"The Protracted Game" is a book by Scott Boorman, about about conflicting styles of combat strategy in the Chinese revolution and Korean war, as mirrored in the world's two great intellectual board games, go and chess.
I read it as a young go-player in the late sixties. The Vietnam war was huge, and anybody could see that Boorman's analysis applied there as well. Our guys were playing chess; Mao and Ho were playing go, or rather (to give it the Chinese name) wei chi.
Boorman makes a convincing case that in any such conflict, the chess players lose.
He is entertaining when he quotes the losers. This can't be happening! The dirty cheaters! Everything was working according to plan, just the way I wanted it to, and then-- wham! where did all our guys go? It just doesn't make sense! It's their fault! They're bad! They're doing it wrong!
Recently, it dawned on me. Hillary is playing chess. Obama is playing go. Chess is pure DLC. Go is the 50-state strategy.
Chess we all know about. It looks complicated; all those different kinds of pieces, each with its own arbitrary powers. Some pieces are much more powerful than others: you methodically bring them into play, carefully focussing their distinctive ranges to control the center. Pawns can be important, of course, under certain circumstances, but it's standard play to sacrifice them; the big pieces are much more carefully guarded. Everything is ultimately focussed on one big win-- on one piece in fact: your opponent's King. Typically the game will build towards, and be dominated by, at the most three big conflicts. You start the game with a board as full as it will ever get, and when the game is over, many-- sometimes most-- of the pieces are gone. It's a game of tight focus and subtraction.
Go, or wei chi, looks simple. It's played on a plain grid, with plain black and white pieces that are otherwise identical; as individual pieces they are no more complicated than the Xs and Os of tic-tac-toe. The rules can be tricky to understand: they seem simple, but how they translate into play is baffling, at first, and continued study will reveal new subtleties, no matter how deep you go. In non-handicap go, the board starts out empty. Gradually areas get built up and connected, until the whole board is covered by a network of lines enclosing spaces. There are small and large wins and losses along the way, but nothing like a checkmate. The game is over when there are no more useful plays left. You win by getting the most territory-- it's a game of networks and addition.
Chess is relatively quick, on a small board of 64 squares. It's a single battle, really.
Go is a long game, on a big board of 361 points. It's a whole war, with multiple fronts, and multiple battles all being fought out at the same time.
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When engaged in real warfare, as in play, chess players want the center. They focus their forces and fight fiercely to take and hold the big cities. They look for the important figures in the enemy camp and seek to neutralize or coopt them. They get the factories, the weapons, the media.
Go players go out to the fringes. They don't concentrate in one place, and they don't fight where enemy power is strongest. They create new power through organization, they create new structures, new means of communication, loosely at first, then filling in as time goes on, in response to the shape of the game.
Chess players seek to build an impregnable fortress in the middle of things, from which they can venture forth to attack.
Go players head for the outside, scattering small cadres around the countryside, loosely linked. They cultivate the fringes. Peasants, who are treated as pawns, cannonfodder, by a chess playing ruling class, are the heart of a go-player's revolutionary guerrilla force.
Go players avoid fighting where the enemy is strongest. While chess players are building their fortresses, go players make sure that they are everywhere else.
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In go, war, and politics, the great majority of whatever you want-- points, votes, food, ideas, common sense, soldiers, even usable money-- is not located in the center, but outside of it.
And it also turns that out seeking to create your base in the center is a wrongheaded strategy. The wise player begins on the outside, and gradually uses those positions to work towards the center. Your opponent's standard tactic is to cut you off from your secure groups located outside the center. Unless you can frustrate him by keeping that connection strong, your position in the center will wither and die. In go, war, and politics.
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A good go player might give a newbie as many as 27 extra pieces for a handicap, placed on the board before the game begins to ensure an interesting game. All the moves experienced players make to neutralize their initial disadvantage look completely irrelevent to the newbies, who often think they're winning right up to the point where huge groups of their pieces begin leaving the board.
But before that point, a chess player rejoices at the idiocy of her enemies. She forecasts victory, right up to the moment she realises she's losing. She still doesn't accept that she has lost, then, but plays with the same kinds of tactics, only more so, and more wildly.
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Go is a long game, and a close one. The best games, at the end, you win by a couple of points. I think that's what we're going to see in this primary. The Presidential campaign, though, I hope to be a blowout.