Chess Made Me a Worse Chess Player
and a Better Musician.
Six original songs. Three languages. One uncomfortable truth about what chess failure actually produces — and why the Grandmaster title would have ruined everything.
People ask me how chess inspires music, and the honest answer takes longer than a sentence. The short version is that chess gave me a way of paying attention — to losing, to time pressure, to the gap between what you planned and what’s actually on the board — and that attention is the same thing songwriting needs. The longer version is what this post is about.
A chess board has sixty-four squares. You play on all of them. You lose on all of them at some point. And at some point — if you are paying attention — you stop being afraid of losing and start becoming interested in what losing teaches you about yourself.
The collection called Pieces is what happened when I stopped being afraid. Six original songs, written in the languages of the chess communities I have competed in: English, Tagalog, Taglish, Turkish. The game is the same across all of them. The feeling inside it translates perfectly without translation. But the words that carry it best depend on who is listening. The full six-song Pieces collection is on Bandcamp now.
I have played competitive chess in seven countries. I started at twelve, which is late by any serious standard. I set a goal: Grandmaster by sixteen. I am sixteen. The title did not come. What came instead is documented in a memoir launching August 2026. And what came before the memoir, in the middle of the journey while I was still inside it, was music — which is the part of this story where chess inspires music in a way I didn’t see coming.
Six squares, six songs
How chess inspires music — and what it actually produces
Chess teaches a specific kind of thinking that has no name in ordinary language. It is the ability to hold several futures in your head simultaneously, to evaluate them honestly without flinching from the ones that end badly, and then to act anyway. Grandmasters call it calculation. Psychologists might call it scenario planning. I call it the most useful thing I learned before I turned sixteen.
Chess inspires music in this collection in a specific way: every song was written from inside that calculation process — not after it. Every Move Counts is what calculation sounds like when the position is losing. One Move To Mastery is what scenario planning sounds like when the future you are imagining is still out of reach. One Move Closer is what acting anyway sounds like when the outcome is uncertain. Hindi Tayo Susuko is what commitment sounds like in Tagalog. Laro Lang is what equanimity sounds like in Taglish. Hamleni Yap! is what decisive action sounds like at 128 BPM on a Turkish dance floor.
Chess did not teach me to be musical. What it taught me was how to sit inside difficulty without flinching from it. That turns out to be the same skill that writing honest songs requires — and that, finally, is how chess inspires music when nobody’s looking.
Here is the uncomfortable truth nobody in chess education will tell you: four years of obsessive chess training, fifteen coaches, six hundred and seventy-five rated games, seven countries, and one Grandmaster goal that did not arrive made me measurably worse at chess than I would have been if I had approached the game differently.
I trained volume when I needed to train depth. I chased rating when I needed to study patterns. I treated endurance as a substitute for understanding — and the board, eventually and without mercy, told me the difference. The gap between my peak result (plus 184.8 FIDE points in a single Budapest tournament) and my floor result (minus 82.8 points six weeks later in the same city, same format, same field) is not the result of bad luck. It is the result of confusing ceiling discovery with floor building, which is the specific mistake that four years of high-volume chess training produced.
But here is what that same four years produced on the other side of the ledger: six songs in three languages. A memoir. A voice. A specific understanding of what it feels like to want something badly, work for it honestly, fall short of it completely, and find out that falling short was the whole point.
The way chess inspires music here is unusual: the music exists because the score didn’t. If the Grandmaster title had arrived on schedule, I would have been grateful and moved on. There would be no reason to write Every Move Counts, because every move would have counted in the conventional way — it would have added up to a title, which is the only score chess officially keeps. The failure is not the price of the catalog. The failure is the catalog.
This is not an argument for failing deliberately. It is an argument for paying attention to what you are actually building while you are chasing what you think you want. Chess made me a worse chess player. But the honesty it forced on me — about preparation, about the gap between what I reported doing and what I was actually doing, about the difference between working hard and working clearly — made me a better artist, a better writer, and eventually someone who had something real to say.
Calculate. Commit. Continue. — not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because the process is the point.
Read by language
Each language has its own blog — three different ways chess inspires music, written for three different chess communities in their own register. The argument is the same. The voice is different. Because chess speaks differently depending on who is at the board.
One Move To Mastery
One Move Closer
Laro Lang
Dans pistinde
The board is still mostly empty
A chess board has sixty-four squares. Pieces fills six of them. Fifty-eight remain. The memoir will add more. The music will add more. The swimming chapters, the fitness work, the medicine path, the things that happen between now and whenever this sentence is read — all of it is a form of filling squares on the same board.
Chess gave me the language for all of it. The way chess inspires music, in my case, isn’t romantic — it’s structural. I became honest about the distance between where I was and where I was trying to go. That distance is where the songs live. That distance is where the memoir lives. That distance is where everything real lives.
Calculate. Commit. Continue.
Kerim Demirkol
FIDE Arena International Chess Master · KimDem · Oceanman Champion · Borlaug Scholar
Six original chess songs. English, Filipino, Turkish. Lossless WAV download — yours to keep. On Bandcamp now. The music store has all six with preview and individual buy links.
Written at 16. Lived from 12. The full account of the four years this music came out of — the ambition, the burnout, the Budapest collapse, and the rebuilding. Pre-order on Amazon now. Launches August 2026.
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