The Law of Numerical Superiority: Why Intentions Don't Win Games
This is part of the Chess Theology series.
For the full context, I recommend starting with Sacrifices as Experience: What Chess Teaches Us About Failure.
Chess is a beautiful game. The more I learn about its theory, the more I connect its mental models to the mechanics of life. Within Chess there are analogies that reduce the guesswork in both micro and macro living.
The most foundational of these is the Principle of Control.
The 3-Piece Rule
A chess board has 64 squares. Your ability to win a game correlates directly with how well you control the critical squares.
Take the f-pawn for example. It is a notorious problem area in the opening because it is defended only by the King. If the squares around it are not properly reinforced, the opposition can combine a Bishop and a Queen to create a lightning-fast checkmate. They aren’t “smarter” than the King; they simply overwhelm him.
This is the law of numerical superiority:
- A square you attack with one piece is contested.
- A square you attack with two pieces is safe.
- A square you attack with three pieces, you control.
In any exchange, if you have more pieces targeting a square than your opponent has defending it, you will win that exchange.
Tactical Overloads: From the Board to the Pitch
This principle is identical to the logic used in elite football (soccer). For teams that play a possession-heavy game, numerical superiority is the only metric that matters.
In the build-up phase, a midfielder will drop as close to the defenders as possible. Why? Because if the opposition commits three men to a high press, the defense now has four people to pass around. They create a “plus-one” scenario to render the opponent’s effort useless.
Coaches like Pep Guardiola obsess over this. They use inverted fullbacks to win the midfield battle and overlapping fullbacks to load the opposition’s box. The tactical goal is simple: Ensure the other team never has more men than you in any part of the pitch. The opposition’s only foil is to counter-load, using midfielders to cover the “half-spaces” created by touchline wingers.
The game, at its highest level, is just a series of attempts to create and resolve numerical imbalances.
The Life Map: An Audit of Artifacts
How does this map to real life?
The more artifacts you are willing to commit to a pursuit, the higher your chances of winning at it. Be it family, business, religion, or even sin. Time, money, and attention are the “pieces” on your board.
We can invert this principle to perform a brutal audit of our lives: It is easy to infer a person’s true priorities by looking at where they expend their resources.
The tricky part is that we are often mistaken about what we actually prioritize.
- A man may call himself a “family man,” but a look at his calendar—his deployment of pieces—reveals that he dedicates almost zero resources to the home.
- A founder may claim to value “culture,” but fails at the moment of truth when executing that value system becomes too costly in terms of time or capital.
Numerical superiority doesn’t care about your stated values; it only cares about your deployments. You can tell where your heart truly is by looking at where you spend your pieces. Whatever you focus your numbers on, wins. For good or for evil.
Next Step: Read Sacrifices as Experience to understand the cost of the pieces you trade to maintain this control.