goes on. Hillary, I am sure, has sat down many times with her strategists and discussed the possibilities. She recognizes that she is facing nearly insurmountable prospects as each state’s elective process is checked off and Barack maintains that lead. But she also recognizes that there are a few more plays to be made in this game, and that within the rules already established (the brokering at the convention, for example) that provide a possibility to still pull out a surprise checkmate of her own. Until the game is over, until Hillary’s king stands surrounded and unable to find a legal move to safety, she is still in the game. It is her right to continue.

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