“Chess-Playing Excitement” in 1859 | Hacker News Reader

“Chess-Playing Excitement” in 1859

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74 pointsyarapavan49 comments

I love chess but stopped playing around the age of 20.

I played a lot in school and was captain of my school team. I played in league and cup matches for 2 years and every day I practised on fellow students in the sixth form prefects room. There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves. On the other hand there was the excitment of knowing when you had beaten your opponent and just had to finish him off. I remember going to a tight end game with a top table opponent and had just Queened a pawn with another one 2 moves away. The referee gave me the Queen and said "Shall I leave another Queen here?" I replied "no thanks I just need the one" and grinned at my opponent. It's been said chess is more brutal than war.

I had to give it up as I began obsessing about the game. It was driving me slowly mad. I was having nightmares about being chased around a large chess board by the pieces. I haven't played a game since.

> "Shall I leave another Queen here?"

I realize it was probably obvious in your case, but I would have been bothered by the ref making a comment or question like that during the game for fear of tipping off my opponent.

I'm sure his opponent knew.

>"There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves."

This has been true with most sports or competition based activities that I have done too. There's nothing quite like the nerves you get just before a match starts

Yes it's true. Though with Chess it felt different. I guess with sports you are pitting physical or athletic ability against an opponent but with Chess it's your mind and intellect which seems to draw the ego out more. Winning is euphoric but losing is a crushing psychological blow to the essence of what makes you... your mind.

And with chess boxing, it's both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing (Yes, chess boxing is a thing.)

Were you ever as competitive (that is, skilled and practiced) in any particular physical sport as you were in chess? I suspect that if you'd put as much of yourself into, say, tennis or soccer, that you'd have felt similarly.

EDIT:

I've been pondering this a bit more, and I want to share my thoughts.

I was thinking about how some of my friends react to losses in mental sports/games versus physical sports/games and their particular histories, as well as my own.

Playing a bit to the idea of dualism of mind and body, some people focus more of their energy on the mind and some on the body. This affects their notion of self. For you, your focus was on chess and the mind, consequently a loss in that game or evidence of your mind not being as honed as your opponents strikes your ego more than a loss on the tennis court might. I have teammates on a rec soccer league who take it very seriously. They spent their youths practicing soccer or another sport at least as much as you spent on chess. A loss on the field, or a near loss, hits them hard because their sense of self is so tied to their physical capabilities. Anything demonstrating that they aren't as good as an opponent hits them harder than it would me. I'm a tad bit more like you (though never seriously competitive in mental games/sports), my particular focus in those years was on acquisition of knowledge and understanding. This is not a directly competitive thing (outside of trivia games like Jeopardy!), but meeting someone who understands a field, that I've studied, far better than I do is both inspiring and a blow to the ego. "I've spent X hours, days, months studying this, and still I'm nowhere near this person's level of understanding and capability."

All this is not meant to say that your view is wrong, but that what each person experiences as a hit to their ego is going to be different, and largely determined by what they put their energy into. Outrun a former sprinter and they'll feel the effects of their age and it'll weigh on their mind. Beat an old and unpracticed chess champion and it'll be the same. But beat the sprinter at chess and they won't care, and the chess champion might even laugh at the suggestion of a footrace assuming they'd lost before it began.

No I'm speculating. I'm imaging if I lost something involving physical activites I would rationalise it as my opponent being stronger/fitter/faster/better hand eye coordination etc. But how do you rationalise it when someone out thinks you? Deceives you? Displays more cunning and can think ahead better.

I might be making a false distinction but it just seems to be more personal and gets to the core of your being.

> I might be making a false distinction but it just seems to be more personal and gets to the core of your being.

I sort of responded to this in my edit to my previous post. I think that each person's notion of self is different and largely a consequence of where they've spent energy developing themselves. If you focus on chess for years, a loss at chess will hit you harder than a loss at golf. If you focus on golf for years, a loss or a particularly uncharacteristically bad showing will hit you harder than a loss at chess.

I'm competent in mental games and passable at sports. I can outsprint a lot of people younger than me and more practiced primarily because of a fortunate body type, not because of practice. But if someone came in and tore my code apart (I've literally been programming for 75% of my life, starting at age 8), that'd hurt me more than any game or sport. Still mental, like chess for you, but it's probably more significant that it's been my focus for so much of my life.

Just to expand the topic a top surgen with hand issues with have a 'similiar' loss of self experience. In the end people often define themselves by the roles they play "I am a Programmer" even out of context "I am a retired Teacher."

Starcraft is similar. There's even a phenomenon around this called "ladder anxiety" where people are scared to start the automatch process because of how depressing it is to lose: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=297...

I think most if not all e-sports have similar effects to this.

Even Kasparov somehow compares them to chess. http://www.dailydot.com/esports/garry-kasparov-esports-chess...

I played somewhat seriously as a teenager, and ended up quitting for pretty much the same reason. I'd have unnerving stress dreams where I was trying to solve some position but the position kept changing subtly.

>I had to give it up as I began obsessing about the game.

When I started dreaming about playing tetris, I realized I should probably take it easy.

My Starcraft coach tells me that if I want to get better I have to practice about 10 hours a day.

So although, like chess, the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1], the opportunity cost is astronomical.

Improving your brain while destroying your life . . . well, one could do worse.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Are you already GM level? If not, then your coach is nutso.

Agreed. StarCraft is not as hard as people make it out to be. The path to Masters is pretty straightforward and achievable in under 3 hours a day. You just need to be smart about how you practice.

the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1], the opportunity cost is astronomical.

How do you measure such "astronomical" opportunity cost? There's no meaningful, factual way of establishing the "what if" possibilities for any given individual. Instead, to make a scientific determination, we'd have to examine the lives of populations who engage in activity X versus those who do other things, controlling for other factors.

Is there an "astronomical" difference between economic outcomes for those who play chess at the highest levels, versus those who play football, for example? Could the same thing be said for Starcraft?

Even if you're only 10% efficient, 10 hours a day is a lot, in fact especially if you're 10% efficient, you only really have 1.6 hours in your day of effectiveness, spending the majority of that daily time on a leisure activity is... costly.

Football does not require 10 hours a day of training. Even pro players train just a couple of hours per day, with maybe an extra hour of tactical work. In fact, you'd struggle to find any physical sport that requires that much dedication, because overtraining is very dangerous. I knew a few teenagers in professional basketball teams and whenever they were seen around playgrounds they were soundly rapped by their coach. The only exception is pre-season conditioning, but even then you will not get anywhere near 8 hours, let alone 10.

(aside: several retired players alleged that there are loads of unreported cases of depression among top-flight pros, mostly due to the fact that they simply don't know what to do with most of their time.)

I used to be mid-GM in EU, I didn't play that much.

> Here’s the thing, though: We can chuckle at what seems like a nutty, off-base argument — except the author makes some extremely good points. Take, for example, the argument that chess is too sedentary a pasttime for people who were living increasingly industrialized and sedentary lives. This was true, and still is!

Idea: make a chess clock where the two sides are independently powered by rechargeable batteries that start with low charge.

Each clock side is hooked to a separate treadmill, which charges that side's battery.

If your side of the clock runs out of power during the game while the other side still has power, you lose. It is up to you to decide when and how much to use the treadmill during the game, as long as you can keep your clock powered.

Implementation Note: it would probably be better to not do this by actually having the treadmill control the power supply for each clock side. It would probably be better to just do this abstractly. The clock would keep track of an allowed run time parameter, a treadmill distance to run time conversion factor, and then would flag if "allowed run time" + "treadmill distance" x "conversion factor" - "actual run time" < 0.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

I was a low-level recreational player as a kid, got freaked out when I beat a state-ranked player, and have never been able to finish a game since then.

That's not chess per se, it was a reaction to perceived stress. Plus I know that if I really got in to it it'd take over. Chess scares me.

>> champions are afraid of losing, everyone else is afraid of winning [1]

I found this to be true of myself. Chess afficianatos probably know better than me, but wasn't Bobby Fischer a big proponent of alternative rules for chess that removed the advantage of "merely" memorizing strong opening games and mid game strategies, something the soviets of his era trained specifically for? please correct me if I've got that wrong.

[1] billy jean king

Edit spelling

Yes, Fischer wanted the back line to be drawn such that the order of the pieces was not set in stone but still imposed some limitations to retain castling and bishops being on alternate colors (instead of having two bishops on black)

Typically called Chess960 or Shuffle Chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960

Aficionados :)

The chess benefit from memorizing openings reminds me of two amazing articles reporting that many Scrabble champions are non-English speakers who've simply memorized the word list without having its contents in their vocabulary:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f...

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2005/dec/11/features....

Nice piece about "chess sickness" and Duchamp (and he created less art and became more consumed with Chess) that echoes this post: http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-game

“Much of an exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule,” wrote Edward Said. “It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists [and] chess players.”

Nabokov wrote a wonderful novel, "The Defense", about a chess player who goes mad.

> "I have wasted too much time on it already; I cannot afford to do this any longer; this is my last game."

Who wants to take odds on whether or not this guy stopped playing after that game? I can't even remember how many times I've said this about various activities...

Would posting comments on HN happen to be one of those activities?

My main programming activity these days is working on my chess GUI. Working on problems like; How can I quickly search 10,000,000 games for a given position without creating a fully indexed multi-gigabyte database? Etc. Sometimes it bothers me. Am I wasting my life?

So I'll reach out to you guys because I've been racking my brain to no avail for the name of a particular blog, and have come up empty.

The blog in question would have been perfect for this article, as it had both chess related questions, as well as articles of historical curiosity. Math articles, as well, would appear, and any sort of other kind of post that would interest folks who find these kinds of things interesting. I thought the name was related in some way to "meandering" or "useless" or something "trivia" related in the title, but I'm completely blanking.

I would have sworn up and down that I heard about this blog from an XKCD comic (the same one that brought me here 3 or 4 years ago), but when I went back to look at the comic in question, I couldn't find the blog.

I apologize if it's off-topic, but it's sort of inverse-relevant, I suppose?

Almost certainly Greg Ross's "Futility Closet". http://www.futilitycloset.com/

[EDITED to be less diffident -- I'm at least 95% confident this is what you're thinking of.]

This is absolutely correct, thank you!

I spent my late teenage years and early 20s often playing chess with old guys in the park. I regret I didn't engage in more productive pursuits, like chasing girls and taking them on dates. I am not kidding. If I had to go back I'd seriously cut down on the chess and up the dating.

Arthur C. Clarke had a short story (so short, it fit on a postcard), in which chess defeats AI. http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html

To play chess is the mark of a gentleman; to play chess well is the mark of a misspent youth.

I lost interest in chess when I realized that, in order to be really good, you had to spend a lot of time studying and memorizing openings. That seemed like a boring waste of time.

Its sort of funny how the original SA article sounds like a beautifully crafted work of satire. I had to constantly remind myself that the original article is genuinely sober.

Just like articles on the evils of video games the past couple decades.

This is exactly what I kept thinking of. You could basically do a search/replace of "chess" with "video games" and be pretty close to the sentiment towards gaming in most media until very recently. And with the advent of eSports, the comparison seems all the more apt.

"Why Clickbait Article Titles Will Destroy Your Mind"

I was thinking the same.

I hope they post the Medium stats on Views vs Reads

I entered the website for a sub-second, glimpsed the first line of text, and I was gone.

some one please change the title. It looks very close to a link bait.

The article feels rather click-baitey. It's basically a submarine for the book. While it does offer an interesting historical position, it completely fails to compare and/or contrast that to modern opinions, despite foreshadowing this in the opening paragraph.

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