[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