Chess players are a breed unto themselves. The game itself, as well as the people who like it often look like a blend of the opposites. You need to be quick but patient; competitive, yet composed; aggressive and cautious, etc. Now, if you are a dancer, your step will probably be a bit lighter than the next person’s. If you work in funeral home your attitude towards life and death is probably not the same as your neighbors. By the same analogy, if your hobby, passion, or career are constantly placing you in a position where you have to think several steps ahead, have to stay obsessively aware of the minutest details of your situation and all of the potential risks, and have to know when to back off and when to push on, you can be sure that this will reflect on the way you live your life. This ability to predict actions of a swarm of moving pieces and to find a way to avoid getting swept away and actually manage to ride the current is something that you can see defining the life and career of Dragan Solak.
There’s no better way to learn about yourself, your limits and potential than overcoming adversity, and for that, well, you need the adversity. In this regard, as someone born in Serbia in the early 1980’s Dragan Solak was extremely fortunate – adversity was to be found in abundance.
While he had a stable home, and to the best of our knowledge, didn’t have to live in inhumane conditions, the state that the country, and indeed, the region was in at the time wasn’t exactly ideal for young athletes or young thinkers, whichever way you want to describe him.
Taking the brunt of the blame for the civil war that tore up the region in 1992, Serbia was placed under sanctions, and became almost universally vilified. While there were countries, mostly in Eastern Europe that didn’t want to ostracize Serbia, most of the world was closed for its citizens.
When it comes to the way you develop your skills, chess is not like some of the other sports. If you are a runner, you don’t really need an opponent to keep working on your skills, you just have to keep running. However, with chess, while working on your own is not only possible but absolutely essential, there’s only so much you can learn without someone to challenge your skills and knowledge. It wasn’t long before Dragan Solak outgrew the playground that his home country was able to provide, and decided to relocate to Turkey.
While we don’t presume to know his reasoning for the move we can say that he continued stringing one success after the other, not missing a bet when he started officially playing for the Turkish Chess Federation.
So, how does Dragan Solak and his, still burgeoning career exemplify the qualities we mentioned earlier? Well, getting to love and know chess in an impoverished country that no one wanted to come to and you couldn’t get out of demanded equal amounts of patience and ambition, acceptance and defiance. It is this kind of ability to find a way for opposites to work together that can make a difference between success and failure.
