If you’ve ever watched someone choose a seat in a room or decide when to speak in a meeting, you already understand chess. The game is just another way people show their instincts without realizing it. Then there’s a moment, usually somewhere around move fifteen, when you stop playing chess and start revealing yourself. You think you’re calculating, and honestly, sometimes you’re just acting on instinct. The small allegiances you’ve built up without noticing, pieces you reach for without thinking, squares you feel vaguely uncomfortable leaving unprotected, it all becomes relatable. The logic is real, but underneath it runs something quieter and harder to name. 

My favorite piece has always been the bishop. Which probably says something about me, though I’m not sure what. It just sits there, patient behind a row of pawns, waiting for a diagonal that might not open for another ten moves or might never open at all. There’s a kind of trust in that stillness, the same trust you learn in nonprofit work, where so much depends on timing, on letting the right opening emerge rather than forcing one. When the position finally does crack and the diagonal clears, the bishop doesn’t announce anything. It just reaches. Farther than expected, often farther than your opponent had tracked, a long quiet line of consequence was always there, just waiting for the board to catch up.

That’s the part I like. There’s something about having both bishops on the board that I’ve never quite been able to explain rationally. Maybe it’s the geometry. Two diagonals running across the position, covering entirely different squares, each one doing what the other simply can’t reach, and together they create this kind of breathing room that’s hard to quantify but easy to feel. The board opens up.  It reminds me of the way certain nonprofit efforts work in parallel. One initiative opens space for another, each shaping the environment in ways that feel less like strategy and more like climate.

Tal and Karpov played very differently, but both understood what an active bishop pair could do to a position before a single piece was exchanged. I’ve noticed it in my own games too. There’s a hesitation before trading a bishop off, a reluctance that isn’t quite strategic, more like the instinct you develop in community work, where you learn not to give away something quietly essential just because it isn’t loud

Knights have their tricks. Rooks have blunt, undeniable power, but the bishop pair just quietly shapes the whole thing, and then waits. There’s a reason the bishop has always felt personal to me, more personal than I can fully explain through strategy alone. It moves like how the nonprofit world works. Or more accurately like how I want that work to function: from the margins, along diagonals nobody’s watching yet, nudging open spaces that haven’t announced themselves as important. Honestly, so much of what we do stays invisible until it suddenly isn’t.