The Best Chess Analogy I've Seen Yet

As we all have seen, the media compares things to chess: baseball (ad naseum during the playoffs), football, politics, financial transactions and the list goes on and on.

But this time, someone actually made a comparison to chess that is better than I've ever seen.

An FBI counterintelligence agent compared her line of work to chess, "Counterintelligence is like chess -- you have the foundation of a crime, the trunk of the tree, with a lot of branches. In terrorism cases, you look at the intelligence and the potential crime to stop the threat before it actually happens."

Not only is that pretty cool to think about (her line of work), but the analogy is a breath of fresh air from all the banal analogies and comparisons that usually bombard news reports.

Chess Comparisons

Tis the season when every sports writer in America breaks out the chess comparisons. Every year, MLB writers compare baseball matchups to chess. During the summer, it's not so bad. But during the playoffs, every, single writeup has at least one reference to chess.

Now with football in full swing, comparisons are being made between linebackers and quarterbacks. This week it was Ray Lewis vs. Peyton Manning.

To add on top of these is the US Presidential election. And we all know that somewhere in a political contest, there has to be at least some reference to chess. This political chess comparison is actually pretty good. The writer seems to have the good sense to take the comparison one step further by actually explaining the comparison of John McCain to an amateur chess player. Most writers will simply say, "it's a chess match" and leave it at that.

And then there is this article that classifies the two candidates into classic and hypermodern types. He dubs McCain a "classic 'Romantic-era' player" comparing him to Captain Evans. On the other hand, the author tags Obama as a "Hypermodern positional player" who is "an analytic who prefers big ideas to short-term tactics."

I really don't mind the comparisons. I enjoy the ones that go into the details. But the ones that make the broad-stroke comparisons aren't really that great. Everything is like chess in one way or another. But to put some thought behind the comparison is what makes the comparison truly worthy.