[barrkel]

I really don't think so. Getting really good at a game involving a discrete territory relies heavily on developing spatial intuitions that are specific to the game. Through experience and study of prior games, you get increasingly aware of the possibilities of positions many moves in advance; humans aren't built to exhaustively analyze game trees like the naive chess AIs of the 90s. If the game isn't a transparent metaphor for something else in life, then the intuitions won't apply either. Real life doesn't have things that move like knights, or shape the board like pawns.

[mablap]

An Elo score of 1500 is not considered being "really good" at chess.

In real life, you have to make choices. Some choices preclude certain futures while enabling others. Sometimes you can make a sacrifice now in order to "win" later. Etc.

I am not saying that memorizing complex mating patterns for example can be directly transposed to real life decision making. Rather, realizing these exist, and appropriating the patterns of thought that make such analyses possible is what is beneficial.

You are right that we aren't "built to exhaustively analyze game trees", but this is precisely what makes learning chess a good thing: you get to train your mind to do that. Transposing that skill in real life is, I believe, beneficial.

[grkvlt]

I had always assumed ELO was an acronym of some kind, turns out it's the surname of the system's inventor; Arpad Elo. [0] And, according to Wikipedia, 1500 would be a mid-level player, so not really good, but certainly not beginner either.

> In general, a beginner is around 800, a mid-level player is around 1600, and a professional, around 2400.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo

[SubiculumCode]

Of course you are right, vut part of getting good in chess is learning to think ahead in the first place, to stop thinking just about what you want to do, but about what your opponent wants to do...I think up to ELO 1500 is just learning to basic discipline in your thinking