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A general comment about playing Chess. I've been playing since I was a kid. I like the game. Well, sort of. I've probably logged nearly 10K games on the pla
A general comment about playing Chess. I've been playing since I was a kid. I like the game. Well, sort of. I've probably logged nearly 10K games on the playchess server. One day, while having a conversation about Chess with another (older) engineer he made a comment that really stuck in my mind, he said: "All you accomplish by playing a lot of Chess is to become a better Chess player".
His comment had a point to it. The conversation took place while we were waiting for the results of FEA for a fluid-based thermal management system. Each run took 18 hours. It had been running overnight and we were about to get results. While we waited I fired-up a quick game of Chess and we started to talk about the subject once I was done.
His point was that, unless your goal is to become a world champion and somehow earn a living out of playing Chess the game can very easily become a huge waste of time. You don't learn anything more than playing Chess. It is false to assume that good Chess players are really smart people. Yes, they might have the ability to achieve deep concentration and focus on the game. One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.
I thought about this on-and-off for months. Nearly every time I thought about playing Chess his words played back in my head. My conclusion was to accept that he was right: There was no point to playing Chess beyond a level of entertainment.
In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database. You need to study openings, endings, all sorts of mid-game permutations. You need to study your opponents' games and know how to counter some of their moves or approaches. In other words, you need to turn a fun game into a job. That, to me, turns a fun game into an ugly job. I have no interest in being that person.
This point got driven home as I taught my kids to play. I started one of them off when he was six. This was prior to my "revelation". Very soon he was winning local tournaments right and left.
As I understood what was happening I pulled him back a bit from this rather serious engagement with the game. To some extent he had already learned a lot of what the game has to offer: Considering your options; Patience; Planning; Concentration; Goals; Making choices; etc. His time would be far better invested on such topics as programming, music, even building cool things with Legos.
You can learn the basic real-world-usable lessons of Chess within six to twelve months of playing the game. Anything beyond that is just playing more Chess with no further lessons that apply to other aspects of your life.
I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe of their mental abilities. What they have to become in order to play at these levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was a kid. It was very cool to solve problems as they were presented and "fight the battle". It isn't cool to play against a database --or have to become one.
It is exactly the same for competitive gaming, and for everything else that's competitive I think. At some point, I was competing at a national level (France) on Warcraft III, I realized that if I were to be in top8 or above, I had to play 50 hours / week. That's a full-time job, and the level of specialization and skill specificity you need is really high. I chose to work on my studies instead. Now I sometimes play StarCraft II (not really got time recently), but not above "for fun" nor more than 5 hours / week, or I quickly get frustrated that I'm no longer at a top master / grand master level.
Games are fun, they teach you a lot of things, they can be recreative if you're not all-in. If you don't want to make it your career though, keep focused on the main thing you want to do with your life.
Recent 48-hour obsessions of mine that follow a similar pattern: Starcraft 2, Minecraft.
I indulge them as long as they don't suck up more than 100 productive hours or so of my life. At that point, I chop them off and file them away.
We have similar chess history, but I think you're being emotional here in your "rebuttal of chess". I've had similar thoughts but I've come to the natural conclusion that all that matters in the end is whether I enjoy playing it or not.
Some things you mentioned don't add up. You don't have to be a human database to play chess as a hobby, even at club level. Playing at club level can be fun, and can definitely be a healthy hobby which doesn't take more time than any other sports or any other gaming activity. If it's not fun for you, or if you obsess over how better you could get if you just studied this or that opening, or how you'll never even reach 2200 ELO, then chess is probably not for you or not fit to be a hobby for you, that is true.
In short, thinking you would gain more mentally that would help with your engineering skill-set by playing chess instead of just, well, studying and working as an engineer, is fallacious to begin with. If there aren't any such studies, which I doubt, then why would you assume that? Of course, if all you want to do in life is being a better engineer, then anything but doing that is a "huge waste of time", not just chess.
But I think I still understand you emotionally as we had similar thoughts. Maybe, like me, you too rationalized your time spent in chess by saying to yourself that it helps your focus and concentration at work etc., but that's really not any more logical than rationalizing smoking, in the end you're just fooling yourself spending time doing something you enjoy. I'd think this was obvious, and I knew it even when as I was doing it myself. Maybe you just needed that external heads-up, from that older engineer you mentioned.
On a completely different note, I could still argue chess is not entirely useless in that sense. Compared to legos, you're forgetting that chess is a social activity. You're facing real people, and beating them can build confidence, and losing also has its lessons - socially, not chesswise. I've learned a lot about competition at a young age, and I've experienced what "winning" and "losing" is like. This is different than team sports, because you're out there alone by yourself, with no luck involved. And although we don't share the same success with him, a friend who doesn't spend more than a few hours per week playing chess became rather successful (2000+ ELO), and I see that it made him a lot more confident. Also for what it's worth, a lot of people - you may find the notion stupid - perceive him to be a very smart person, which is pretty valuable socially. I think that is an incredible value gained for that effort, arguably more efficient than a college education considering all this talk nowadays about the bubble.
I've hit the same wall a number of times in my life across a variety of games/past times/hobbies.
Two things which I have always come away with is a wonderful collection of amazing people and a keen understanding of how to improve at something as quickly as possible.
I think that is pretty much what life is all about.
PS: in case anyone is interested, my obsessions in chronological order have been; quake, skydiving, paintball, quake3fortress, online poker, starcraft 2.
PPS: online poker was different to all the others in that I actually made money doing it, which had the upside of granting me "spending money" and the downside of turning it into a second job.
I've had a similar experience, in school I got hooked on chess. Having an unfortunate tendency to try to master anything I suck at that I find interesting I dedicated quite a lot of time to learning chess, playing in the swedish masterships and even attending a special high school with chess on the curriculum.
The thing is though with chess (as with anything I'd guess) the first 20% of skill can be really hard to acquire since you need to "get started". The next 60% is usually a challenge that's fun and stimulating. Going beyond that it gets rough (unless youre exceptionally talented). I think chess is especially bad from that aspect, at higher level the amount of pure database knowledge you have to memorize is tremendous and IMO takes some of the fun out the game. Fischer tried to solve this by inventing a version where you randomized the position of the pieces each time. Games like go also seems much better since it's more about skill and intuition than rote memorization.
A big part of becoming great at chess is actually retraining the part of the brain that remembers faces to absorb board positions. I'm not talking about absolute recall , but a grand master has seen so many games that he can "intuit" a board drawing from his experience.
"Good hobbies", IMO, form either new brain connections , improve body coordination or just generally improve mental or physical health. I'd be surprised if learning chess didn't change the brain pathways in some ways that are beneficial but it probably doesn't increase much after a certain skill level. Learning to play an instrument, juggling, snowboarding , meditating, jogging are probably all "better hobbies" quantiatively
Anyways, I realized that while playing at a top level was probably achievable, the effort wasn't worth it. Working with computers and playing chess is a little more sitting down than I'd like in my life and time was better spend moving around and enjoying the company of others :)
I wish I could spend chess "just for fun" but alas it's hard to do at that level. Better to play some of the more clever board games where memorization isn't such a large component and you actually socialize as well
>> One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.
Really? Is Chess somehow different from any other activity? My teacher escaped from Kazakhstan simply because he could play Chess really well. Does the fact he chose an activity you have decided you don't like have any bearing on what type of person he is? Of course not.
>>In other words, you need to turn a fun game into a job.
To excel at something, you need to work at it; what is your point?
>> What they have to become in order to play at these levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was a kid.
How would you know? Have you ever played at a high level or known a world champion?
>>In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database.
This is demonstratebly false, rote memorization is meaningless in chess. Openings are the LEAST productive element of the game you can spend time on. Only ideas and concepts matter at all. A chess master does not automatically have a greater capacity to memorize than an amateur.
I have never seen a comment of such amazing paternalism directed at any other activity. How does studying music help one in politics or business or even as a lawyer? The answer: Just as much as chess. Simply the self-discipline required to play on such a high level must have some benefit. Even if everything you said was true, so what? Why does one take up activities except to interest herself personally? At least with Chess you are guaranteed to see moves or games of spectacular beauty. It does take time to develop a level of intution where one can recognize such beauty.
You're being a little harsh. I can relate to the frustration a player feels when progress seems to stall, unless you put some effort studying openings and endings.
Anyway, I agree with you. "To be a human database" is like saying that a musician is a "human sequencer". The joy of playing a good game or a difficult song has nothing to do with feeling like a machine. And you don't need to be a master to enjoy. In FICS there are enough players of my level so I can win... sometimes.
As for the discipline thing, there is something very important that chess teachs: the discipline of what works. It's following the rules that you win, not doing just what you would like. The frustration usually disappears when you accept that.
The sequential forced way of combinations is in particular a habit that helps me with my work.
In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database.
The higher the level of competition, it's actually more than becoming a database, but continually studying and making innovations, especially in opening theory. The innovations, inventions, discoveries in opening theory make chess a dynamic game unlike many other games and sports. What was considered the best move in the past, can be proven to be inferior to today's innovation.
It is not fun to play against a database, but on another note, one of the enjoyable parts of the game is it's possible to have masterpieces of your own. You can get into some situations where your play is just how the best human or computer would play. Composing a masterpiece and executing these combinations is very satisfying.
I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe of their mental abilities.
I don't know which parts you admire and which parts you don't. Apart from playing nearly 10K games online, I don't know if you've played through the annotations of some GM games. Through their commentary written after the game, you get a picture of what they were thinking: both breadth and depth. Some of these calculations are remarkable mental abilities, similar to say people who mentally compute large numbers or have perfect memories.
My impression is that the top players of today have deeper, amazing mental abilities than players years ago. In the past superior judgment and evaluation was the key. I classify this era Karpov and earlier. IMO, the latter half of Kasparov's era and beyond, has required players not only to have strong positional understanding, but deeper calculations mentally. I have this theory that Karpov faded in the mid 90s not so much because of what he did, but because of the deeper rigor the newer generation had on calculations. Their depth of calculations was equal to Karpov's. In his era, Karpov had an edge on calculations and could make defensive moves that others thought would not work. The newer generation could calculate deeper and really find attacks that would overcome the defense, and that's why Karpov lost more. Disregarding the computer annotations, the commentary of what a top player was thinking during the game, can still be an awe-inspiring display of mental abilities.