[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?