[A humble request: If you can, please donate to help me carry on tracing word histories. Thank you.]

 

With reference to the wooden pieces that chess-players and draughts-players move across the board, the noun woodpushing is a colloquial appellation for chess-playing and for draughts-playing—especially for inferior chess-playing and for inferior draughts-playing.

Likewise, the noun woodpusher is a colloquial appellation for a chess-player and for a draughts-player—especially one who is unskilled or a novice.

The noun woodpushing occurs, for example, in the blurb of Curse of Kirsan: Adventures in the Chess Underworld (Milford (Connecticut): Russell Enterprises, Inc., 2002), by Sarah Hurst:

Chess, Insanity and Politics Have Always Been Inextricably Connected

Chess can be an obsession that takes over your life, whether you are a wood-pushing novice or a superstar grandmaster. British journalist Sarah Hurst was infected with chess fever at the age of 20 and spent seven years exploring the mysterious world of the amateur and professional player.

These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the nouns woodpushing and woodpusher that I have found:

1-: From the column Chess, published in The Northern Whig (Belfast, County Antrim, Ireland) of Thursday 18^th February 1892 [page 7, column 3]:

THE STEINITZ V. TCHIGORIN MATCH.

Bearing in mind the score at one time in the Steinitz-Zukertort match, it is perhaps too early to predict, with any comfortable assurance of success, what will be the result of the present contest. This much, however, we will say, that everyone who loves chess as distinguished from wood-pushing, and who prefers the old brilliant combination play to the new masterly inactivity, must hope for the success of the younger master, whose victory will undoubtedly give encouragement to the advocates of the open game.

2-: From The Professor’s Spectacles, a short story set in Vienna, Austria, by J. W. D., published in the American Chess Magazine (New York City, New York, USA) of December 1897—here, the noun woodpusher is used as a surname:

[page 409, column 1]:
I returned, wearing meanwhile the master’s spectacles, to my bachelor quarters in the little side street near the university. Later on, it being my “chess evening,” I dropped in at the club, hoping to get a game with my dearest enemy, Herr Woodpusher.
[page 410, column 1]:
One young whipper-snapper contended that there was something occult about my winning—some circumstance outside of the game itself.
“His goggles, for instance—I do not at all doubt it,” put in Karsel.
“Absurd!” I exclaimed, my choler beginning to rise.
“Not so very preposterous, either; there’s old Woodpusher can’t play a little bit without his gig-lamps,” retorted another.

3-: From London’s Leading Chess Amateurs, by W. Smith, published in Cassell’s Magazine (New York: Cassell and Company, Limited) of November 1898 [page 632, column 1]:

Few people, perhaps, recognise the immense hold which chess has upon London. In every little café and restaurant the chequered board is to be found; and day after day devotees of the game may be witnessed battling as if their lives depended upon the results.
But for any true idea to be obtained of the popularity of “the noble art of wood-pushing,” as chess was once designated, a tour round the London chess clubs is absolutely necessary.

4-: From the column Draughts, published in The Nottinghamshire Guardian (Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England) of Saturday 1^st July 1899 [page 7, column 6]:

We notice that […] in last week’s issue of the “Birmingham Weekly Post” […] the paragraph headed “Wood-pushing” […] is wrongly credited to the “Leeds Mercury.” It appeared originally in this column, in May of last year.

5-: From the column The Chess World, by ‘Mate in Two’, published in the Morning Leader (London, England) of Saturday 19^th August 1899 [Literary Supplement: page 4, column 5]:

How many people in the world play chess? Someone has been setting the number down at 24,000,000, and so far as one can follow his process of argument, he has done so for the following reasons: In 1872 he says “there was a carefully-compiled magazine issued by the City of London Chess Club,” and in this Mr. E. N. Potter computed the number who played chess at that time to be 7,000,000. Now more than three times the number indulge in the game. Well, let it be 24,000,000, or any other imposing collection of millions, the larger the better; and let the cynic refrain from his Carlylean fling of “mostly wood-pushers!”