10 ms·
There is a great quote of Paul Morphy "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Onl
by me_me_me 5y ago
There is a great quote of Paul Morphy
"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'.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> make a living some as coaches or streamers 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."
- colmvp 5y ago> Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming. 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.
- alasdair_ 5y ago>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. 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). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705244 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705244
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- busyant 5y ago> Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing 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."
- sandworm101 5y agoPhotos have been a big part of promotions in the US armed forces. There has been pushback in recent years, iirc the marines abandoned photos last year, but you still have to "look the part" and attach headshots to many promotion applications. I've seen people pay actual money ($$$) for professional photographers to get an edge over their peers. 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.
- epivosism 5y agoHow do descriptions of physical attributes work? Possibly by just giving the candidate's percentile rank by sex? 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.
- CydeWeys 5y agoPhysical attributes are not particularly important wrt promotions in the military; you just need to pass that baseline fitness bar to not be flunked out on medical. 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.
- mikepurvis 5y agoI think Alexandra Botez manages this kind of thing well— obviously she's young and attractive, and there's a certain amount of goofing around that goes on (her younger sister is a co-host), but overall the channel is pretty tightly focused on chess games, commentary, etc. And she's certainly a very serious player herself and has specifically spoken out on sexism issues in tournaments and the larger chess community, eg: https://www.insider.com/how-chess-was-more-sexist-than-its-portrayal-queens-gambit-2020-12 https://www.insider.com/how-chess-was-more-sexist-than-its-p...
- Claudus 5y agoThere is certainly sexism built into the rating system, as woman titles require 200 less Elo points to achieve. https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-become-a-chess-grandmaster#rating https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-become-a-chess-gra...
- argc 5y agoIf the titles required the same Elo to achieve then there wouldn't be a point to have separate titles. The female-only titles are useful to encourage women to compete imo.
- CydeWeys 5y agoThey're different titles though. Grandmaster (GM) != Woman Grandmaster (WGM). Judit Polgár, for example, peaked at an Elo of over 2,700, so she easily qualified for Grandmaster (requirement of 2,500). Similarly, a Brigadier General is not the same rank as a General, despite some commonality in word choice between the two ranks.
- namdnay 5y agoWell OK, but it doesn’t explain why there’s a WGM. There isn’t a “woman sergeant” position, and we’d definitely take offense at a company defining separate “senior engineer” and “woman senior engineer” positions.. so why accept the condescension of WGM?
- xenocratus 5y ago> Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming You mean like this? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715141 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715141
- toss1 5y agoThis 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?
- me_me_me 5y agoLearning 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.
- smichel17 5y ago> but not probably only up to the point I'm really struggling to parse this. Can you reword it?
- me_me_me 5y agomy bad, the 'not' was an accident.
- toss1 5y agoI 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...
- fenomas 5y agoThis reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler, describing a chess game: > ..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.
- drcode 5y agoHe must not have had much experience with quant desks at trading firms.
- brudgers 5y agoChandler did not. He died in 1959. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler
- uyt 5y agoI thought "advertising agency" was referencing that the best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads at google/facebook. I guess it was always a thing even back then?
- petamask 5y agoPossible. But I think more likely is that it was a good frame of reference for him as he was an executive at an advertising agency for quite some time.
- fenomas 5y agoI don't think that's correct. Outside of writing, his career was spent in an oil company.
- tkgally 5y agoI think he meant that the best minds of his generation were devising advertising campaigns and writing advertising copy for laundry soap and canned vegetables. Advertising was more text-centric then, and talented writers like Chandler could make more money writing ads than books.
- js8 5y agoFunny part about the Morphy quote is that he would probably waste less of his life had he actually stick to chess.
- neaden 5y agoEh, there was nothing really for him to do in the Chess world. At that time period there wasn't really professional chess like there is today, he could have made a living gambling at it essentially but he would have considered that wasting his life.
- aoeusnth1 5y agoBecome a history teacher and open up a chess club. Organize tournaments and write books. There’s a lot he could do beyond “professional chess” as it’s known now.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoReminds me of Michael Jordan abandoning basketball because he became too good at it, and realizing he wasn't that good at other sports.
- nojs 5y ago> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life 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.
- BeetleB 5y ago> 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.
- manquer 5y agoMost faculty also teach as well, their paychecks for most part are well earned. 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.
- manquer 5y agoThe comment is from the world champion of 1850s . Being professional back then was considered equivalent to gambling. Professional sports or hobbies wasn't thing till early to mid 20th century. The early Olympics even had amateur only rules. 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.
- leto_ii 5y agoI have to say I don't really like this quote. The first part smacks of superficiality i.e. learn chess enough to be able to show off in polite society. The second part I think simply denotes a misunderstanding of what playing chess well means. You can play chess well without being a GM. 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.
- manquer 5y agoThe point is it exponentially harder to break the 2500 / 2600/ 2700 barriers . It is hard work. 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.
- leto_ii 5y agoIt's true I didn't know about Morphy when I made my comment, I read on Wikipedia afterwards. 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.
- me_me_me 5y agoYou took a quote out of context, then admitted it later. And yet you still claim that your point is correct if quote is taken out of context. Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
- paulddraper 5y ago"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 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.
- qqtt 5y ago"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.
- paulddraper 5y agoFair, just emphasizing the similarities to his quote.
- GPerson 5y agoYou just bounced me back from a momentary bit of depression.
- stainforth 5y agoAnd apparently at his law practice "clients" would come in, but just ask to play chess.
- stonemetal12 5y agoHow much of a life did you waste if you were "the greatest chessmaster of his time" at 22. I have heard worse tales of misspent youth.
- vishnugupta 5y ago> "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." A long time ago, someone characterised chess as a DOS on the mind.
- teachrdan 5y agoTo put it more succinctly, "Good at chess, bad at life."
- nextlevelchess 5y agoThere are certainly some negative examples. But "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." is way too harsh imo. You learn dozens of things that help you in life & business as well: -pushing yourself to the limit -how to learn best -how to get back on track after defeat and much more. For me, getting the GM title was sort of a life school. I'll profit from the journey my whole life.
- robrenaud 5y agoThe oppurtunity cost is huge though. That level of dedication, focus, and intellect applied to a productive endeavor like science, technology, or business is likely to push science forward or create millions of dollars of value. 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.
- nextlevelchess 5y agoSure, the oppurtunity cost is big. And I'm not saying it is the best way to put out value in the world. 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.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoPaul Morphy also played at a time when chess was much less respected than it is today. You couldn't make a living off chess and it was viewed similar to gambling.