Playing the System¶
I’m thankful for my old chess teacher for this one. When I was nine, the national chess federation in my country had a programme where they taught everyone in development groups the Open Sicilian (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6/d6/e6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 … ). Every week was dedicated to teaching a main line of the Sicilian – Scheveningen, Dragon, Najdorf – and we’d then play against each other for a rated match. This was also seen in competitive play throughout the age-group championships and school championships.
It sounds like common knowledge, but we noticed that everyone was playing one of three to four main lines, even though in a chess position there are usually tens or hundreds of possible moves. The effect of common knowledge is strong, and when I sat down at a board at that time, I was sure that I would end up facing one of these lines.
So we found a way to challenge this system by playing a sideline of the Sicilian. It would be something only I would play and most people would not have encountered it in their regular sessions, but I would have built up knowledge in this particular line to prepare deeper than anyone. This is the Godiva variation of the Sicilian:
It’s not a main line for the reason that it’s not generally good opening practice to bring your queen out in the opening or to use two moves in the opening (eventually, the queen should move to c7, where it is normally developed to in normal Sicilian systems). It’s basically absent from high-level play – besides the play of GM Grivas - or the games that we would analyse in our weekly sessions, but it also did not have the same high-risk structure as an opening trap, which requires the other player to make some mistakes without which the player who set the trap will be left materially worse off. In short, this was an ideal scenario for me to play the system rather than the game.
I’m probably around an average club player level – barring a few anomalous results with 2000+ rated players OTB and I’m rated slightly over 2000 on lichess. Knowing that variation did not change that. What changed was that I was able to play the system and rack up many wins in my age group – taking many of my friends who I played against out of opening theory and into my weird world. A lot of my wins and trophies in chess were from that time, coming down to not necessarily having superior tactical or strategic awareness, but playing the system rather than the game.
When you learn a lesson at nine years old, it tends to stay with you deeply.
Coming from a country that has mandatory military service, I was aware of the lower-order game that we were playing: to train hard, get into the best physical shape we could be, and do well; and the higher-order system that we were playing, which was shaped by views of agency both within where I was training and nationally.
I did well at the game, but that was a baseline for everyone. What really made a difference was playing the system: being aware that generally the public perception of people in military service is that they do not have a high degree of agency; being aware that I was training in a group that was largely considered as being highly regarded.
The awareness of these two concepts at the same time led to a realisation that there was a divergence between perceived and actual agency, and that the awareness of this knowledge could result in positive outcomes for everyone and make a positive change towards our training experience. I’m not going to go into any details, but this awareness shift and framing helped create one of the periods of my life that I am the proudest of.
In general, there is always a system a couple levels higher above the game; this system will differ person-to-person as people would have different objectives that are being prioritised, and their awareness of others’ awareness of the system. A module on game theory that I took in high school had the following premise:
Everyone in the group chooses a number from 1 to 100.
If your number is closest to half the average value of all numbers in the group, you win.
It was fascinating to see the range of values that people had chosen. The first thought would be to choose 25, as a random distribution of values would mean that 50 would – on statistical likelihood – be closest to the average. However, assuming that everyone wants to win this game, no one would choose a number from 51 to 100 – you’d never get to half the average that way! Therefore, the range of possible values are actually within 0 to 50, and half the average of that would be 12.5. However, everyone would probably be aware of that fact too – and we saw a few 25s, a few 12.5s, but also many 0s from the people who brought the thought process to their logical conclusion.
There is a secondary game here – how much do you think the other people in the population know? This can lead to conclusions whether the population is behaving in a rational manner and the guesses show that there is a two-way interaction between people’s opinions of the rationality of the population and whether the population is acting rationally.
The people who guessed 25 clearly thought that the other people in the class didn’t really think too much about the premise and would have put down any number. The people who guessed 12.5 thought that the rest of the class thought like the people who guessed 25 and wanted to think one step further. Interestingly, the people who had guessed 25 did so not out of ignorance of the logical conclusion of the game but did so being fully aware of it while considering the level of rationality of the population. Unfortunately for them, we were in a game theory class.
While the Nash equilibrium of this game was everyone guessing 0, what the population thinks of itself and its characteristics has a critical effect on what the actual characteristics are and how rationally the population behaves as a result. This could lead to irrational behaviour that is strongly entrenched, providing strong opportunities for people to leverage that asymmetry.
Now, one of the key things that I do think about day-on-day is: what is the system? What is the higher-order system that I’m thinking about beyond the lower-order game that we play each day? Are there key assumptions that I can try breaking and see where they go?
Being aware of where, how and why people behave irrationally creates an asymmetric advantage where you are in a unique position to shape the group consciousness. Thinking the opposite of what the group consciousness dictates, even (and especially) if it means challenging your own cognitive biases, can result in very surprising results.