I once heard a Chess master refer to chess as the ULTIMATE MARTIAL ART. Obviously, if you take your chess board into almost any martial arts school and try to use it in a fight there is a VERY good chance your board is going to get broken up and the pieces inserted into places that will make Emergency room folk lore.
It did get me thinking though. WHY would you say that? Chess is possibly the ULTIMATE game of skill, strategy and planning. I hear of chess players thinking many moves in advance, planning their strategy, HAVING a plan, and a strategy and a way of reading their opponent, looking for THEIR intentions and looking to work out THEIR strategy.
I teach techniques- scripted specifics. this is the syllabus. I know when i fire off a combination what it is before i throw it. We also teach principles, so that if i kick you in the groin, i have a good idea what is going to happen next. People talk about flowing from one technique to another as the “see” the opportunities or the techniques. I remember a quote attributed to the Great Joe Louis. When he retired after winning his fight the reported asked him why he was retiring when he won. the reason, he replied was that he was seeing the opportunities and hitting them. “What’s wrong with that?”. he replied “before, i used to hit the openings and then see them!”
We use techniques to teach you the flow, and then the techniques teach you principles, which is why we teach them. One approach is not superior to the other. I know people talking about 18 million techniques in their system if you teach the principles etc, others teach principles but haven’t got a range of techniques to work with.
In our system, we teach PRINCIPLES THROUGH TECHNIQUE. All our techniques teach the PRINCIPLE to move off-line; one may teach head movement; another angling; and other height changes etc etc. these are principles you can then APPLY in many other situations.
I have a limited imagination. I am not great at “original thought”. What i am good at, is taking your idea, and maybe making it better, or better for ME, or giving you a bunch of different options or counters for your idea. I want to do stuff MY way. But i want you to do my stuff YOUR way. This is the technique, now make it work for YOU!
Principles give you an endless supply of techniques IF you have the vision and imagination to see what is possible. You invariably end up with more techniques than if you just trained techniques. I have what i refer to as seminar techniques. We take a known start, something in the middle, and finish somewhere else. It isn’t often what i describe as a “core syllabus” technique, but each component comes from somewhere. that’s the advantage of having SOME repertoire of techniques.
How do you learn using principles? How do you develop these principles? How do you know they will work?
For me, this is where teachers come in. How do you know what a snail is in French? you ask someone. Martial arts has teachers. Unless they have just made up their art with no training (and there are a lot more out there than you realise!) they will have learned techniques and principles from their teacher, and these get passed down hopefully from someone that once knew how to fight. But with all theories, how do you know it will work? you test it. How do I know if you have studies? you sit a test or an exam.
In medicine, we have a “Null Hypothesis” theory. We take an idea and try to disprove it. If you cant disprove it, you use it as a working principle till you find a better one. Its better, i feel, to learn from someone who has actually done something, than someone who has made it up.
The principles of learning are the same in any activity. you get shown, you try, you get it wrong. your friends show you some, your teacher shows you more, you do it a few times you get better. As you do more, you get more better and then you may use a compliant partner. getting punched in the face while you are learning something new is a hindrance to effective learning. As you get better, you increase the speed and decrease the level of compliance.
Coming back to chess, we know each piece moves in a particular way. However if someone has knowledge you don’t, and knows that a particular piece can do something novel, you could get blind-sided, or caught out. Now suddenly we have to adapt. Our technical training, with these principles allows us to explore some of the options other people might come up with, even if we haven’t dealt with it before, our technique might.
Let me use the analogy of a game of chess. If we take the King for example, we know that the King can move in any direction one square at a time. That is a rule, that is a principle, that is our technique. It works well and fine for 100’s of chess games. Just as we are comfortable with the King only making that move, something strange happens in the corner of the board, it is called castling.
Now, all of a sudden we have the King moving like it never moved before, doing something completely different. So, we need to look back at our guess and re-test it. We need to create a new guess for the moves the King can make.
These “guesses” are ever evolving as we explore and find out new things can happen. To use yet another chess analogy. We know that a pawn can only move forwards, it may do this for 100’s of games with no deviation. Then, all of a sudden it is taken “en passant” so, we need another guess for this piece. Just as we do this, then we find that the pawn can get to the other side of the board and turn into another piece entirely and start moving completely different. We then need to create more and more guess testing.
The thing i like about the analogy with chess is something many martial artists forget. Your opponent also has a plan, and for every move YOU make, he gets to make one too. You dont get to make 15 moves when he makes one. that isnt realistic. Many martial artist apply one set of rules to every game. They know sport silat so use that in Kickboxing or Muay Thai.. they are gonna get some surprises as happened in the early Cage fights. People werent prepared for what they were up against. What are you going to do if your opponent doesnt stand there and let you hit him 15 times??
But i will argue that chess is NOT the ultimate martial art. In chess we have LOSS. There is emotion as someone catches you unawares, or breaks through your guard and protection. What it doesnt have is pain. At the end of a chess game, you stand up, shake hands with your opponent, and walk away. IN a martial arts fight, you may be unconcious, broken, bleeding and damaged beyond repair. Chess, despite all its skill, and strategy, is still just a game.
What makes martial arts so fascinating and captivating, is that, if done RIGHT, it can be like total body Chess. As we learn to do one thing, we see our opponent do something else ans we have to respond. think speed chess.. against multiple opponents, with milliseconds between moves. As i write this, i can feel the drenaline coursing through my veins, my breathing is deeper, my heart beating faster. I can FEEL the fight, i can feel my heart beating faster. I am prepared.
This is what makes the Martial Arts so fascinating, what makes it a lifetimes study. Just as we think we understand the “rules of the game” another unexplained event happens and the rules are added to. We learn, we develop, our understanding increases.
Knight to King 5
