A game of chess is one of perfect, deterministic information so by definition, it's not really a good substitute for conversation, which is more akin to a game of imperfect information. This leads to the second issue: chess (outside of a draw/stalemate) has a clear winner and loser. Comparing conversation to a competitive game feels unnecessarily adversarial though to be fair, this is acknowledged at the end of the article.

Honestly, the whole conversation == chess argument feels a bit contrived, for lack of a better word. It reminds me of Kasparov's book How Life Imitates Chess, which tried to compare business, politics, and other real-world scenarios to chess. It felt the same way to me - like a rather tortured analogy.

I will say one thing for this article - it is well put together and nicely formatted. I mean that sincerely: it's aesthetically quite pleasing.