6 ms·

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much tran

I am a fairly good player but after playing 22000 games, I came to the conclusion that ideas and strategies from chess are context-dependent and don't much transfer to real life. I'd rather spend all that time reading up on game theory and play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption.

FartyMcFarter 1mo ago
I think there are some valuable lessons that chess can teach, if you approach it the right way: - it teaches resiliency in bad situations. - it teaches you to not be too harsh on yourself as a person. If you watch GMs playing online, they make bad mistakes all the time too - they're not godlike creatures who make no mistakes, far from it. The flipside is that if you approach it the wrong way (I know I have at many points), it can have the opposite effects too. To approach chess in a mentally healthy way was a long process for me. You need to get rid of your ego and be objective as much as possible when playing, or it will just make you sour - this in itself is a valuable lesson.
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  McFarter? LOL. That made me laugh. Yes, I agree.
k2xl 1mo ago
(Disclaimer, I’m the founder of chess67.com) There is a very tangible benefit to people playing in chess that has nothing to do with the game itself. One example is for kids - I think kids playing chess (particularly over the board) learn quite a lot from the game. For example, etiquette (being respectful to your opponent), patience, logic, etc… but one of the best things they learn is how to lose. In chess you lose a lot. Asymptotically vast majority of players will lose approximately 50% of their games. Learning how to lose (respectfully), learn from your mistakes, then overcome them is really great process to learn. Doing this in real life rather than over the screen is also completely different. Combine that with the game being fun and the social aspects (meeting new people, making friends)… chess very much transfers to real life in my view
- 6_7 1mo ago
  I'm sorry, the founder of chess what dot com?
  - tsoj 1mo ago
    LMAO
    - jan_m_savage 1mo ago
      I am too simple, could you pls share why that's funny...
      - qlmos 1mo ago
        [dead]
      - ezst 1mo ago
        GP's username chess' out
- toasty228 1mo ago
  > For example, etiquette (being respectful to your opponent), patience, logic, etc… but one of the best things they learn is how to lose. That's valid for pretty much every kids sports/games though
  - gnufied 1mo ago
    So a lot of games/sports kids could cry out - "that is not fair". There is an element of luck in most board games. Chess is the first board game you can introduce to your kid that has no element of luck whatsoever. It could be brutal. I have seen 7-9 year olds coming out crying after a game in a tournament. But it also may be requires very good parenting to handle all the emotional distress. Chess also is obviously accessible. It is an emotional rollercoaster to engage kids in Chess tbh. We are ready to sometimes throw the towel every other week. :-)
  - 1mo ago
SecretDreams 1mo ago
Main thing I took away from chess when I used to play is it's just another exercise to work parts of your brain. I preferred 3+0 and 5+0 chess because of the low time commit, ease to move next, and the tradeoff between most correct move and most optimal move to cause the opponent to expand more of their time trying to figure out what you were doing. I hit about 2k Elo on lichess playing the 3+0/5+0 and I have no regrets!
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  Yeah I have ADHD and can't bother play slow, long games. I only play bullet (60 sec) and would often defeat 2200-level players before I decided to give up. That means, most of those I will play (socially) in the future won't beat me.
olooney 1mo ago
That's true. Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics (abstractions that let you estimate if positions are good or bad) for yourself. Those are useful lessons, but you don't need to play thousands of games to grasp those ideas. Other aspects of strategy, like shortening decision loops[1], forming alliances, or the exploration/exploitation tradeoff[3], are simply not represented by chess because it is a turn-based, zero-sum game with perfect information. That makes chess a poor model of real-world strategy. Still, the things it does teach are real and useful, so as long as you don't think its the end-all, be-all of strategic thinking you can get something out of it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitation_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
- bluecalm 1mo ago
  I think chess teaches a lot more. It teaches decision making and resource management. It's very important to consider your options and decide how much time you spend analyzing them. It teaches you things like elimination process (if you have 3 options, one complicated one and 2 simple ones then start analyzing simple ones because if they are bad you just saved a lot of time by not analyzing 3rd one). It also teaches you to forget about the past and focus on the present. It teaches you long term plans usually don't work and relying on them is a bad idea and it's better to focus on execution here and now (this is what Soviet school got wrong although probably only officially, the players knew it all along - analogies to 5 years plans were just too tempting for book authors). At human level it also teaches you to design strategy to exploit your opponents - play openings they hate, simplify vs players who like complicated positions, complicate vs players who like simple ones. There is a lot of interesting things you learn about thought process and decision making as your level improve. It might not be the best game for that but it's pretty good considered how simple it is.
  - chaps 1mo ago
    You (and others) should check out real time strategy games if your hope is to learn much of what you're sharing here!
tvelichkov 1mo ago
Reminds me of: "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 Murphy.
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  I got to a 1900 bullet rating in two years, playing an average of 10 to 30 games a day--while not learning any theory! (I wanted to discover theories on my own). And that's when I realized nah, it's not worth it. That's a great quote, thanks for sharing.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- samus 1mo ago
  Murphy was in general so dismissive of his own talent. Granted, he lived in the era before people played chess for a living.
- zem 1mo ago
  *Morphy
speedgoose 1mo ago
> play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption To each their own. If you like the competitive aspect of chess, you may enjoy physical sports too. I started to find video games pretty boring compared to pushing myself physically.
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  I do like physical competitiveness as well-- I did box in my teens, and basketball for decades. It depends on the video games, too.
dainank 1mo ago
I agree. I think in general, any game that is 'turn-based' (in this case chess), with a limited set of options, quickly boils down to pure theory and in my opinion 'dumb intelligence' of just remembering many things and patterns (the AI of now). As soon as a game is in 'real-time' with many-many options, it reaches a level of complexity where you cannot ONLY remember theory and outsmart your opponent. It is far more about applying logic on the fly with the limited time and overwhelming set of options you are supplied. This skillset applies to almost everything in life and serves me personally very well thus far in life. Yes, I understand that chess has different modes that severely limit time per turns which transform it more into the 'real-time' games and value, but it is still turn-based and still has a limited set of options when compared to true 'real-time' games.
- matsemann 1mo ago
  I've never studied any openings and still have loads of fun with chess. I think you have to be IM level or something to not immediately go out theory. It can be a bit fun, sometime, to play someone that has studied an opening at my level, but since they aren't that deep into it, they only know the moves for some variations. So me, not knowing the opening, do something from the left-field, and they don't really know how to punish it anyway. Remember one time someone got a bit grumpy, heh.
- tsoj 1mo ago
  Maths is "turn based" albeit it has practically infinite available moves per turn. But I think the latter matters less than it may appear at first: At least in practice there isn't much different (for both humans and computers) if there are infinitely many moves, or "just" 10,000. And while (as far as I know) there aren't any board games with that many moves, the exponential explosion means that if you conceptually "combine" let's say three moves in a row, you suddenly have not 30 moves, but 27,000. And that's practically infinite.
  - eru 1mo ago
    You can play a variant of math where you only have a limited set of options available each turn, and it wouldn't make much of a difference. (Eg limit yourself to commands you can send to vim as you write your Lean proof or whatever.)
alex1138 1mo ago
I play chess and I'm basically with you It's just a board game
dist-epoch 1mo ago
Before transferring to life, it doesn't even transfer to a game like Poker.
wavemode 1mo ago
Real life is a game of risk/reward rather than a game of deep calculation. You can't "calculate" life because there are too many variables and unknowns. You have to simply pick a path and either accept the risks or mitigate them.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- eru 1mo ago
  Depends on what you do in life.
10xDev 1mo ago
Zugzwang is everywhere.
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  Eh.. it did not originate in chess, this Zugzwang. It's a fairly well-known mathematical entity, goes by the name of Optionality. If you need to fly tonight, and the airliner knows it, they can charge you very high prices: you have no optionality. Nassim Taleb say a lot on this in his Anti-fragile.
SwellJoe 1mo ago
I don't play games for them to "transfer to real life". I play games for fun. Chess can be fun, it has an interesting history and the strategy of various kinds of play open up to you as you play/learn more, it has a structured competition community so you can go places and play with other real people and win fabulous prizes (not really; even some of the best professional players also have real jobs). It's played worldwide, so no matter where you are, you can find people to play with in the real world. It's popular, so there's always someone online you can play against. Some folks find chess fun and interesting enough to play it and study it all their lives. Other games can also be fun, though it's rare for a game to hold someone's attention throughout their whole life.
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  I live my life such that the boundary between fun, work and thinking is usually fuzzy and blurred. So, while I did play chess for fun, after a while it became boring--but I also impute this to my ADHD, perhaps for others it might not stale. I would not mind a game or two with an interesting opponent, but playing daily is out of the question for me anymore. Time has opportunity cost, right?
bumbledraven 1mo ago
Compared to chess, Magic: The Gathering ability transfers much better to real life. MtG has: - dealing with imperfect information - bluffing - thinking ahead with an enormous number of possible moves (especially when you consider deck construction) - tracking board state - mentally implementing "triggers"
globular-toast 1mo ago
Why would you play 22000 games if you didn't enjoy it? Are you saying you went through all of that because you thought it would be good for you?
- jan_m_savage 1mo ago
  My comment may have been too terse. I didn't mean I didn't enjoy or else I wouldn't have played. I did, but it became stale after so many games and regularly defeating 2000+ opponents in bullet chess. The time and energy needed to reach 2500 is not worth the goal.

FartyMcFarter 1mo ago

I think there are some valuable lessons that chess can teach, if you approach it the right way: - it teaches resiliency in bad situations. - it teaches you to not be too harsh on yourself as a person. If you watch GMs playing online, they make bad mistakes all the time too - they're not godlike creatures who make no mistakes, far from it. The flipside is that if you approach it the wrong way (I know I have at many points), it can have the opposite effects too. To approach chess in a mentally healthy way was a long process for me. You need to get rid of your ego and be objective as much as possible when playing, or it will just make you sour - this in itself is a valuable lesson.

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
McFarter? LOL. That made me laugh. Yes, I agree.

k2xl 1mo ago

(Disclaimer, I’m the founder of chess67.com) There is a very tangible benefit to people playing in chess that has nothing to do with the game itself. One example is for kids - I think kids playing chess (particularly over the board) learn quite a lot from the game. For example, etiquette (being respectful to your opponent), patience, logic, etc… but one of the best things they learn is how to lose. In chess you lose a lot. Asymptotically vast majority of players will lose approximately 50% of their games. Learning how to lose (respectfully), learn from your mistakes, then overcome them is really great process to learn. Doing this in real life rather than over the screen is also completely different. Combine that with the game being fun and the social aspects (meeting new people, making friends)… chess very much transfers to real life in my view

6_7 1mo ago
I'm sorry, the founder of chess what dot com?
- tsoj 1mo ago
  LMAO
  - jan_m_savage 1mo ago
    I am too simple, could you pls share why that's funny...
    - qlmos 1mo ago
      [dead]
    - ezst 1mo ago
      GP's username chess' out
toasty228 1mo ago
> For example, etiquette (being respectful to your opponent), patience, logic, etc… but one of the best things they learn is how to lose. That's valid for pretty much every kids sports/games though
- gnufied 1mo ago
  So a lot of games/sports kids could cry out - "that is not fair". There is an element of luck in most board games. Chess is the first board game you can introduce to your kid that has no element of luck whatsoever. It could be brutal. I have seen 7-9 year olds coming out crying after a game in a tournament. But it also may be requires very good parenting to handle all the emotional distress. Chess also is obviously accessible. It is an emotional rollercoaster to engage kids in Chess tbh. We are ready to sometimes throw the towel every other week. :-)
- 1mo ago

SecretDreams 1mo ago

Main thing I took away from chess when I used to play is it's just another exercise to work parts of your brain. I preferred 3+0 and 5+0 chess because of the low time commit, ease to move next, and the tradeoff between most correct move and most optimal move to cause the opponent to expand more of their time trying to figure out what you were doing. I hit about 2k Elo on lichess playing the 3+0/5+0 and I have no regrets!

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
Yeah I have ADHD and can't bother play slow, long games. I only play bullet (60 sec) and would often defeat 2200-level players before I decided to give up. That means, most of those I will play (socially) in the future won't beat me.

olooney 1mo ago

That's true. Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics (abstractions that let you estimate if positions are good or bad) for yourself. Those are useful lessons, but you don't need to play thousands of games to grasp those ideas. Other aspects of strategy, like shortening decision loops[1], forming alliances, or the exploration/exploitation tradeoff[3], are simply not represented by chess because it is a turn-based, zero-sum game with perfect information. That makes chess a poor model of real-world strategy. Still, the things it does teach are real and useful, so as long as you don't think its the end-all, be-all of strategic thinking you can get something out of it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitation_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

bluecalm 1mo ago
I think chess teaches a lot more. It teaches decision making and resource management. It's very important to consider your options and decide how much time you spend analyzing them. It teaches you things like elimination process (if you have 3 options, one complicated one and 2 simple ones then start analyzing simple ones because if they are bad you just saved a lot of time by not analyzing 3rd one). It also teaches you to forget about the past and focus on the present. It teaches you long term plans usually don't work and relying on them is a bad idea and it's better to focus on execution here and now (this is what Soviet school got wrong although probably only officially, the players knew it all along - analogies to 5 years plans were just too tempting for book authors). At human level it also teaches you to design strategy to exploit your opponents - play openings they hate, simplify vs players who like complicated positions, complicate vs players who like simple ones. There is a lot of interesting things you learn about thought process and decision making as your level improve. It might not be the best game for that but it's pretty good considered how simple it is.
- chaps 1mo ago
  You (and others) should check out real time strategy games if your hope is to learn much of what you're sharing here!

tvelichkov 1mo ago

Reminds me of: "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 Murphy.

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
I got to a 1900 bullet rating in two years, playing an average of 10 to 30 games a day--while not learning any theory! (I wanted to discover theories on my own). And that's when I realized nah, it's not worth it. That's a great quote, thanks for sharing.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
samus 1mo ago
Murphy was in general so dismissive of his own talent. Granted, he lived in the era before people played chess for a living.
zem 1mo ago
*Morphy

speedgoose 1mo ago

> play some fun video games, like Red Dead Redemption To each their own. If you like the competitive aspect of chess, you may enjoy physical sports too. I started to find video games pretty boring compared to pushing myself physically.

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
I do like physical competitiveness as well-- I did box in my teens, and basketball for decades. It depends on the video games, too.

dainank 1mo ago

I agree. I think in general, any game that is 'turn-based' (in this case chess), with a limited set of options, quickly boils down to pure theory and in my opinion 'dumb intelligence' of just remembering many things and patterns (the AI of now). As soon as a game is in 'real-time' with many-many options, it reaches a level of complexity where you cannot ONLY remember theory and outsmart your opponent. It is far more about applying logic on the fly with the limited time and overwhelming set of options you are supplied. This skillset applies to almost everything in life and serves me personally very well thus far in life. Yes, I understand that chess has different modes that severely limit time per turns which transform it more into the 'real-time' games and value, but it is still turn-based and still has a limited set of options when compared to true 'real-time' games.

matsemann 1mo ago
I've never studied any openings and still have loads of fun with chess. I think you have to be IM level or something to not immediately go out theory. It can be a bit fun, sometime, to play someone that has studied an opening at my level, but since they aren't that deep into it, they only know the moves for some variations. So me, not knowing the opening, do something from the left-field, and they don't really know how to punish it anyway. Remember one time someone got a bit grumpy, heh.
tsoj 1mo ago
Maths is "turn based" albeit it has practically infinite available moves per turn. But I think the latter matters less than it may appear at first: At least in practice there isn't much different (for both humans and computers) if there are infinitely many moves, or "just" 10,000. And while (as far as I know) there aren't any board games with that many moves, the exponential explosion means that if you conceptually "combine" let's say three moves in a row, you suddenly have not 30 moves, but 27,000. And that's practically infinite.
- eru 1mo ago
  You can play a variant of math where you only have a limited set of options available each turn, and it wouldn't make much of a difference. (Eg limit yourself to commands you can send to vim as you write your Lean proof or whatever.)

alex1138 1mo ago

I play chess and I'm basically with you It's just a board game

dist-epoch 1mo ago

Before transferring to life, it doesn't even transfer to a game like Poker.

wavemode 1mo ago

Real life is a game of risk/reward rather than a game of deep calculation. You can't "calculate" life because there are too many variables and unknowns. You have to simply pick a path and either accept the risks or mitigate them.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
eru 1mo ago
Depends on what you do in life.

10xDev 1mo ago

Zugzwang is everywhere.

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
Eh.. it did not originate in chess, this Zugzwang. It's a fairly well-known mathematical entity, goes by the name of Optionality. If you need to fly tonight, and the airliner knows it, they can charge you very high prices: you have no optionality. Nassim Taleb say a lot on this in his Anti-fragile.

SwellJoe 1mo ago

I don't play games for them to "transfer to real life". I play games for fun. Chess can be fun, it has an interesting history and the strategy of various kinds of play open up to you as you play/learn more, it has a structured competition community so you can go places and play with other real people and win fabulous prizes (not really; even some of the best professional players also have real jobs). It's played worldwide, so no matter where you are, you can find people to play with in the real world. It's popular, so there's always someone online you can play against. Some folks find chess fun and interesting enough to play it and study it all their lives. Other games can also be fun, though it's rare for a game to hold someone's attention throughout their whole life.

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
I live my life such that the boundary between fun, work and thinking is usually fuzzy and blurred. So, while I did play chess for fun, after a while it became boring--but I also impute this to my ADHD, perhaps for others it might not stale. I would not mind a game or two with an interesting opponent, but playing daily is out of the question for me anymore. Time has opportunity cost, right?

bumbledraven 1mo ago

Compared to chess, Magic: The Gathering ability transfers much better to real life. MtG has: - dealing with imperfect information - bluffing - thinking ahead with an enormous number of possible moves (especially when you consider deck construction) - tracking board state - mentally implementing "triggers"

globular-toast 1mo ago

Why would you play 22000 games if you didn't enjoy it? Are you saying you went through all of that because you thought it would be good for you?

jan_m_savage 1mo ago
My comment may have been too terse. I didn't mean I didn't enjoy or else I wouldn't have played. I did, but it became stale after so many games and regularly defeating 2000+ opponents in bullet chess. The time and energy needed to reach 2500 is not worth the goal.