Chess and Wing Chun

Chess is a strategy game with simple rules that any child with patience can learn. But the games in Chess are some of the most beautiful creations of the human mind. Understanding these can tax the smartest minds on the planet of the earth.

 Wing Chun and Chess

I was brought up with Chess and Math. For me, I was attracted to Wing Chun not because of physical fighting but by the fact that Wing Chun had a real logic to it just like in math and Chess.

Bruce Lee’s book that was written by his students Yim Lee talked about the four quadrant theory, the Yin and Yang, economy of motion and the center-line.

I found it very appealing that Wing Chun was not just some brute fighting art that you learned from trial, error and injury like I experienced in other martial arts.

Wing Chun’s first form has the name “Little Idea Form.” My teacher’s teacher, Master Wang Kiu said that Wing Chun was just a re-packaging of a lot of good ideas that are contained in various other fighting arts. My Hung style teacher James Lore said a similar thing about Wing Chun. He said Hung style also has most of the Wing Chun ideas but they just call it small circle Kung Fu which is taught at a more advanced stage.

So Wing Chun was basically the logic and science behind a lot of fighting arts.

My first teacher Patrick Chow would cross hands with me and like in a chess game said “what do you do now?” So I did something and he always had a counter no matter what I tried. It was not a matter of speed or strength but of positional advantage that came from his vast experience of doing sticking hands with many kinds of people.

Likewise when I met Master Kenneth Chung from San Francisco, he used the same approach. Easily he could have beaten me with speed and strength as well but he didn’t do that. He beat me with superior positioning and tactics based on his deeper understanding and experience in the art. When Kenneth Chung gave a seminar in Victoria in the early 1990’s he used one of our smallest ladies to demonstrate what sticking hands was all about. Of course he could have beaten her easily by using speed and strength and his physical size, but he didn’t do that. Instead, he outmaneuvered her using even less force and speed than she was using. She hardly felt him move.

He said Wing Chun in legend comes from a lady and a small lady does not usually have the strength of a large man. So using strength and speed , should not be the primary idea of Wing Chun. He said that Ip Man was a very small man yet he easily outmaneuvered Ken’s teacher Leung Sheung who was a larger man who was also very experienced in Martial arts because he had been teaching Choy Lee Fut, White Eyebrow style and Dragon style Kung Fu for 20 years.

Kenneth Chung, who told me to just call him Ken as opposed to Grandmaster Ken (which he had every right to), said that the three most important things in Wing Chun are 1) Position, 2) Position and 3) Position.

Chess very much is also a game of positional advantage. Whoever can get a better position than their opponent will most likely win. In Chess , it is all brains. You don’t have to worry abut the size of the opponent, which is always a problem in the physical world because there we are limited by the amount of speed and strength that we have. Nobody can beat a grizzly bear. except for maybe a Chinese student that we had, who tried that in Banff Alberta on her vacation there.

Chess is a game where the idea is to attack and immobilize the enemies King. It was apparently thought up in India. According to Wikipedia:

“The history of chess goes back almost 1500 years. The game originated in northern India in the 6th century AD and spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently, through the Moorish conquest of Spain, spread to Southern Europe. But in early Russia, the game came directly from the Khanates (Muslim territories) to the south.”

The rules of Chess are very simple. Any child can learn chess. At one time Chess was mandatory for every child in Russia to learn in school in order to help the developing brain of the child.

In Chess the idea is to somehow attack the opponent’s king. The first thing a chess player learns is to set up a position at the center of the board which prevents the enemy from having easy access to your king. Furthermore your King is protected by wall of pawns which serves as a second layer of protection. Somehow you have to get around those obstacles as well as various other pieces that further protect the King.

Although the way the pieces move is very simple, the strategies involved in winning a game of chess against an advanced opponent is extremely complex and at times very subtle. The slightest positional error can be taken advantage of and lead to you defeat maybe not immediately but sometimes 40 movements or more later in the game.

Some estimates are that the number of possible Chess games is a 10 followed by 700 zeros. There is no word for this number but it amounts to about the same number as the number of atoms in the known universe.

Wing Chun is like this also. Wing Chun is meant to be simple. It has just 18 different hand techniques for defense but you can probably get away with just four or five. Traditional Shaolin arts have many kinds of Kung Fu stances but Wing Chun has only two. Some Kung Fy styles have more than 100 forms but wing Chun just has three empty hand forms and those some people say just came from a single form in the White Crane system of Kung Fu. There are 18 tradional weapons in Shaolin Kung Fu, but Wing Chun only has two: the long pole and the Butterfly knife. In the Wang Kiu system the knife and pole go hand in hand like the Yin and Yang idea of short range vs long range which are both necessary for fighting. The total number of movements in his system for the knife and pole together is equal to 108. His system contains just 5 pieces consisting of 108 movements each.

Some people dismiss Wing Chun as being to simplistic of a fighting art. There are not many techniques, but like in boxing with it’s jab, uppercut, hook punch and right cross, nobody would say that Mike Tyson’s western Boxing art with it’s four different hits, is too simplistic to be of use.

To me it makes sense that Wing Chun is a military art. You do not have time to learn a complex Kung Fu system if you have to fight in a war in six months. Six months is all you have to train. My teacher Dr. G.K. Khoe taught me the complete system of Wing Chun in six months. Of course that didn’t mean I mastered anything but I had a complete tool kit with which to work and further develop. I stayed on for lessons for maybe five years and started up a Wing Chun club so that I could practice his art.

Mastery of anything is a whole different thing and sometimes a lifetime is not enough.

When fighting an opponent of equal size, strength and experience, the fight takes on the attributes of a game of chess. However a slight positional error, once in contact would lead to your defeat in a split second. Once you make a center positional error you will quickly be beaten.

These days it seems that many people were not brought up in chess like the days before the Internet with it’s social media and many addictive games. So when I tell the young people that Wing Chun is like Chess, I often get the response “What is Chess?” So using Chess as an analogy to explain Wing Chun tactics no longer seems to work.

Trivia: the shortest chess game is just two movements by black. This is called the fools mate. It’s kind of like a one punch knockout in martial arts. A normal chess game is more like a 30 minute Gracie Jujitsu MMA fight.