Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.
After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.
Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…
Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the ‘meta’ strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it’s like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
I’ll gladly eat shit for a controversial opinion, but I mentally put chess pros in the same basket as those guys that would queue solely for Office in counterstrike and reach global elite. Like sure, it’s still an impressive time commitment, I just feel like there were better things to put that into. I hate MOBAs and yet I’d respect a professional DOTA player more? But I’m more than familiar with the fanbase of Chess and how defensive they get.
The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
I have a mishmash dialect as we moved around a lot when I was a child; very rural, too. I’ll say “hambag” and “ain’t” and “me an’ this guy” and my sister says “ambliance”, but we spell it all correctly.
Did your chess expert know the spelling and say it wrongly, or was there confusion about the spelling too?
They thought it was because the leather was from a pig…
I think it’s a good name if it’s a pigskin bag. Gonna start calling my wife’s bag that now. Most of her other bags are nylon or whatever, but on she’s had for 20 years is some kind of leather.
Ain’t ain’t a non-word. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
This is not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don’t really play chess?
Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there’s so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It’s about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It’s about tempo and conducting the initiative. There’s a reason it’s the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It’s an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).
It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call “prep”) is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don’t know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.
Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I’ve met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who’s 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I’m a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.
this is inaccurate. edit tbd
If you want to beat all of your friends at chess:
learn how to mate in endgames with a few different combinations of pieces.
Castle early and on the same side of your opponent.
Learn to defend scholars mate.
Focus on piece development early on, get you back rank pieces out (bishops knights)
Fight for the center
When attacking a square, just count how many other pieces are attacking and defending that square and see if you have more than your opponent, this is a great way to quickly analyze an attacks value.
Trade when you have a piece advantage, this is like taking a math question and simplyifing the terms. It greatly simplifies the game and brings it in to the the end game with an advantage.
Learn any one opening system just a few branches that can consistently bring you into tactics (static analysis of the board state) even or with a slight advantage.
These tips can be accomplished in a week and will dominate anyone who ‘just knows the rules’
Got it. To beat my friends at chess i just need to learn to play chess.
Funny, but really, those things are marginally more effort than learning the rules and are a far cry from the level of effort it takes to actually be considered broadly ‘good’ at chess.
Learning one opening system can be done in about an hour and most of the tactics advice is just things to think about as you play.
I also think it’s a generational thing.
Back then, since chess was associated with intelligence, a lot of academic types tried to play it and get good at it.
I would say once we had computers, there was another much more practical thing you could get good at.
But seriously, chess sets used to be part of the house decor.
I know someone who is pretty good at chess but also thinks vaccines are fake, Musk is a genius, and Ukraine belongs to Russia.
So not all chess players are smart.
I don’t think a minority of rightwingers are dumb. I think they’re invested in their idea of their team, and any insult to their team is an insult to them. They root for Trump. It’s like that one guy you know who owns a lot of Lakers memorabilia despite living in Texas. The media, expectations, their own investment, the threat of being wrong or misguided, “Me? Never!”, vastly outweigh any sort of critical thinking. Its straight denial to the core.
But a vast majority? Yeah, dumb as an absorbent trash bag.
The only famous douche I know that’s very good at chess is Andrew Tate lol
Do you know their rating? Tbh most people’s idea of being “pretty good at chess” is actually not very good at all (I don’t mean that as an insult, more lack of familiarity with the game).
That’s not to say that it’s impossible for someone to think those things and be a strong chess player, but it’s probably not super common. I’ve actually ran into a couple people at a local chess club with “interesting” ideas about vaccines and uh… let’s just say they were not hard to beat (I think I mated one guy in like 12 moves). And btw, I’m not even a super strong chess player myself (~1134 USCF). But like, they probably would seem really strong to someone that just occasionally plays chess at family gatherings or whatnot. Chess is a game with a low skill floor and very high skill ceiling, so you have a huge range in ability.
2000 ish, apparently.
ITT: I don’t play chess. I don’t like chess. Friend play chess, he dumb, I am smart. I agree. You hear of Rubik’s cube?
Your skill at chess is indeed very good at predicting one thing: your chess rating. I have been playing every day for almost 2 years and I take lessons, but I started as an adult after finishing my PhD in actual rocket science and supervising a research lab in that area for 10 years. Consequently, I will never be as good as the 10 year olds playing with coaching since they were 6. I have met exactly one good player through my connections to that lab in 17 years. So here are some perspectives on chess if you played in high school or you “learned how to play in 30 mins and think it’s boring”:
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It’s a game with layers. The first layer is knowing how the pieces move, the second layer is memorizing openings, and the third layer is some basic knowledge of tactics (I.e., forks, skewers, pins, removing the defense, etc etc) and THEN you learn the game. Most people never learn the game unless you went out of your way to do so.
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For reason 1, “good at chess” is a hugely subjective statement. You knew a few people who can beat all your friends? Cool. I was that guy and it took me MONTHS to get to what the chess world calls “intermediate”: 1200-1400 ELO. Your friend is probably rated 700 to 750. You have probably never met more than a handful of good chess players in your life unless you were in a university club or better.
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You do not have to be typically smart to be good at chess, but it doesn’t hurt. Top GMs are sometimes impressively smart or impressively… Uh… susceptible to misinformation cough Kramnik cough. But what they CAN do is master the shit out of board positions, visualization, and prediction.
Case in point, Hikaru Nakamura, arguably world #2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WsEQuoOz-c&t=490
Or you can watch him play blindfolded chess against actual good players, or speedrun 1 minute games winning hundreds in a row while talking about his pineapple shirt. He’s alternatingly pretty entertaining and kind of annoying to listen to.
If you are that kind of smart, the visualization and memory kind, yeah you’re probably going to also be a good chess player. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of traceability that I’ve seen research on.
All that said, this thread is absolutely annoying to see the whole world show up and talk out of their asses about it.
/end rant
Edit:
More Hikaru craziness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhDYSNbPs_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXDol9GqK64
Completely agree. Just a bunch of people who clearly don’t play the game and know nothing about it talking out of their asses.
IMO you can’t have a serious opinion about the game without having actually played it competitively. If you’re just somebody that’s casually played a couple games with friends and family, your opinion about the game isn’t really relevant.
“show me your non-provisional rating and then we can talk”. Yeah I agree. But then this is the internet and everyone is an expert at being an expert lol
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Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:
“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”
Chess requires dedication, conviction, and patience. Anyone with average intelligence can learn the game to the point of competence in 30 minutes.
It requires much more time to become an expert, or master.
And most people don’t have that much time to expend on it. That’s not something to be ashamed of.
You also need a sharp memory. I’m good in math, but terrible in remembering things. I forget terms that I’m actively doing research on, and constantly need to look at notes. (Aside: I work on modular forms, and often write them down as MF in my notes. I have more than once read that aloud as motherfucker, once in front of my advisor. Dude is chill, so it’s fine. But I dread the day it happens during a talk lol.)
There’s also a similar trope with the Rubiks Cube.
Bonus points is when there’s a game theory department in a movie. Then they all will be masters in any game.
Lol. Just in case someone finds it useful, the math of game theory has very little to do with games.
I remember Crazy Rich Asians was a great offender of this. The main character is a teacher in game theory, which naturally makes her great at any game (which also becomes an important plot point later in the movie).
[odd topic?]
This is from an essay about writers. The author said that you see a lot of architects in movies because it’s a fast and easy way to convey that someone is ‘artistic’ and a bit of a dreamer. It doesn’t matter that real life architects are much more about engineering that artistry; it works for a character.
The same thing with chess, it’s a fast and easy way to present a ‘smart’ character.
Architects or advertising executives. Sometimes lead male is one and lead female is the other.
I think it was one of the writers on Cracked that opined it’s because those are the only jobs screenwriters partially understand. They’re people who pitch ideas to customers, kind of like screenwriters do with scripts. So you get a lot of main characters that have a weirdly large amount of down time, a looming deadline to present an idea for an ad campaign or building to your boss and the three executives your boss is kissing up to. Is it the moment of triumph for our main character, has our main character had a change of heart that he can’t run a greenwashing campaign for ExxonMobile anymore because hippy dippy love interest got to him, and now his previous life is going to fall apart and he’s going to start over as a shop owner in a small town or something…
I’ve noticed that a lot of the women in rom-coms are bakers.
Then you’ve got the Hallmark movie they’ve remade 90,000 times now, where the women are usually some kind of lawyer or executive or something, who travels to a small town likely where she was raised for some contrived reason only to find what she really needs: Some stuffed flannel with designer stubble.
I want that in the next satire. A business card with
Angelina Jolie
Some kind of executive
Or lawyer
on it
I think my top favorite business card simply said
John Doe
Legitimate Businessman
I remember a sign from The Simpsons.
Legitimate Italian Businessmen’s Club.
Also from that episode “It’s an Italian American Mexican stand-off!”
One of the daftest people I ever met managed to beat 3 of us at once at chess. Would routinely kick my ass every time and it wasn’t even close.
The kind of person who absolutely would have injected bleach to cure covid.
Learning a few chess pro tips will make you better than anyone trying to figure that game out.
The top levels of chess are skill but the bottom is people doing pre-learned openers.
That checks out. I think I beat most of my friends simply because I remember a chess aficionado mentioning the center as being important to hold.
As a child I attended a chess club. There were no lessons. People simply played chess against each other.
I learned less in my entire years there than I did later in life in reading chess tips such as this page.
https://lichess.org/study/y14Z6s3N/A9uqbWxr
Looking back at those games I could recognize ways in which I was beaten by two moves in hindsight. But I had no idea about macro such as controlling the center or moving out the knights early were generally advantageous moves.
I recall some top player saying that he’d deliberately do a really ‘bad’ move at the start of a game and watch his opponents head explode because they’d never seen any top level player do that.
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing chess
„The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.“
Folk always seem to underestimate the effect of training and experience. In a match between two unpracticed players, sure, the more analytically inclined of the two will have an edge. This is true of any game with a strategic component. General intelligence helps but specialist knowledge is better.
Chess takes lots of time to get very good. Any actual scientist, professor or engineer doesn’t have the time.
