Multiple-choice reading

When I was eleven, I was briefly the second-strongest chess player of my age in the country, and I remember the ranking list far better than I remember most of my teachers. It arrived in the post once a month, a few stapled sheets of closely typed names, and my father would read it at the breakfast table before passing it across to me, his finger resting on my name like a man steadying a glass on a moving train. I have since met a number of people who were prodigies of one kind or another, and almost all of us share a curious habit: we date our childhoods not by years but by results.

It is fashionable now to be sceptical of early specialisation, and much of the scepticism is deserved. There is a growing consensus among coaches and educators that children who try many activities before committing to one tend to last longer, and burn out less often, than those who are channelled into a single pursuit from the start. I have no quarrel with that. But the debate tends to proceed as though the only question were whether early specialisation produces champions, and I was never going to be a champion. The more interesting question, to my mind, is what it does to the ones who were merely very good.

What it did to me, first of all, was to make me extraordinarily good at a single kind of thinking. By twelve I could hold a position in my head for twenty moves and see, often before I could explain why, that a particular pawn was weak or a bishop badly placed. This is a genuine pleasure, and I have no wish to disparage it. But it is a narrow pleasure, and the narrowness is not visible from the inside. I assumed, as children do, that the way I thought about chess was simply the way intelligent people thought, and I was baffled, for years, by how poorly it served me elsewhere.

School was where I first noticed. My history essays were, a teacher once wrote, ‘all calculation and no narrative’: I would identify the decisive factor in the outbreak of a war with great confidence and then discover that I had nothing whatever to say about the people who fought in it. Friendships were harder still. Chess trains you to look for your opponent’s intentions and to assume that they are hostile. It is a useful habit across a board. Across a table in the school canteen, it made me, I am reliably informed, rather exhausting company.

I stopped playing competitively at fifteen. There was no dramatic collapse; I did not, as prodigies in novels tend to, break down at a tournament or sweep the pieces onto the floor. My results simply levelled off while those of two or three contemporaries went on climbing, and I discovered that I did not enjoy being good at something nearly as much as I had enjoyed being better at it than other people. That was an unflattering thing to learn about oneself at fifteen, and it took me most of my twenties to forgive it.

My father took it harder than I did. For four years the ranking list had been the closest thing we had to a shared language, and when it stopped arriving we found, to our mutual embarrassment, that we did not know what else to talk about. We learned, eventually. But I have sometimes wondered whether my early talent was as much a burden to him as to me: something he felt obliged to tend, at considerable cost in time and money, for fear of being the parent who had wasted it.

I play again now, online, late at night, badly and with enormous enjoyment. I lose to teenagers in Manila and retired engineers in Ohio, and I find, to my surprise, that I do not mind in the least. What the years away from the game gave me was not a better grasp of strategy but a different relationship with it: I am curious about my mistakes rather than ashamed of them. If I could say one thing to the eleven-year-old at the breakfast table, it would not be to stop. It would be that the list is not the game.