Source: see below.
What happens when a man is a good writer and scholar, but a self-admitted beginner in chess? Most chess players would say that his insights about the game and life would not be worth much. But this is not necessarily true. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, the weak players plays chess just as much as the strong one. Mychal Denzel Smith, a low-rated beginner, writes in an interesting essay about what chess means to him (the illustration is taken, as an example, from the many illustrations in the essay, by Peter Oumanski).
Smith shares with us that scholars' mate is not good chess, that pawns are important, that using the queen to threaten the opponent without developing one's pieces is no good, and so on. He makes, however, no pretenses that he is teaching experienced players something new; rather, he is describing his own process of learning the basics. The essay is best in its examples of interesting facts - for example, that the "scholar's mate" really meant (when the term was first coined) "student's mate" in the sense of young students, and in other languages is it know as "school mate" or "shoemaker's mate" (as in Hebrew). I.e., "scholar" here was a term of derision, not praise.
Perhaps due to the very fact that he is a beginning and looks afresh at chess, he avoids the old cliches. Chess is not, for him, a status symbol, something to be taken up as a matter of showing one is intelligent. It is - what is often forgotten - fun, a game, and a skill to be mastered. He seems (like many scholars nowadays, alas) to be rather obsessed with class/race/social differences, he correctly points out among other interesting things how chess, like other supposedly "highbrow" activities - opera for example - is not only for intellectuals but can be known on a high level by all.
