"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Only with age I can appreciate how true that quote is. There was an article that came up not long ago about GMs selling games for others to earn their GM norms. And the sad truth is being GM in chess doesn't put a food on the table.
The very peak of the players can make a living some as coaches or streamers but not everyone can be a 'winner'.
> ..seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
I guess it was always a thing even back then?
Hmm… any way we can turn chess into a proof of work algorithm? xD
That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.
When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.
You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.
Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.
Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”
but studying hard topics can teach you thinking tactics for analyzing problems and looking for thr big picture.
I mean... I am charitably trying to find interpretation/context in which this is meaningfully true, and failing. In which way is bitcoin more "computer money" than any other money these days?
I purchase things, pay my bills, obtain payment, invest, and do all my transactions at least 95% digitally, with "computer money".
Uncharitably, I could call Bitcoin "that, but less practical / more wasteful". Charitably, I could say "There are specific goals/circumstances where Bitcoin has benefits".
But I feel it's decades late to be "first iteration of computer money", unless there's some squinting and extremely specific ad-hoc defining that I haven't imagined. Even the "Money" part (as practical transactional currency) is these days increasingly less relevant,by proponents and pundits alike, as opposed to "investment vehicle" or "storage of value".
(as for chess, I don't know; I gave up when I realized how much memorization, as opposed to developing of understanding, was involved to get much better; it may indeed enable self-knowledge and mold character at some level beyond the ones I've achieved. Therefore, I cannot contribute to discussion on whether Chess is practical/efficient/meaningful way to grow those characteristics - i.e. hammering rocks for 5,000hrs probably grows character at some level but may not be sufficiently practical/efficient to matter. I respect it like a do Golf - it takes immense skill, dedication, and investment to develop it to a high level, and world-class players are incredibly good at it; but it's not a skill I desire to grow myself anymore).
Emphasis is on how minting, the creation of new money, is strictly enforced by the protocol (software), and decentralized. Further, it is hard-capped.
As such, it's money that is born digitally, natively. This extends to ownership, which is just a bunch of private keys.
But let's agree to disagree there. Even then, money has multiple roles: unit of account, store of value.
Currently, Bitcoin plays the role of storing value. Like a savings account, or "digital gold". Not for payments. It might play a payment role in the future on layer 2, or it might not. Too soon to tell.
The first iteration of computer money is called 'regular money'. Nobody uses cash anymore, we all use computer money.
I don’t know, their fans complain quite loudly.
And in those jobs being good at chess is only part of the equation. You have to be personable, someone that people aspire to. Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming. I once chatted with concert violinist. She was not happy about trends in the soloist community. "The moment I saw an exposed midrift in a concert hall, I knew I would never be a soloist."
That's life in general. Even at my company when choosing photos of people to profile to for recruitment posts on LinkedIn, it's pretty clear they lean towards attractive people.
I also notice that with Company Profile page, where who they show is not really indicative of who comprises the company.
There have been several studies on this. Apparently being an attractive woman is a net negative when it comes to being hired by other women (6% fewer callbacks than the same resume with less attractive photo attached in one particular study).
I used to work with an ex-military guy (extremely bright, hard working, excellent leader, etc. etc.).
He was about 64 inches (1.63 meters) tall, balding, and not the handsomest fella. He told me point blank: "I was never going to become a general or achieve any other extremely high rank simply because I didn't have 'the look' or physical stature of a general."
Compare Canada where, beyond not having photos, even gender-based pronouns have been removed from performance reports in order that reviewers not risk gender bias.
That would be gender-blind but also ignores the fact that absolute scale actually matters in war sometimes - running speed, ability to lift and load heavy tank shells for a few hours etc.
One might argue that actual physical strength doesn't matter much. One way to check this claim would be to look at recently granted medals for valor, and see how many of them are related to absolute (not relative) physical prowess.
Indeed, the higher up you go, the more your job becomes about leading and the less it becomes about individual feats of strength. I think you're thinking about the military a little bit wrong here -- this isn't the Roman era (when centurions led from the front and had to be legitimate physical badasses). Being higher up in the military nowadays is a lot more akin to being a paper pusher director at a company.
Medical and fitness are different things. Lots of people can pass the fitness tests but still flunk out for medical reasons. Diabetics. People who get cancer. Failing eyesight. Sever allergies. It is very possible to ace the fitness tests while still failing the medical.
If there was one, there was at least a ton of exceptions to the rule, male and female.
EDIT: Though I didn't work with any generals. There are only several hundred U.S. generals, and that number is capped.
Take Thatcher or Merkel. Both women for whom this arguably matters even more, not attractive, and not even coming from a background that lends itself naturally to climbing hierarchies. Kohl, Merkel's mentor used to often refer to her as his "Mädchen", ('girl', but diminutive, only used for children) and she basically back-stabbed him and took control of the entire party.
There's definitely ways for unattractive or more generally, people who nobody expects to rise to power to do exactly that.
This New Yorker profile from a few years ago is a long read but very much worth it if you want to get a overview. The beginning recapitulates a lot about her childhood so you might want to skip that part if you're only interested in her career.
https://www.insider.com/how-chess-was-more-sexist-than-its-p...
Similarly, a Brigadier General is not the same rank as a General, despite some commonality in word choice between the two ranks.
"These titles are sometimes criticized and some female players elect not to take them, preferring to compete for open titles. For example, Grandmaster Judit Polgár, in keeping with her policy of playing only open competitions, never took a women's title."
Another good example is Xyla Foxlin, who walks a similar line with a YouTube engineering/maker channel and has been very explicit about her approach: "I refuse to “act more like a man” in order to achieve legitimate and respectable success in the professional world. I happen to be someone who embraces her femininity and feels powerful in cute shoes and sparkly makeup, and I don’t see how any of that makes me less of an engineer." [0]
[0]: https://medium.com/1517/beauty-and-the-invisible-beast-c2a8d...
You mean like this? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715141
Frighteningly apropos
EDIT: After becoming the greatest chessmaster of his time, Morphy retired from chess at 22. He then had a rejected marriage proposal, failed legal practice, and died at age 47.
Put another way, after abandoning chess at 22, he lived another 25 years, fell in love, and was given wide latitude to live a life of comfort and pursuing his passions owing to his family's wealth. Unfortunately he developed something akin to paranoid schizophrenia before the world knew how to effectively treat it.
Really hard to sum up an entire lifetime in a couple sentences. Pointing out only a few bad things is just as misleading as only pointing out a few good ones.
In my family I had/have two people who plaid chess well (2000-2300 range) without wasting their lives in any way. They held full time jobs, had families and enjoyed the game at a pretty serious level. If anything chess helped them stay mentally active and engaged well into their 90's.
The reason it is hard work is because beyond a point the preparation is a lot about memorizing and remembering a lot of lines variations not improving on your understanding or theory. That's also why older you grow it is harder to be at the top, understanding is not diminished at 40+, however memorizing abilities are.
You will have to understand Paul morphy story to understand to why he said something like that.
He was the world best by a good distance and he quit playing at 22. He had struggles and was consumed by it. After spending most of your formative years and not finding the meaning in the life despite having won pretty much everything can be life altering. He is known as the pride and sorrow of chess with good reason.
In context the quote has different connotations. However, having taken it at face value, I stand by my comment.
Nothing in the Morphy quote explicitly addresses the technicalities of becoming a world class chess player.
In general playing chess well means something else to the general public than to a GM level player. My comment was made having the former interpretation in mind - Morphy was obviously talking from his (very different) point of view.
And yet you still claim that your point is correct if quote is taken out of context.
Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
> Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
There's no fallacy here. I have my opinion, I stand by it regardless of the quote's context. I understand that Morphy didn't mean what I thought he meant. It's just that my opinion on the usefulness of chess is still the same.
In his defense I don't think morphy intended for people outside the chess world as a general statement.
I'd like to see some evidence of that.
However, what does decrease with age is physical stamina. And classical chess tournaments, oddly, take a lot more physical stamina than you might think.
Counterintuitively, the whole faster/blitz chess systems have been good for older chess players.
Also certain types of information is more easier learnt when you are younger like multiple languages. I believe there is research on learning pedagogies for senior citizens having different approaches than children factoring in the ability to learn quickly.
Most mathematicans and many other scientists achieve the peek before 40, while there are exceptions like Euler or gauss it is not common.
Even in tech you find a lot more younger workers than other more stable technical fields as the learning curve is recurring and steeper than in other fields
I wouldn't disagree there is more physical stamina required for tournaments, however I doubt it so difficult for players in their 40s/50s cannot manage it without loosing competitive advantage.
From physics genius to dissapearing one day with no known fate.
The quote is from Paul Morphy, the best player of the 19th century. He practically invented playing chess well. And he hated it, he felt he should have become a lawyer and did something useful with his life.
When he was still actively playing, he seemed almost unbeatable, and nobody understood why. Somehow Morphy intuitively knew when to start an attack and when he did, it magically always worked out, while other top players at that time often saw their attacks turn into nothing and would soon lose afterwards. It took a decade until an a dedicated studier of his game, Wilhelm Steinitz, figured out the logic behind it. His theory of positional play changed the way people looked at chess and meant the start of the modern chess era.
Morphy himself didn't live to see this, after quitting chess he became increasingly schizophrenic and eventually died penniless and alone.
The point was taken, see my comment below. I didn't know the context behind the quote, I understand that Morphy didn't mean it the way I took it.
Nevertheless, I think that under the general interpretation of what it means to know chess well (which is surely different from Morphy's), I stand by my idea that knowing chess well can be a positive thing.
I think so. I'm getting a lot of flak over it though :-<
> If we raise the bar to 2500+ maybe you will agree?
I can't say. I do have an acquaintance who is at ~2600 level who is also a well adapted guy. He's not a full time player anymore, though.
I have no opinion on whether chess performance at a GM level is bad for you. All I wanted to say was that you can get pretty far with chess (I think a level of 2000-2300 qualifies as pretty far for the general population) without it affecting your life negatively.
2600 rating on sites like lichess or chess24 is much more plausible, it corresponds to roughly 2150-2300 fide rating.
Yes. He's a pretty well known Australian player, not sure how active he is anymore though. Now has a full time academic career.
Edit:
After verifying on the FIDE website, I see his ranking is around 2500 now. He is a GM though.
(Two of them are from exUSSR, and the last one has a surname that sounds Chinese)
(Also, verifying the plausibility of statements by internet users is a personal hobby of mine, hope you understand)
> verifying the plausibility of statements by internet users is a personal hobby of mine, hope you understand
https://xkcd.com/386/ not sure it's the healthiest hobby, but I guess I understand.
Although seemingly not so far away by sheer number, the 2000-2300 elo range is worlds apart from 2500+ (GM) levels, in terms of how much effort (and talent) is required.
The Wikipedia section about his abandonment of chess is tragic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy#Abandonment_of_che...).
I know that. My point was that a score of 2000-2300 can still qualify as knowing chess well. Didn't know Morphy was a top level player when I made the comment.
We always instead played checkers, for real - always encouraging and teaching, but no patronizing wins for me - it was a long time until I could actually take a few games. Great memories, and he was gone too soon.
I did play some in HS & college, very much enjoyed some intense games, and still think it was good advice.
The Paul Morphy quote is spot on, save maybe for great champions like Garry Kasparov, who also went to to greater things. I suppose the same could be said about many pursuits where only a few get to truly earn a living, such as acting, music, sports - it becomes what you make of it but perhaps chess is a bit more extremely consuming?
Mid/high level players to progress up are in large degree forced to study positions memorise lines etc. To large extend its a competitive memorisation game.
This is natural step in high level chess, its like a precopmutated hash table, the more upfront work you can precomputate the less time you need to spend over the board on that move.
I play chess for fun and as casual hobby, and i think its a great way to exercise your brain. Thinking about board and evaluation positions. It translates into real world too.
Its also one of the last few things i can do and not get distracted by anything else.
I'm really struggling to parse this. Can you reword it?
This is what the mentor in the movie means: some become good, some foolishly pursue nothing. The game can be addictive. But to be great is the rarest thing.
Wasted in what sense? Aren’t we all playing made up games and solving artificial problems at the end of the day? Most GMs probably aren’t doing it to make money, they get a similar thrill from it as, say, a mathematician gets from understanding and solving deep math problems.
Very apt analogy. Most math faculty members in my department stopped being productive in the last third of their career. After a while, it just gets old. Proving yet another theorem no longer excites them.
At least they collect a decent paycheck, though.
The reason the contributions usually drop for mathematicans is less to do with losing interest and more that they simple don't have the mental capacity they did in their 20's and 30s into the 50s .
Maths is very tough field to do research in.
There is more to life than being a chess player or a mathematican. His point is more to do focusing/obsessing on a single narrow subject, given morphy's own experience I would say he is more than qualified to make that comment.
A long time ago, someone characterised chess as a DOS on the mind.
Hikaru says becoming a GM to like getting two PhDs.
If studying and playing tons of chess very well brings you joy, by all means go for it. The wasted life part seems very harsh and judgy.
Two PhDs sounds like a lot. After all, most GMs get the title before their twenties. But such comparisons are very hard anyway. But it is also possible to get the title while pursuing another career path, you don't have to focus 100% on chess.
As you say, the wasted life part is way too harsh and based on only some madly crazy examples in chess history.