Being Bad At Chess Is Star Trek Tradition

3-dimensional Chess is supposed to be some kind of futuristic turbo-Chess in Star Trek, but every time it comes up, it’s a fantasy where writers pretend that intuition and gumption can possibly defeat logic and analysis in a game of perfect information with mathematically exact moves. They do this in the Original Series with Spock’s perfect logic being defeated by Kirk’s…well, exactly what quality Kirk has isn’t clear, but some kind of creativity and human gumption. That isn’t a thing in Chess. If an opponent surprises you with a sudden checkmate, it’s not because they invented a new way to move their pieces, it’s because they saw one of the very large but finite number of perfectly mathematically defined moves that you missed.

The Next Generation usually has Poker games, not Chess, which is a better choice for many reasons: It allows a larger number of players at once, Poker-playing strategies straightforwardly reveal a lot about someone’s personality, especially concerning appetite for risk, while Chess-playing strategies require a lot of knowledge of the game to reveal anything besides the fact that these two characters play Chess, and if you want to do the “pure logic gets outmaneuvered by intuition” thing, then it makes perfect sense in Poker. Data, taking up Spock’s role as the flawless logician with poor intuition, can instantly calculate the exact odds that any other player has any other hand based on the cards in his own hand and the river, but this means he has a very predictable strategy and no ability to guess when someone is bluffing even in a weekly Poker game where players can get to know each other’s tells. Paradoxically, Data would be very good at high-tier professional Poker where everyone has figured out how to mask their tells so the math is all that’s left, but because it’s a multiplayer game, Data can lose because of an inability to take advantage of other players’ weaknesses.

But also, when 3D Chess does show up in TNG, it’s Deanna Troi checkmating Data and saying that Chess isn’t just a game of logic, it’s also about intuition. No it isn’t! Games of intuition exist, Chess is not one of them!