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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting article and it really is sad that classical music which has a lot to offer for anybody is being used as a deterrent for 'delinquents' or class signifier.

I have made a similar experience as a semi-competitive chess player. As a child, I never perceived chess as an outlandish hobby. Chess clubs are full of people from all walks of life. But nowadays especially (maybe after enough movies used chess players as a trite metaphor for 'genius mastermind') people seem more often associate chess with that kind of stuff.

It strips something from the activity itself if it becomes associated with certain exclusive groups or classes. It's also happening to healthy nutrition or sports which are increasingly seen simply as signifiers of elite status and optimised lifestyles, rather than communal, shared activities.

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I personally got a vibe that chess is an “upper-class elite thing” just because of the chess books section at my local bookstore. 30-40€ for a book on just one particular aspect of strategy, and there are dozens of books out there to read.

Yes, I know that players are not advised to read such books until they are relatively high in the rankings, but the prices of those books do tell you that even if a local chess club is open to everyone regardless of class, if you want to continue to progress in the game you’ll have to shell out money.

(Of course, things are easier these days because virtually every chess book every published has now been scanned and uploaded to filesharing communities. I get the impression that the Russian chess community, most of whom either cannot obtain or cannot afford the books, have come together in a joint effort to get this done.)

I'm pretty bad at chess but I think you could probably spend less than $100 and have all the technical materials you need to get quite good at chess (one book on middle games, tactic puzzles collection (software or book), endgame book, maybe opening book) and probably only really need to study the tactical one for quite a while. My friend went to paid chess tutoring programs as a kid and said they just solved tactics puzzles and then played each other

The vast majority of books I noticed at my local bookshop were dedicated to different openings or certain subcategories of those openings. Batsford, I think, is the most famous publisher of these.

Again I'm bad at chess but that sounds like mostly a waste of time until you're already very good from what i understand. That stuff might be entertaining to learn but if you're rated like 1500 I doubt you're losing cause your oponents are getting out of the opening with a 1/4 pawn advantage. And it takes a lot of study to get to the point where you worry about that (imo)

In my city at least chess is not an upper-class thing. Most of the dedicated chess players (I'm talking international masters) make a modest living teaching the game. Very easy to be a grandmasters in chess and be relatively low income, if you don't publish books or find some other source of revenue.

Why do you need to progress in the game? Most people play games they enjoy and don't feel a need to progress to elite levels. It's fine if you want to become elite, but not at all necessary.

Definitely the vast majority of chess players are happy to just play casual games with friends. But I think that many of the people who join chess clubs, which often emphasize ranking and competition, are interested in progressing as high as they can. And if eventually you’ll reach a point where you have to invest money in materials, it is cold comfort if clubs claim to be open to everyone regardless of socioeconomic level.

It isn't the classical music at that particular BK. The speakers are very loud. Any sound would do. The homeless just camp across the street in front of the library. So it solves nothing. BK probably gets more business at the expense of library.

Not only are the speakers loud, they are those PA-type speakers with a limited frequency-response and a piercing, gritty sound — fatiguing to listen to.

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