[crdrost]

This is really fascinating to me as the article at least mischaracterizes chess. It is fascinating that it is also mischaracterizing poker and poker is much more robotic than stories have told me.

That chess is less robotic, is perhaps not obvious. A postmodern skepticism of “even in principle” thinking is part of it: who cares what’s possible in principle, when in practice that is inaccessible to me? The actual narrative is me versus this player, my blunders versus her blunders, and whoever blunders less wins. There is a Platonic Form of perfect play that has no blunders? It is discovered by computers? See, this is something I had to acclimate to in learning chess, because chess engines are available, they will rank your games and tell you that this opening is slightly better than that opening by a tenth of a pawn, and you have to like just throw them in the trash. It's like a standard of beauty that demands you have half a percent body fat and rippling abs and bench 300 easy. And instead you have the desire to be Interesting, rather than to be True.

I play some openings because they are silly, you chase my knight in a massive circle around the board and then I am totally undeveloped but you are questionably developed and it is not clear you are doing better. Gone are the days of memorized 20-deep trees of Sicilian openings where I got a careful half-pawn advantage in my theory and then turned out to blunder my queen and erase it all. That was, if you like, a half-life.

[osazuwa]

I don't disagree. But the premise is not that getting good at making less blunders than your opponent in chess isn't fun or fulfilling. It is that getting good at making less blunders in chess doesn't transfer to real life decision-making as well as getting good at games like poker.

[crdrost]

I just think that they have different things to teach us. Chess gives you transferable skills of thinking through problems backwards, thinking about timing and how to create time, thinking about how you might get trapped later.

By contrast, say, backgammon gives you a transferable skill of luck-creation and the strength of being vulnerable and well, I don't know what exactly cube management is but something to the effect of the wisdom about when to cut out early versus when to stick with something to the bitter end. They are different skills.

Baseball teaches a transferable skill of perseverance, of "hey you are going to miss most of the pitches and in fact if you consistently hit a 25% batting average you can easily ride that into a professional career."

Trying to evaluate any of these in terms of its impact on "real life decision-making" is probably doomed to failure, no?