Musing 125

I was recently asked to teach chess again, and I was thinking of my own chess teacher.

When I began learning from him, he gave me an acronym for the basics of chess strategy that has such wide applicability to life – CAKE

C - center A - army K - King E - examine

With only a couple exceptions, the pieces in chess are most effective in the center of the board because they can affect the most squares. So in general, you will want to move chess pieces toward the center of the board.

In life, this corresponds to finding where we can be most effective. Are we introverts who love books and seeing people helped with knowledge? Put yourself where that can happen. Are you gregarious and enjoy being in large groups, go for that.

Similarly, the A in CAKE stands for army. The key point here is that you can’t win the game with just 1 piece (not even the queen!) so you need to use all your pieces.

The applicability to life should be fairly straightforward. When you commit to your goals, are you trying to do the bare minimum for it, or are you actually committing the resources and gifts you have to it?

K is for the King, because obviously, the goal in chess is to put the opponent’s king into checkmate and keep your’s out of it.

When doing something, what’s the win condition or way to know it’s been accomplished? Or, what’s the lose/failure condition? Or even more generally, it’s just goal setting in general.

E is examining what’s going on. In chess, this is important because you need to watch out for traps your opponent is trying to set for you, or attacks they may be setting up, or weaknesses they have so you can attack.

In life, this looks like doing prep work for what you’re working on. In business, it’s learning from mentors or competitors. In day to day life, it might be working on self-improvement.

And to answer - why cake as an acronym? Because victory is sweet, and so is cake!