My chess rating is 1847. This number tells you almost nothing useful about how I think.

I learned chess from my uncle, who learned it in a prison in El Salvador and taught it to me as a language — not a game, but a way of having a conversation about consequences. He never talked about rating. He talked about position. 'Rating tells you where you've been,' he said. 'Position tells you where you are.'

I became serious about chess in high school, joined the team, studied openings, improved my rating. And I noticed something uncomfortable: the better my rating got, the more I played not to lose rather than to win. I became conservative. Defensive. I stopped taking the positions that were interesting in favor of the positions that were safe.

My uncle, who never broke 1400, beat me in a casual game when I was visiting last summer. He played a knight sacrifice in the middle game that I hadn't seen and couldn't calculate. It was objectively unsound — according to every engine I checked afterward. It was also beautiful, and it worked, because I was so surprised by the irrationality of it that I spent six moves trying to refute it instead of playing my own game.

Afterward he said: 'You play like someone protecting something. What are you protecting?'

I've been thinking about that question since. At Penn's Wharton School, I want to study behavioral economics — specifically, how the psychology of loss aversion shapes decisions in high-stakes environments. My uncle asked me a chess question. I think he was asking me something larger.