At first blush, the title of this entry is a tad obtuse. How is horse training like chess? Sort of sounds like the riddle from Alice in Wonderland, “How is a raven like a writing desk?” In the Lewis Carol classic, the riddle is nonsense spoken by a madman. In our case, it is my hope that neither is the case.
When dealing with horses that have an ‘issue’ I often explain to the horse owner that the horse is only behaving the way it must behave; it has no choice. It behaves the way it does because of how the horse has evolved in general, combined with this horse’s specific breeding, conformation, life experience, the training received to date; in short, it is the combination of all these, and many other, factors that wire it to respond the way it does. The horse does not wake up one morning and “decide” it is going to have a problem with something it has done very well before just to make this hard on you. It does not suddenly find it funny to turn left when you think you are cueing it to go right. Yes, horses have moods and hormonal fluctuations and some even have what can only be described as a sense of humor, but they do not reason things out, or plan to make your life miserable. They respond to the stimuli around them and the way they respond is dictated by things quite beyond their control.
Okay, what does this have to do with chess?
In a chess game, each player moves one piece at a time trying to gain the advantage over the other. The movement of each piece is controlled by rules; the rook moves forward and back, side to side, while the bishop moves only diagonally, etc. For each move you make there are a finite number of responses and as the game progresses the number of possible responses is reduced until finally there are no moves left for one side or the other and the game is over. Well before that point, one player begins to find that their moves are being completely dictated; in short, they have to respond in a certain way to what is presented as to do otherwise would not really be possible. Much the same way a horse will respond in a given way when to a particular stimulus.
When a chess game begins there are many moves possible and each individual move has only a small impact on the end of the game. As the game progresses, each move becomes more and more important. When training a horse, the rider tries one method or another to achieve a particular goal with the horse. The horse in turn responds the way it must to each move based on the factors listed above. Each response will in turn prompt the next move of the rider and so on.
In training, as in chess, thinking several moves ahead is the key to winning. Making ‘this’ move so you draw ‘that’ response, which in turn allows you to make the ‘next’ move in your strategy, which if properly chosen, draws the ‘desired’ response, allowing to you make it to the ‘end game’ in a position that ensures a victorious outcome.
Also in training and chess, if you do not have a plan and are just moving around randomly and hoping it will work, OR if you are only reacting to the last move made by the other player, your chances for success are reduced greatly. Luckily for us, horses are not trying to beat us. In this way, horse training is easier than chess. The bad news is even good players are sometimes defeated by novices who do not respond as expected to standard moves. In these cases, we are forced to rethink our strategy and adjust our game.
The good news is each day is a new game. Each time we begin working with our horses we have the chance to adjust our play style to suit the nature of the particular horse. Also, we have the advantage of taking moves back in the middle of the game. Think of it like playing chess with a computer. You play along, thinking all is going well when suddenly you see you have gotten yourself into trouble. You can keep playing along knowing you are fighting a losing battle or you can step back through several moves until you find yourself in a comfortable position and then choose a new direction to take your game.
At times I am challenged in my belief that the horse is an innocent victim in the training process and it is the trainer who is at fault when things go amiss. A rider will have a problem with something they are attempting and will turn to me and say, “See, I am doing this right, the damn horse is just being willful.” In short, they have run out of moves. It is in this situation I think “Checkmate, you have lost this game.” The rider did not see where things went wrong with this horse; sometimes they picked up the game in the middle from another player and did not see the moves the previous person had made that set this match down a losing path. Here is where you start taken moves back, and back and back until you find the position of advantage. This may mean just going back to the previous preparation work you were doing for this one thing the horse is having difficulty with, but it may mean stepping down out of the saddle and returning all the way back to basic groundwork, conditioning, or flexibility training. If the opening was wrong, the game was lost before you even see it. I harp on groundwork with my clients for this very reason, as it is through groundwork we set the responses in the horse we count on later in the game.
If you don’t play chess, well don’t worry, I don’t think everyone has to play chess to be a good horse trainer, though I recommend chess to everyone, training horses or not. There is much the game can teach us about life. What I fervently encourage you to do is think about training as a move-by-move process, or step-by-step if you prefer. If you don’t understand the rules of the game when it comes to training, then you will need to learn them. Instruction from someone who already plays well is a good place to start. Understand that sometimes the proper move is to take back several moves. Think ahead and try to understand what early moves will make the later ones more effective and remember that in horse training, as in chess, you have to be smarter than the other player to win. ;>