Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

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This is why my grandfather never played chess with me and actively discouraged it - "too many great minds are wasted on chess".

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?

Learning and playing chess is great for you, but probably only up to the point of being competitive.

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 suspect you are right about the strategy and point at which it reaches a point of diminishing returns. Your likening the memorization of huge numbers of opening and mid-game sequences to precomputed hash tables seems spot-on...

> but not probably only up to the point

I'm really struggling to parse this. Can you reword it?

my bad, the 'not' was an accident.

This phrase from Morphy and your story about your grandfather reminds me of this "Maybe I can win a pawn" scene: https://youtu.be/pOzaIcZwpwQ?t=60

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.

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