Playing chess is a life lesson in concentration | Hacker News Reader

Playing chess is a life lesson in concentration

aeon.co

229 pointsagronaut124 comments

Once one has learned how to concentrate, the next thing to learn is to be able to concentrate on the right thing.

Chess taught me to concentrate, but I've always had trouble concentrating on what I should be concentrating on, and instead wasted too much time concentrating on chess and other diversions.

The real trick is being able to focus on something even when it gets frustrating, painful, or boring, and being able to do this for extended periods of time. Then the world is your oyster.

It's easier to maintain long concentration on some things, and harder for other things.

In chess, once you start a game, you don't stop thinking about the game until it's over. And you also tend to be surrounded by an environment---whether it's audience, or a park, or a chess club---that doesn't try to grab your attention away.

It's really easy for me to concentrate on playing music, or just listening to music, for two hour straight. The same for reading books.

But I can't maintain that long a focus when I'm programming. At some point, I'll be waiting the computer to give me feedback, for compilation, tests, or results. There's nothing for me to think about on that code, and my mind goes to something else. I have a list of other stuff that I could fix, so I don't stray too far from programming, and can always go back into it swiftly.

I took a "study drug" once for fun in college. My friend warned me: "it doesn't focus you on studying, you might end up very meticulously cleaning for a few hours". I ended up playing Nonogram for 3 hours into the night.

On the "focus what's important in life" I feel like everyone should consider Effective Altruism - focusing on the effectiveness of one's pro-social actions first and foremost.

what do you think about the fountainhead?

Have not read. From everything I've heard around it -- I already hate it.

Why do you ask?

I read effective altruism and then the fountainhead right afterwards. It was a good balance between two extremes.

I see nothing extreme about giving 10% of your income to help others.

Thank you for the recommendation for The Fountainhead -- I'll consider finally reading it some day so I can form a personal opinion of it rather than basing my opinion off others' comments of it.

Yeah, I finally got all of my medications dialed in, so I am a ninja at concentration.

And my Elo in chess has skyrocketed, while my job performance has stayed flat.

>The real trick is being able to focus on something even when it gets frustrating, painful, or boring, and being able to do this for extended periods of time. Then the world is your oyster.

Any advice on learning this? Is it just the usual "do things that are difficult and meaningful?" Or is there a shortcut?

The key is recognizing that pain, boredom, frustration, and any negative emotion, are merely temporary, ephemeral states of the mind and body. You do not need to change what you do with your attention merely because a whim of boredom came up. Meditation practice helps you learn this, how to let go of whatever's taking over the mind. With your mind freed, you may then reapply it to the task at hand.

So how you do concentrate on things that are not chess and games which you find boring?

I think this comes down to realizing that everything in life is eventually hard. Provided you're doing something worthwhile [1], when the going gets hard, don't look for easier pastures. They're all difficult. Just keep plowing away. And don't doubt. Where there is no doubt, the wind is your companion.

[1] Ecclesiastes is a pretty great book to help figure out for yourself what exactly this is. It's not for nothing that the book uses the same word for "meaningless" or "empty" or "vanity" or "vapor" or "breath" as its refrain. It's also a beautiful book in itself as literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes#Influence_on_West...

(disclosure: I am not religious). Yes. Ecclesiastes has some great and often quoted lines: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die…” “…There is nothing new under the sun”. It’s not a typical old testament book, which I think is why I finished it.

(going really off topic here)

I was inspired to look at the Biblical version after reading the awesome “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny, in which a poet on a mission to Mars uses it as a basis for communicating with the ancient Martian elders. Incidentally, a copy of Zelazny’s 1969 story was landed on Mars in 2008 on a DVD carried by the Phoenix probe [0]. If 'The Martian' was the perfect story of engineering on Mars, 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes' is perhaps the perfect poetic look at the planet, at least on a par with "The Silver Locusts".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(spacecraft)#Phoenix_D...

Thanks for the pointer to “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”.

Thanks for the link to Ecclesiastes. It is a great book which I hadn't read yet!

There is a technique I see none of the other comments have hit upon.

First, know concentration is a skill, so develop that. I can tell you how to muscle up but if you can't pull up then knowing how won't help.

You are able to convince yourself you're interested in something by asking questions about it. Create the space in your brain that wants the knowledge to be in there. Find a question you genuinely want to know the answer to. There's usually at least something. This is how I was able to maintain focus on reading atomic physics, funnily enough, it's now the most prominent thing I remember from my degree.

You start from something simple and repeat this every day forming habit. Gradually it would build general self-control.

For example, you start by always eating breakfast at a set time. After a few months you add going to sleep at a specific time. Once you regulate sleeping and eating you can add some exercise. After you learn how to control your physiological needs you will become more focused at work and daily life.

Remember to take things slowly.

I think people try too much to concentrate on things that they do not actually like. As Bukowski wrote, “Don’t Try.”

I'd interpret Bukowski's famous "don't try" not as "don't do what you don't want to", but rather as "don't foster conflicts". To try is to do something when you half-believe that you can do it and half-believe that you can't. It's half-commitment. Bukowski is instructing, I believe (wink wink), to drop all that believing and just do things, without mental baggage.

So in other words this is the forefather of Yoda's "Do or do not, there is no try"?

I think it’s about not forcing things. Don’t set a time for when a creative output should be done. Wait for it and let it come to you. “Trying” won’t lead to genius creations; just letting it come to you from spontaneous inspiration and patience.

What I frequently hear from writers is you don't get to decide when inspiration will hit you. To be equipped to deal with it you have to write all the time, mental block or not. It just gets easier the more you do it.

I think a lot of it is to do with what you're paying attention to. If you show up every day to make and think about art, then your brain will stay in that space, and eventually reward you with ideas. If you completely give up and disconnect, then your brain will leave that space. You don't get ideas for things that you never think about.

I've had friends commend me on my discipline before, as if I've spent years honing my concentration skills. The reality is that I just like my side projects. I like thinking about them and playing with them. Everyone's trying to force it instead of giving themselves space to play.

I don't necessarily recommend it, but dropping out of college for a year and working dead-end low-wage jobs got me to go back with a renewed vigor and willingness to focus. Subjects and activities I found boring and impossible to focus on suddenly gained a new weight that pushed me through my previous limitations.

Another poster mentioned it, but seeking mastery over the whims and desires of your mind is paramount. My anecdote above was basically that. My mind never stopped fighting me, begging me to be lazy and go play video games. But the inner acknowledgement that I had to succeed and graduate let me fight against it.

I also changed my environment, working out of coffee shops and computer labs, surrounded by other people studying and working their asses off. I joined the ACM chapter at my school and expanded my social network to include people who were working as hard as I wanted to. This provided mental sustenance when my personal discipline would wane.

I suggest listening and reading all of John Cleese's talks on creativity. The painful level of effort he describes is fundamentally related to these challenges.

Also, caffeine, copious amounts of it.

Neil Gaiman said that when he doesn't feel like writing, he gives himself two choices, either sit there and do nothing, or write.

Then, he'll sit there, and after a few minutes, the boredom of doing nothing gets very strong, and he'll be motivated to write.

Jerry Seinfeld said the same thing for his comedy writing. I've found the advice to be incredibly helpful in my own work.

I'll have to give that a try. Because right now its write seriously (science), or play with the internet......

I think part of the answer is that you have to have a clear long-term goal that is very important to you, and keeping that goal in mind when are tempted to quit.

If you don't know yourself well enough to know what goal is truly important to you, you risk abandoning your task when the going gets tough. So self-knowledge is also important.

I think that's part of the reason why so many young people don't do that well in school.. they either don't know what they want or think they want one thing when they really don't. Once they mature, understand themselves better and so know what they really want then achieving it could become much easier (assuming they're not burnt out or too old by then).

Also, I'm not by any means a master at this, so I try to look to people who are, and learn from them. For me that means people who've been able to achieve amazing feats of endurance, like Robert Owens[1] and David Goggins[2], or have overcome some incredible adversity, like Brooke Ellison[3] and Kyle Maynard[4].

From some of them, I remember learning to focus on the present, on putting one foot in front of the other, in a kind of hyperfocus on exactly and only the very smallest thing you need to do right now, then doing it again, and again, and again, and again.

Another lesson I'm now remembering learning from many of them is that they built up a stock of achievements they could recall when the going got tough. Knowing that they persevered and succeeded before gave them confidence that they could do it again.

You also have to have hope, be willing to try (and try your best, no matter what the outcome), and somehow overcome depression and other mental issues, if you suffer from them. Therapy works for some, medication or other medical interventions work for others, religion for still others, but ultimately there are no sure or easy answers here.

Having a strong support network and mentors also really helps a lot. It's very difficult to go it alone, though some truly exceptional people manage it (though even then there's usually something in their early life that helped -- often parents or other sources of guidance)... I'm thinking of POW's and concentration camp survivors. Speaking of which, I can highly recommend Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning,[5] as it's about why people endured in the absolute worst circumstances imaginable.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg9kJeule7Q

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78I9dTB9vqM

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alf_I1p7bds

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqRJ-178dVk

[5] - https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/...

I agree with long-term goals and knowing what you want, but I feel for some people there also needs to be some kind of pressure. Mine was 'I'm afraid to be poor and if don't work right now I can say bye to this eng. degree'

Focus is a complex muscle and it's even worse when you're never challenged during childhood. 'grit', 'hard work' are empty words when you don't see the need. Breezing through school while being a smart ass annoying (childhood trauma will make you a pita to teach...) brat is no recipe to learn 'work'. It's different from physical work that was taught to me early, where you see the chai of effort to the result quite quickly, build a wall, a cement patio, wallpaper, paint, 'heavy' garden maintenance, housecleaning. Immediate or rapid feedback, you do you see.

With intellectual concentration, be it books, science lessons, etc. If there's no quick gratification ('oh I understand this immediately, new thing I know, cool' or 'Hu, interesting story') the voluntary focus muscle doesn't engage.

It took me years of searching at random how to make myself concentrate enough to 'go through' stuff.

I hope my kids won't have the 'panic-level fear of being poor' as a drive, but I also hope I find a way to teach them the value of sometimes forcing yourself without understanding why /right away/ (trusting you're on a path to enlightenment or victory or success...) and to teach them to exercise the focus muscle as they need.

> From some of them, I remember learning to focus on the present, on putting one foot in front of the other, in a kind of hyperfocus on exactly and only the very smallest thing you need to do right now, then doing it again, and again, and again, and again.

This one really resonates with me. During a difficult period when I was struggling with burnout and feeling "scatterbrained", I developed a habit of writing down the next task I needed to do. If I couldn't bring myself to make any progress on it, I would then break it down and write down the first subtask, etc. (I would not write down a big list of subtasks as this would only discourage me, it was just about the next one or two things.) On a bad day this might recurse down to extremely simple things like "connect to the VPN" or "open the visual studio project", but I'd write it down and checkmark it nonetheless to force myself to make minimal progress. For each top level task, I would end up with a OneNote page with multiple screenfuls of deeply indented notes and ctrl+1 checkboxes everywhere.

Additional benefits of this approach include the ability to continue quickly after interruptions or distractions, and to easily switch between tasks when waiting is involved. It also helps to dig deeper into tasks (e.g. really understand each change in a code review instead of glossing over big chunks in the diff). So I've continued this habit ever since.

Through grit

I think the point is that diversions don't really require much concentration, they're easy to consume. If they did require a lot of concentration they wouldn't (usually) be diversions.

Depending on the goals you've laid out in front of you for the day, Chess is either a diversion or the "right thing". The "right thing" is up to you. Considering the investment Chess requires I don't think it's typically what is pulling people away from tasks they should be doing.

- Concentrate - play the position, not the player - sometimes you play the player - survive an encounter where there is nobody else to blame

That last point is the biggest lesson to be learned for a lot of kids, and a big reason kids quit a good number of difficult activities.

Words of wisdom here that I try to impart to my kids.

We nerd types have made this mistake for the last 75 years or so. This mystique about chess has been completely misplaced in my humble opinion. At first the claim was that Smart people played chess, therefore if you made a computer that played chess well it would be Smart. That turned out to be hilariously untrue, but durable: nerds were finally relieved of their arrogance after about 5 decades only when it became clear even to them that the game-winning systems required brute force methods.

Thoughtful people absorb life lessons from almost everything they care to study deeply. You can make virtually all of his claims about martial arts, child rearing, studying and playing music, competitive video gaming, gardening, playing golf, meditation, religious study, farming, marksmanship, other board games, programming—the list is endless.

The author doesn't dispute this at all. He's a chess grandmaster who is not mystifying chess, but pointing out how a lifetime of rigorous chess playing has taught him the value of concentration. He acknowledges that the very same thing occurs in people in other disciplines, athletes for example.

It's not an article about the virtue of nerds but about the combination of attention, flow experience and concentration, in the face of a culture that neglects all three but the latter in particular.

And I think he is very right and chess can teach us important lessons here, as can programming, or craftsmanship, or participation in the arts among other things.

Particularly important is the point about autonomy. Making concentration and understanding of our own mind through games like chess a priority is liberating. Through things like chess it is possible to move from being distracted by external rewards towards understanding one's own cognition the focus of life, without which no genuine thinking is possible.

What you are saying is true. You can get life lessons from everything. Nevertheless, in some cases implicitly we talk not about the average or best case but the minimum. A university degree means you meet some minimum requirements. Being a doctor means you meet some minimum requirements. Of course, you can diversify well above the minimum.

Here, also, we are talking about the minimum. Sure, you can do gardening and think deeply about something, or you can feel very tired and the years just flow by.

In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.

It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference. Not the expected and not the max as in other stories we tell ourselves.

"In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.

It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference."

UNLIKE the work of doctors and lawyers (at least in good standing here in the US), there is no clear "minimum" in chess (or other sports), you are free to not think and lose as much as you desire. Plenty of people do not take games seriously. I concede that in order to have a elo/fide/uscf rating above something I consider competitive, say 90% percentile, you likely need those qualities.

Also sad blitz chess noises

> In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.

someone passionate about gardening can put it the exactly same way you did.

AlphaZero, formerly the strongest chess playing program/player, searches the game tree via Monte Carlo tree search, which really isn't brute force.

But more to the point of your comment, it makes sense to make these claims about chess in particular because chess more or less is exclusively about pure concentration. There is no physical ability you must develop like you would usually have to for sports or music or gaming.

If Monte Carlo tree search is not brute force , what would you consider brute force?

Well, I'd say it's an approximation of brute force. I'd say traditional minimax (with or without branch-and-bound improvements e.g. alpha-beta pruning), is brute force.

A nerd should have understood that for a game with finite search space, a sufficiently fast brute-force solution will always beat (or not lose to) a smart person. It's the nature of brute-force solution.

All search spaces are finite for a sufficiently fast brute force solution.

75 years? It's had a mystique for over 1000 years (going back to the Islamic golden age).

I meant in the programming world.

The first claim is a strawman and deserves no further refuting.

The second is...true. Everything we do is something we can learn life lessons from. And chess is a lesson in concentration and focused mental activity, which remarkably few things are.

I got out of chess before it consumed my life and I never regretted it. It's a game, not something to spend your life on. Doing anything well is a lesson in concentration, so from that point of view you could replace 'Playing chess' with a very large variety of other skills and it would all send the exact same message.

I understand your point. It's a very addictive game. But I feel that the point of the author is that it's a game that requires skills that are useful in life. I kind of agree. Also it's easier to concentrate on something fun, challenging and in the case of blitz or bullet, fast and intense.

But what's the difference between Chess and if they stopped updating League of Legends? Even as an esports fan I find odd how much value people place on a game.

If they stopped updating League of Legends, then in 20 years it would be dead. Chess is here to stay for ages to come.

In moderation, yes. As a career, definitely not.

agreed

What did you replace it with?

Work. And at the time a saxophone. Both much more satisfying.

So, as someone with ADHD-C, and someone who's been playing a lot of chess recently in the wake of its resurgence online, can I expect some important insight or self-realization from practicing the art of concentrating?

I can concentrate for hours and hours on certain things, I just don't always get to choose the things. Will chess and its nature of honing concentration force me to enhance that?

I listened to this article on the drive to work this morning, and I found it very interesting, and yet a bit hard to relate to. For neurotypical players, maybe it's a lot more rewarding to sit down and concentrate on chess. When I play, I have some good streaks and then streaks where I get tilted out of my flow, and I try and force myself to stay in the chess box, and I burn up and find something else to do. I used to be 1600-1700 in high school, and now I'm barely treading water at 1250-1350 on lichess.

I'm hoping there's someone with a brain like mine who has more experience to share.

Great link. Best I've seen in the front page in quite some time, imo.

Enhance it in other areas? I doubt it. If you go by Barkley's model, ADHD is mainly executive dysfunction and might just as well be called intention deficit disorder. Hyper focus conversely is what is called perseveration and it is actually not a good thing in most cases. If you find an interesting angle that keeps your mind in the zone then that's probably how you could learn chess more deeply (aka if you really like studying chess openings and books from Alekhine, and if you enjoy finding those patterns in your own games for instance). Of course there are ways to improve the situation, break down your tasks into smaller tasks and so on. Or do boring small tasks immediately. Get enough sleep. Exercise. Also I would strongly recommend medication. Meditation seems to help some people as well.

I can attest for meditation. If I try to sum up the insight in the case of ADHD it's that the next thing will not be more interesting than the present, and that simply being can be more pleasing than "doing" something. It's not only intellectual, there is a whole well-being feeling that comes up (at least for me). So the whole never-ending fall forward to find the next best/more interesting becomes kind of pointless in the process. Maybe not a cure but an efficient way to keep it under control instead of suffering from it.

Highly recommend HealthyGamerGG's videos "How to Deal with Your ADHD ft. Mizkif" and "Solving Laziness with Asmongold". (Her's a Harvard psychology professor who has surprisingly-wholesome live therapy sessions with famous streamers). The presentation is a tad corny in some areas--like awkwardly phrasing psychological phenomena in terms of RPG mechanics--but that doesn't make up the bulk of it, promise. I'd be lying if I claimed to be coming from a place of any more expertise than you, but I suspect that some of the framings he discusses will resonate.

It's actually hard to practice concentrating with a game or active activity. If you truly want to meet your mind, sit down and do nothing, i.e. meditate. You'll notice your mind racing, and you'll see just why it's hard to concentrate on anything. You can then practice letting go of intervening thoughts, without self hate, and just observe the breath, sounds around, but in a passive, calm manner, not reactionary or impulsive with the attention.

I've heard this advice many times over the years, and I guess I've really just never committed myself to meditation as a regimen. I can keep a fitness routine very well, I think that's as close I get with my brain to that place of reflection.

Did you have any like, significant trauma to deal with when you started meditating? I have some things in my past that I feel the need to run from when I am still and quiet in my mind.

(Beginner/very part-time meditator here.)

Just start. I think most ‘courses’ will address this concern — it’s kinda the basic tenet of meditation, that you‘ll notice thoughts but that this is okay. You train yourself to notice them, observe them, and let them drift by.

Personally I like Headspace because I find Andy Puddicombe’s voice delightful. But of course there are a million meditation resources, many free.

As someone who never thought I’d be a meditator — and whose first experience was in a packed auditorium with Sam Harris at the front, which was amazing [0] — I can’t recommend it enough. This thread has me wanting to get back in to it. (Because, like anything else, the act of just doing it is half the battle won.)

[0]: At the global atheist conference, whatever it was called, in Melbourne, c. 2012? Anyone else there?

This reminds me of a question posed by an online user of a message board I frequent: Will the likes of Deep Blue and Alpha Zero kill competitive chess?

My initial thoughts were, "No, of course not! Cars and trains didn't kill track-and-field competitions!".

But now that I think about it, I really do feel a slight aversion towards getting back into chess.

Although practiced concentration is a side-benefit of playing chess regularly, the fact of the matter is that nowadays, it is impossible to play in a manner that hasn't already been thoroughly examined by some AI.

There's no new ground to discover; no interesting techniques or thought-processes that an amateur or a world champion can invent; there is no more sense of human innovation in the game.

If I picked up a chessboard for the first time in a decade, there would always be a chance that I can come to defeat Gary Kasparov someday; that is not the case with AlphaZero or DeepBlue.

Say what you want about the benefits of forced concentration or the social benefits, but that desire to play chess has been extinguished for me, and I'm sure for many others, once AlphaZero and DeepBlue hit the scene.

I don't get this line of thinking at all. It seems like such a random goalpoast. Why does it matter if the computer is better? If you're an 1800 rated player, you're still so far behind the best humans that it's irrelevant. Or why care if a computer has examined some similar positions before? As an amateur the positions won't be novel in qny way anyway. No more human innovation is blatantly false. If anything, computers have led to lots of new ways to play. And humans play humans, what a computer would do in a position is irrelevant.

For me, AlphaZero was the overwhelming proof that a game with a fixed board and a limited set of rules is fundamentally an exercise in pattern recognition and response, not of actual innovation or creativity. This applies every bit as much to chess and go as it does to checkers. I realized that I really didn't want to try to be a better pattern recognizer (aka computer) than other humans, so I stopped playing and put that time toward endeavors that humans actually excel at: creating entirely new things.

> creating entirely new things

Like a writer?[1] Or a photographer?[2] A graphic designer?[3]

Careful, the computers are beginning to horn in on everything :)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...

[2] https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/

[3] https://brandmark.io/

could you ever find solid ground?

I (used to) play go competitively (European 4dan). AlphaGo took me by surprise, but apart from the occasional cheater, its consequences are mostly great:

- I have a superhuman teacher available anytime, ready to analyze all my games and answer all my questions (though the "why?" question sometimes takes a fair bit for the teacher to explain).

- A lot of widely accepted dogmas in go were shaken, that was just a whole lot of fun.

- Learning joseki (corner sequences) finally makes sense (they used to develop and change every year, which on my level wasn't worth keeping on top of).

- It's a sneak peek into what's coming with AI. I watched the Lee Sedol match live, some of the AlphaGo moves were amazing. The human commentary was enlighteningly wrong: "oh he lost the first game, surely he'll win the next four"

I see where you're coming from, but I think the practical chances of a given chess player who hasn't played in a decade becoming GM-level are realistically similar to beating Alpha Zero. Ben Finegold tweeted about this once: https://twitter.com/ben_finegold/status/1316936206844821505?...

Chess has to be the only game that regular people actually think they could become elite at. If you’re just picking it up in your late teens, there is basically no chance of becoming GM or even IM. Nearly every top-rated kid will never become GM for that matter.

It seems like people really downplay difficulty of getting to that level. Even comments from the parent about hypothetically being able to beat Kasparov imply a certain misunderstanding of the vast gap between the 1% best players and the .01% best players.

I suppose it’s fair to have fantasies about the possibility of beating the best of the best but the reality is for almost every person, a player like Kasparov in his prime is no different than a computer.

Yeah but this would to me be an argument against chess in general, whether pre- or post-AI.

Math is better, I feel like I can really contribute stuff that no one else would otherwise.

> but that desire to play chess has been extinguished for me, and I'm sure for many others, once AlphaZero and DeepBlue hit the scene.

It was extinguished in 1996, when DeepBlue played? Or 2018, when AlphaZero was announced? In the intervening time, an entire generation of chess players - and many generations of chess computers - has come and gone.

I understand the feeling that there's nothing new to discover - but if you conflate the state of competitive chess in 1996 with that in 2018, you probably don't know how much you don't know. And if you could have hypothetically beaten Kasparov, you'd certainly have had a chance against Deep Blue.

A more suitable analogy to me would be - did Formula 1 kill off all other motor racing series? I don't think it did.

Do you feel like, because you couldn't beat a supercomputer there's no point in playing all the humans on the way towards competing at the highest levels? Also, was there much innovation left in the game even before the AIs took over? As a casual chess player I (probably naively) thought that the game had been explored pretty exhaustively already.

No sarcasm intended, as I said I'm strictly a casual player so I enjoy the game for the intellectual challenge and the social element, but all the upper echelon stuff is a mystery to me.

>Will the likes of Deep Blue and Alpha Zero kill competitive chess?

In a way it's led to more preparation requirements for serious tournaments. You can load up a board in any position and Stockfish will tell you the best possible move from that point.

Once you review your games in Stockfish/similar, it's honestly hard to think about how you would learn what you did wrong in the past, on your own at least. Unless you had a GM teacher, even your teacher may not be 100% all the time, but chess engines have gotten to the point where they essentially are 100% correct.

On the other hand, the fact that it stays unsolved and isn't predicted to be solved in the near future (and it's not sure whether we'll one day have enough computing power to solve it by brute force) indicates that it probably has a long life ahead. Games only are really ended when they're solved.

Here's a link to the game Rowson mentions against Yermolinsky. The critical position ("Yermolinsky offered a pawn as bait...") arises on move 18.

It's not spectacular - I would say mundane, but you can't say that when someone beats a top GM in just 24 moves. What Yermolinsky overlooked is a famously missable type of move - a backwards move to a square that was occupied at the start of the variation - but still trivial for a player of his class.

It looks to me like he did not like his position after move 16 and sought these complications partly as a bluff. The computer says Black's position is not all that bad after 16...dxe5 or 18...dxe5, but he will have to either defend a passive position with a weak d-pawn or sacrifice a pawn in a different way.

https://lichess.org/oLuNYymZ/white

I think the move Rowson's referring to is move 9. Since in the essay he says "Yermolinsky offered a pawn as bait, and I very nearly didn’t take it because doing so would allow him to play a series of forcing moves"

So the only pawn that was offered and that Rowson took was on move 10 in reply.

The only reason I checked was to see how far a grandmaster was looking ahead, in this case 14 moves, which i find impressive. "...I discovered a surprising detail right at the end of the line, in which my knight could retreat back to its original square, "

Like you, I wouldn't be impressed if he only saw from move 18 to move 24.

The parent comment is correct -- "offering a pawn" means allowing the other player to capture a pawn without yourself having an immediate way to regain it, usually banking on some kind of other piece activity as compensation for the material.

On move 9 it is a simple exchange of pawns and since the material remains equal after the resulting sequence of exchanges we would not refer to that as offering a pawn.

Yep, I looked at it again. My desire to be impressed with grandmaster foresight got the better of me.

Wrong. Source: played chess up to 2100 FIDE in my early teens, can't concentrate for shit 15 years later.

Hm. Maybe Chess has more of a signalling effect than a cognitive one? [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2019-07-people-chess-smarter-evidence-...

Do you still play chess? maybe it would help regaining your concentration...

Past a certain level you don't progress based on brainpower alone but preparation: first your general repertoire of openings, and specific openings against your opponent - because in tournaments you are notified about your opponent the day before and you can look up the games they've played in ChessBase or something. In any case your opponent will do the same against you so you come up handicapped if you skimp on preparation. Having to do actual homework is the thing that kind of disincentivized me as a teen from pursuing a potentially professional chess future and led me to do more normal studies. Now with an actual job and all that I'd hardly find the time to go up that hill again.

So you can see my habit of being distracted in the face of actual work isn't new and the advent of electronic devices was just icing on the cake.

Chess 960 (Fischer Random Chess) would at least remove much of the opening study and seems to be growing in popularity partly for that reason.

You probably don't need to improve, just play. Or you could teach someone.

The author is a ~2500 GM. I do think it depends on the kind of chess though, bullet is rather different to classical in mental requirements.

Yeah when I was competitive blitz ratings weren't a thing and bullet was ridiculed as 'not chess', 'serious' players were all in on classical. This was before the puniest computer would utterly rout the best human, people weren't complaining about draws so much, streaming wasn't a thing...mentalities about fast-paced chess have evolved a lot since then.

Chess can be like fucking crack for some of us tho. I personally have went down the rabbit hole of watching one game after another. A binge which lasted for months, that started with watching a few AlphaZero games.

> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life. ~ Paul Morphy

I question how much buzz about chess lately is the direct result of a certain Netflix Original.

The effects seem to cascade. Chess blog posts on HN... a flood of sales of Chinese chess sets on Amazon... game night pics featuring chess on your social media feeds.

How much of our behavior is dictated, or at least seeded, by Big Ns?

As someone who is following chess more intensively for over two years now, I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Netflix.

With the pandemic there was a huge influx of new chess players. You can see it in [0], the player count rose over 50% from February to April.

After that chess suddenly got popular on Twitch as well, which I would attribute mostly to GM Hikaru, who played chess together with well known streamers such as xqc. That rise is well visible in June/July [1] in the twitch chess category.

Queen's Gambit was just recently released (end of October). This of course led to chess being even more popular, but I wouldn't attribute all the chess posts to it. I maybe would even go so far and attribute it partly to frequency illusion [2], now that you're watching out more for chess posts I assume.

[0] Games played per month on lichess (open source chess server): https://database.lichess.org/

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/743

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Cool, I never heard of frequency illusion. I experience it all the time.

Games can you teach many things.

Running a guild in World of Warcraft can teach you more about management than most MBA courses.

Building Magic the Gathering decks can teach you how to find good tactics that aren't obvious at first.

I recently introduced chess to my kids (6 & 11 years old). They both immediately got hooked and we have been playing several games every night.

It's high-quality time for you & kids (no screens!), and also teaches the kids to think complex sequences (or combinations of the future) in their mind, and patience in general.

Concentration (on anything) as an escape hatch away from the otherwise general noise on the mind (which games and music can give) needs to be distinguished from concentration resulting from a general and deep availability of one's being for any activity at hand.

Ultimately after several attempts at trying to like chess, I find its determinism bit boring. Games with random elements have gameplay elements like evaluation of risk and rewards, so I gravitated towards them(like Scrabble).

Strange, because chess definitely has elements of risk calculation based on your uncertainty. Without a computer, you cannot calculate all the lines ahead, so many decisions come down to trade-offs involving uncertainty. Colloquially, this usually is called "strategy", which involve decisions that are much longer term than calculated tactics, and therefore involve a great deal of uncertainty.

Tactics still dominate, but strategy leads to tactics.

You're often left making decisions on the basis of, well, maybe if I do this I'll be able to poke my rook through later, but maybe they'll win counterattacking the file I'm leaving.

You might enjoy "Chess960" (or Fischer Random Chess): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

The order of the back-rank pieces is randomized (but identical for both players).

Give CamelUp a look! Great for kids or bigger groups!

You also might want to give "Liar's Dice" a look - some of the variants are similarly great for bigger groups, and still rely heavily on strategy.

But is it really random though? Are they anything more than deterministic in the expectation?

Try Backgammon. The game is full of strategy but you play with “the chaos of the dice”.

Concentration is indeed a powerful skill for any human to have. It gives one the ability to apply themselves at the task at hand.

One thing that I have discovered is that one can’t concentrate intensely on different hard things at the same time.

The why behind the concentration is also very important.

The blog article here https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/do-not-engage-the-mi... explains this further.

Why concentrate on playing chess when you can concentrate on solving math problems? They are deeper, more fun and also related to the real world. I never liked chess but thinking about random math problems kept me up at night. If you think math problems aren't interesting then you just aren't trying to solve hard enough math problems, there is no end to them.

Maybe because not everybody who is good at chess is also good at math. I knew a chess prodigy who could not add two three digit numbers if his life depended on it. It's a bit like catching a ball: when looked at it analytically you are solving a whole bunch of equations in real time, but in practice it is a skill that even a dog can perform with remarkable accuracy. Obviously, chess requires some analytical skills. But it does not necessarily indicate an ability - or a desire - to do maths.

Stole my comment! :)

You're right, though. I started playing chess to improve my concentration as a teenager, mostly for the purpose of improving my ability to focus on math. Then I realised that I got better at concentrating at math by... doing math problems instead of wasting my time playing chess.

According to Wikipedia: G. H. Hardy described proof by contradiction as "one of a mathematician's finest weapons", saying "It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."

You don't even need to proof theorems in algebraic geometry to start seeing the beauty and power of mathematical thinking. Get a mental arithmetic app on your phone and spend a few months routinely practising some sums. What first appears as a dry activity will soon become a highly personal exercise in creative reasoning, of finding the best way to represent and manipulate with numbers. For example, I solve arithmetic problems visually but my friend works best by reasoning aurally (I don't get it either, but seeing as he can multipy two 4 digit numbers in seconds it works for him). I'll say that learning to multiplying large numbers in my head has done more for me in terms of mental training than chess has!

Why focus on solving math problems when you can solve political problems. They are deeper and more interesting. Or maybe different people find different things interesting?

What's a good source to get started?

I suppose the transparency and the basic uniformity is what really separates chess from other mental activities. That is to say, there is no hidden information or any advantage that isn’t equally available to everyone. there are not too many activities that operate on that same sort of classless, egalitarian level, and so I can understand why the author is so passionate about it as a tool for learning the skills of concentration. With that in mind, I am terrible at it, and go makes me look like a drooling idiot... I can’t even understand when a game is over even though I try to practice every day.

Chess teaches concentration, but also other skills as well. As I wrote in 2002[1], it also teaches things like strategic planning and resource management, ability to persevere despite setbacks, time/focus management, etc. It's certainly not unique in this, but it's a pretty good mix.

[1] http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2002/05/what-chess-has...

I appreciated the author's life story, but I don't understand the point of learning a certain quality through a peripheral pursuit. The best way to learn real life things is to engage with real life things. There are so many things to do and so little time to do them.

The hours you spend playing chess/video games/whatever else is marketed to boost some ability are better spent pursuing what you want out of life directly. Or spent doing these same things, but out of genuine interest and for their own sake.

The great thing about these peripheral pursuits is that they reduce opportunity costs and the consequence of failure.

There are only so many games in a season, and only so many practices in between games. In athletics, if you want to build a new skill you're best doing drills so you can independently work on that skill without sacrificing valuable practice/game time where you should be focusing on higher level strategy stuff.

If you're a consultant and your approach is to get on a client site and send it, that's probably an effective learning strategy right up until you tank your reputation and can't find any more clients to practice with.

I remember playing some speed chess with someone my level (I'm not an experienced chess player). It's a really different experience from the regular long-contemplation chess. What really stood out to me was how dramatic the effect of deep deliberate breathing was. My ability to make quick and good decisions would improve immediately. Similarly in tennis (I've played like 3 times), or badminton, concentrating on the ball would have a huge effect on being able to return it well.

Eh... Yes, it requires concentration. But it also requires really good working memory and visuospatial skills. These don't have particularly broad applicability in real life.

Exactly. Chess and (less so) GO are all about reading. If you study, you can learn all the tactics. The problem is never missing a single piece and its relevance across the whole game. That is something computers don't fail at, they never misread. I've wondered if Lee Sedol could beat AlphaZero if he was given AZ's top 50 potential moves on each of his turns.

I started playing chess for the first time since summer 2019. I was rated 650 on Lichess. I got addicted and a year and a half later I’m 1800. I’m still addicted.

> the game has been a source of friendship, refuge and growth.

That was for me when I used to play on yahoo chess...i don’t know why they killed it..it had a great community.

Playing go is a life lession in concentration and probably something more, because go is a much deeper game, not just in complexity, but also in richness with respect to strategy. Think only about something like aji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Aji .

Any non-trivial hobby is a lesson in concentration: painting, playing piano, rock climbing, carpentry. Ultimately it's all mindfulness.

Isn't mindfulness the opposite of concentration? Concentration takes you away from your place in space and time, because you are absorbed in something else. Mindfulness is usually described as being fully present.

I can only recommend Shogi (japanese Chess) for anyone considering Chess. Shogi is a bit faster AND if you have someone around who has more Chess-experience than you (like my father for whom chess was basically the only board game available) it makes playing interesting as they won't just be able to work with their memorized moves..

I thought the whole game play is to distract you so to relax your mind so it can rest. It may run all those non-game serious thing in the background. Like sleeping.

Unless you want to be pro. Most of us are not.

I played GO. Still remember must have hot tea as the blood go all to the brain the whole body feel very cold even in hot summer.

Concentration? I exclusively play bullet and blitz. No increment.

You need to concentrate for rapid and classical, but rapid and classical is boring.

It is true mainly because if you forget about the clock your opponent will run it down after some initial courtesy :)

...unless it's bullet

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