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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I used to play a lot of chess, and it totally took over my life. So I never play it anymore, because for me it's too addictive.

For some people (like some of these hustlers and others who can make a living from it) that's ok, but for me I wanted more from life than just playing chess all the time and thinking about nothing but chess.. but for certain types of people it has a way of sucking you in and can be a way of avoiding life.

However, there were plenty of positive things I learned from chess, like thinking ahead, being able to concentrate in distracting environments, and having lots of patience.

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I've noticed that the #1 positive thing I learned from chess is rarely mentioned by others, and I'm not sure why that is. For me it was:

Pattern recognition.

I many cases (at least at the intermediate level), winning/losing games doesn't come down to who can "think three moves ahead," it comes down to whether someone can recognize that a pattern of three moves will result in a particular outcome. It may be a nuance, but it's actually an important one because it eliminates the notion that someone has to be of above-average intelligence and discover new moves on the fly to succeed.

In actuality, that skill of pattern recognition can be practiced, honed, and applied in numerous areas of life. Playing chess is such a pure form of the skill that it opened my eyes to how many other activities can benefit from a similar approach.

Definitely agree. It’s not even super purposeful recognition. It’s a feeling like “this seems bad”, and looking for why, only to figure out your opponent’s likely plan.

It’s much better to be less intelligent and have that feeling, than be more intelligent and not even know to look for the danger.

That's a well-known aspect of "expert" level chess player thinking! There's a famous experiment that demonstrated this. Researchers briefly showed set-up chess boards to novices (little to no chess experience) and expert players (2000+ ELO) and then asked the players to recreate the board they just saw. If the set-up was from a real game (not necessarily a famous or studied game) experts performed far, far better. However, if the chess board was just a random scramble of pieces, novices and experts had the same recall ability. Essentially, expert players saw the patterns at work in legitimate mid-game set-ups and this helped the recall task.

Yes this is an interesting result that I recall from my days when I was into chess.

But this result speaks to something more general that is interesting as well. It seems high levels of skill in many other fields is associated with incredible ability to recall details about a performance in that field. If I recall correctly, Bobby Fischer was able to perfectly recall positions (and his analysis of them) from games he had played years ago (and consider how many games a professional chess player might play in a career).

The question I have is, what exactly is the connection? Is this association essential? And is it the incredible memory that leads to high skill, or the it's the reverse?

Yup

My grandfather said that "Too many great minds have been wasted playing chess.", and so always played checkers with me, always kind and teaching, but never rolling over. It took me years to win, but I still remember the three times I did before he passed away when I was 13. I've hardly ever played again. Played enough chess in HS to learn how, a few openings and just enough games to understand the intensity. I could definitely see what he meant, and it's probably a good thing my passion was already for alpine ski racing, which has similar intensity but is naturally a bit self-limiting (e.g., the lifts close and you have to go in).

I've since read the saying to the effect that "Being able to play chess is a sign of intelligence, being able to plat chess very well is a sign of a wasted life.". Seems to ring true, except for the true greats.

First one is Einstein(?) and the second is Paul Morphy

Nah that's bullshit.

"Too many great minds have been wasted programming UIs."

Both quotes are tongue in cheek, you're not supposed to take them seriously.

If you're good at something, fuckin do it.

Seeing a lot of comments in this thread from people who probably consider themselves intelligent, but haven't put the time into understanding chess, so you all have come up with some pretty creative excuses why you don't like chess.

Y'all are just bad at it, and that's ok.

aaannnd . . . . Whoosh!! It isn't about how good you are; in fact it is the opposite.

My grandfather was an engineer and focused on building actual things - being a productive member of society. He was also pretty alert about avoiding addictive things.

His point was that the gifted minds — who can get and ARE very good at chess — tend to get addicted and squander years or decades just chasing the next tournament, the next 100 GM points, the next high, producing nothing useful, and getting no skills applicable to productive pursuits.

He did not want to see me go down a path that could lead to being a chess bum any more than he'd want to see me become a ski bum, join a cult or just become a hardcore partier. All are surely enjoyable, but not a productive addition to society.

(& no, I haven't got a shred of insecurity about my abilities; I was getting good at an extremely satisfying rate, but also saw what it would take to get really good, and that I'd be better off spending my time not memorizing every classic opening and variant, but instead on understanding physics and chemistry concepts ... I absolutely see the beauty of chess, and may well take it up again, but I also am grateful for by grandfather's point, especially considering how addicted I got to the adrenaline of ski racing at international levels...)

And if you enjoy it and have the freedom to do that - fantastic - it's your life, do what you want - I hope you get as good as you desire and enjoy it!

Why is learning physics and chemistry a better use of time than learning chess?

Because I can leverage that knowledge of physics and chemistry to build something useful - and actually do so in my job. I use that knowledge to produce good things for customers, feel the satisfaction of that connection between my study and what I can offer people, and now that I'm writing about it, have a thought that I haven't had in a long time that my grandfather would indeed approve (so double thanks for the question!).

Chess may be more satisfying, but as a career, it's pretty self-satisfying, and only the very top competitors even really provide entertainment for others. That said, chess can teach you a lot about strategy, your own mind, managing your own emotions and skills, etc., and all of those are useful skills to apply to life in general (as long as you don't fall to the addictive risk and make a burnout career out of it...).

I’ve had my chess learning period followed by obsessive play up to a point that after playing a few hours daily I’d see those patterns in my mind’s eye for a while afterwards. I realized it ‘s not something healthy and I stopped playing altogether.

Recently I started playing online from time to time and want to make sure it never becomes an obsession again. Learning how to lose gracefully is an important milestone in one’s quest for maturity.

Generally chess has some wisdom that can be carried out in other areas of life. One point worth mentioning is that no matter how complicated a situation has become there’s quite often a good way out of it if one keeps calm and looks out for solutions.

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." - Paul Morphy

There’s absolutely no limit to the amount of time your could spend getting better at chess. I personally lost interest due to the excessive levels of memorisation involved, which was also one of Fischer’s main complaints about the game.

"I personally lost interest due to the excessive levels of memorisation involved"

You could play Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess360), which relieves players of the need to memorize openings, as there are way too many opening positions to make memorization practical.

Fischer Random is a much more rewarding game to play imo. There’s a lot less people playing it though.

Same for me but with Scrabble. Saw the same thing in that scene. I don’t necessarily want more from life, but I didn’t want to be obsessed with Scrabble any longer.

And it’s just 100% memorization. The French champion doesn’t even speak French for example.

Don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it’s definitely not 100% memorization. You have to know the words and which one to play. The “right” one to play is usually obvious, but on 2-4 turns per game, the strategy becomes very very very important.

With perfect word knowledge and garbage strategy you could probably be around the 25-50th best human player and with a fair bit of luck, would win some big tournaments eventually.

I stunk at chess in college because I'd spend my time thinking about how to write a program to play chess rather than my next move. My favorite book was:

"Chess Skill in Man and Machine" https://www.amazon.com/Chess-machine-monographs-computer-sci...

which inspired parts of the computer strategy in the game Empire.

Chess playing programs have gotten so good these days, there's not really any percentage in writing one.

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