This paper describes a Portuguese ongoing experience of policies aiming at including people in society and ultimately in the labour market, promoting sustainability in wellbeing. Namely, if focuses on the teaching of chess to prisoners in Portuguese jails, and the following participation of these prisoners in championships as the first Hybrid European Championship for Prisoners held in October of 2021. the authors base the study in theories about social inclusion and relate them to chess. Then they explain in detail experiences dealing with the inclusion of chess in society. Furthermore, they explain the Portuguese case. The chapter concludes that chess has been a very interesting tool for the social integration of prisoners in Portugal as well as in other countries. Therefore, the experience is worth being pursued and developed worldwide.
TopIntroduction
Chess is considered to be one of the most fascinating table games that exist. Its origins are legendary – it would have been invented in Antiquity for a King who would have been tired of wars, and who could not pay the inventor the sum he demanded (Dodona, 2021). Chess evolved in the Middle Ages – and in the Renaissance the two first chess books were written by a Portuguese (Damião, 1512), and by a Spanish monk (Lopez de Segura, 1561) Long time considered as a luxury for very intelligent people, chess became a sport with official champions since the end of the 19th century (Winter, 2021).
Nowadays chess is considered both a sport (Chess and Technology, 2015), a science (Chess and Science, 2021) and even a form of art (Humble, 1993, McDonald, 2013) or all of them as the same time (Fine, 2015). First, chess is a sport, because millions of registered players enter official championships every year under the umbrella of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) (FIDE, 2021); to those should be added the millions of amateurs that each day practice in online platforms like chess.com or lichess (Chess.com 2021, Lichess 2021); chess is played at different speeds (classic, rapid, blitz) and there are World Championships for the three categories (Fide, 2021). Secondly, chess is a science, because it has not only rules, but even a very developed theory (Šahovski Informator, 2021); in fact since the 1980s chess began to be played by computers, a goal aimed at by Alan Turing some decades before (Turing, 2016; Stezano, 2018); the “silicone monsters” first won a controversial match against a World Champion in 1996, (Newborn, 1997); afterwards the potency of the Artificial Intelligence grew, and nowadays the the Stockfish program (Stockfish, 2021) and Alphazero program (Sadler, 2019) seem to be the most advanced machines in the theory of chess; world class players use computer programs to enhance their knowledge and skills about chess (Kalinin, 2017). Thirdly, chess is an art, because every game is a collection of moves, and all those moves are options for creation; novices are usually very creative, and they lose a lot; therefore experienced players tend to follow more reliable and known lines of play; but, it is always possible to find a new move or to improve a previous studied position – and this possibility of creativity makes every game a constant surprise (Kasparov, 2018). It is said that “the player who loses is in many cases the one that does the last big mistake” (Tartakover, 2021) but this usually happens because the opposite side has been playing good and creative moves that provoke and induce the decisive mistake. All in all, even if computers may have changed the game, they did not change the players, who are as human and creative and able of art as ever (Metcalfe, 2021).