“Chess-Playing Excitement” in 1859

https://medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your-mind-78ad1034521f

by yarapavan • 11 years ago

74 49 11 years ago

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.

marktangotango• 11 years ago

> 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

Nadya• 11 years ago

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

harperlee• 11 years ago

Aficionados :)

schoen• 11 years ago

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....

briane803• 11 years ago

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.

mholt• 11 years ago

"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.

nathancahill• 11 years ago

I'm sure his opponent knew.

tbomb• 11 years ago

"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

briane803• 11 years ago

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.

albinofrenchy• 11 years ago

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.

gsam• 11 years ago

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.

dang• 11 years ago

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

twerkmonsta• 11 years ago

"Why Clickbait Article Titles Will Destroy Your Mind"

deanstag• 11 years ago

I was thinking the same.

brayton• 11 years ago

I hope they post the Medium stats on Views vs Reads

mromanuk• 11 years ago

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

pattisapu• 11 years ago

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....

dimino5• 11 years ago

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

mafuyu• 11 years ago

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.

stcredzero• 11 years ago

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?

dimino5• 11 years ago

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.

toyg• 11 years ago

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.)

Nimitz14• 11 years ago

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

dimino5• 11 years ago

"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...

unclebucknasty• 11 years ago

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

platz• 11 years ago

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.”

tequila_shot• 11 years ago

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

stephengillie• 11 years ago

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.

agentgt• 11 years ago

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.

Jtsummers3• 11 years ago

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

Roodgorf• 11 years ago

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.

tzs• 11 years ago

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.

nvader• 11 years ago

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

dimino5• 11 years ago

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?

gjm11• 11 years ago

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.]

dimino5• 11 years ago

This is absolutely correct, thank you!

billforsternz• 11 years ago

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?

thesteamboat• 11 years ago

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

daveslash• 11 years ago

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

EGreg• 11 years ago

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.

fsk• 11 years ago

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.

“Chess-Playing Excitement” in 1859

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