[robomartin]

A general comment about playing Chess. I've been playing since I was a kid. I like the game. Well, sort of. I've probably logged nearly 10K games on the playchess server. One day, while having a conversation about Chess with another (older) engineer he made a comment that really stuck in my mind, he said: "All you accomplish by playing a lot of Chess is to become a better Chess player".

His comment had a point to it. The conversation took place while we were waiting for the results of FEA for a fluid-based thermal management system. Each run took 18 hours. It had been running overnight and we were about to get results. While we waited I fired-up a quick game of Chess and we started to talk about the subject once I was done.

His point was that, unless your goal is to become a world champion and somehow earn a living out of playing Chess the game can very easily become a huge waste of time. You don't learn anything more than playing Chess. It is false to assume that good Chess players are really smart people. Yes, they might have the ability to achieve deep concentration and focus on the game. One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.

I thought about this on-and-off for months. Nearly every time I thought about playing Chess his words played back in my head. My conclusion was to accept that he was right: There was no point to playing Chess beyond a level of entertainment.

In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database. You need to study openings, endings, all sorts of mid-game permutations. You need to study your opponents' games and know how to counter some of their moves or approaches. In other words, you need to turn a fun game into a job. That, to me, turns a fun game into an ugly job. I have no interest in being that person.

This point got driven home as I taught my kids to play. I started one of them off when he was six. This was prior to my "revelation". Very soon he was winning local tournaments right and left.

As I understood what was happening I pulled him back a bit from this rather serious engagement with the game. To some extent he had already learned a lot of what the game has to offer: Considering your options; Patience; Planning; Concentration; Goals; Making choices; etc. His time would be far better invested on such topics as programming, music, even building cool things with Legos.

You can learn the basic real-world-usable lessons of Chess within six to twelve months of playing the game. Anything beyond that is just playing more Chess with no further lessons that apply to other aspects of your life.

I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe of their mental abilities. What they have to become in order to play at these levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was a kid. It was very cool to solve problems as they were presented and "fight the battle". It isn't cool to play against a database --or have to become one.

[grepherder]

We have similar chess history, but I think you're being emotional here in your "rebuttal of chess". I've had similar thoughts but I've come to the natural conclusion that all that matters in the end is whether I enjoy playing it or not.

Some things you mentioned don't add up. You don't have to be a human database to play chess as a hobby, even at club level. Playing at club level can be fun, and can definitely be a healthy hobby which doesn't take more time than any other sports or any other gaming activity. If it's not fun for you, or if you obsess over how better you could get if you just studied this or that opening, or how you'll never even reach 2200 ELO, then chess is probably not for you or not fit to be a hobby for you, that is true.

In short, thinking you would gain more mentally that would help with your engineering skill-set by playing chess instead of just, well, studying and working as an engineer, is fallacious to begin with. If there aren't any such studies, which I doubt, then why would you assume that? Of course, if all you want to do in life is being a better engineer, then anything but doing that is a "huge waste of time", not just chess.

But I think I still understand you emotionally as we had similar thoughts. Maybe, like me, you too rationalized your time spent in chess by saying to yourself that it helps your focus and concentration at work etc., but that's really not any more logical than rationalizing smoking, in the end you're just fooling yourself spending time doing something you enjoy. I'd think this was obvious, and I knew it even when as I was doing it myself. Maybe you just needed that external heads-up, from that older engineer you mentioned.

On a completely different note, I could still argue chess is not entirely useless in that sense. Compared to legos, you're forgetting that chess is a social activity. You're facing real people, and beating them can build confidence, and losing also has its lessons - socially, not chesswise. I've learned a lot about competition at a young age, and I've experienced what "winning" and "losing" is like. This is different than team sports, because you're out there alone by yourself, with no luck involved. And although we don't share the same success with him, a friend who doesn't spend more than a few hours per week playing chess became rather successful (2000+ ELO), and I see that it made him a lot more confident. Also for what it's worth, a lot of people - you may find the notion stupid - perceive him to be a very smart person, which is pretty valuable socially. I think that is an incredible value gained for that effort, arguably more efficient than a college education considering all this talk nowadays about the bubble.

[jasonkester]

Indeed, but you can say this about pretty much any hobby.

What does playing Guitar get you beyond getting better at playing guitar? Snowboarding? Rock Climbing? Traveling the world? Building perfectly accurate models of 19th century warships?

There are a million things that people can take up a a hobby, and even dedicate their entire life to. All of them have your same points in common that, unless you manage to become one of the top 100 people in the world at it, it's not really going to ever benefit you beyond your own personal satisfaction.

And yet, I defy you to find a single person who doesn't have at least one of these time wasting hobbies. It's part of what makes us human.

My advice is to not sweat it so much and go play Chess if it makes you happy.

[vetler]

Snowboarding and rock climbing improves your health, so it's absolutely not wasted time. You get the benefit of doing something fun, while also making you a healthier person.

You're still right, though. Play chess if it makes you happy.

[jasonkester]

True, though there are better ways to improve your health if that's your goal.

If you want to be truly good at either one of those things (to the level that the grandparent talks about where he's a "walking database"), you're going to do all sorts of things that are not particularly beneficial to your health.

Next time you meet a really dedicated snowboarder, have him do a couple deep knee bends and take a listen. If you ever meet me, have me show you my knuckles, which I can no longer straighten nor bend completely after 15 years of dedicated finger training for Rock Climbing. Watch me do a one-arm pullup, then laugh as I fail to run a mile because I'm not actually, in any normal sense of the word, in shape.

Pretty much all the hobies I mention above, and most you could think of, require you to specialize in ways that make them unsuitable training for the general case area in which they improve you. Just like Chess sorta makes you smarter and piano sorta makes you more dextrous, training for a sport just sorta makes you healthy. But mostly it makes you a better snowboarder, climber, etc.

[kamaal]

Uncharted territories make interesting things to me. Once I figure out the secret sauce behind things, they stop being fun to me.

Some sports are enjoyable for sheer thrill and excitement. They go outside the bounds of a hobby, they are more of experiences.

[jc123]

In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database.

The higher the level of competition, it's actually more than becoming a database, but continually studying and making innovations, especially in opening theory. The innovations, inventions, discoveries in opening theory make chess a dynamic game unlike many other games and sports. What was considered the best move in the past, can be proven to be inferior to today's innovation.

It is not fun to play against a database, but on another note, one of the enjoyable parts of the game is it's possible to have masterpieces of your own. You can get into some situations where your play is just how the best human or computer would play. Composing a masterpiece and executing these combinations is very satisfying.

I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe of their mental abilities.

I don't know which parts you admire and which parts you don't. Apart from playing nearly 10K games online, I don't know if you've played through the annotations of some GM games. Through their commentary written after the game, you get a picture of what they were thinking: both breadth and depth. Some of these calculations are remarkable mental abilities, similar to say people who mentally compute large numbers or have perfect memories.

My impression is that the top players of today have deeper, amazing mental abilities than players years ago. In the past superior judgment and evaluation was the key. I classify this era Karpov and earlier. IMO, the latter half of Kasparov's era and beyond, has required players not only to have strong positional understanding, but deeper calculations mentally. I have this theory that Karpov faded in the mid 90s not so much because of what he did, but because of the deeper rigor the newer generation had on calculations. Their depth of calculations was equal to Karpov's. In his era, Karpov had an edge on calculations and could make defensive moves that others thought would not work. The newer generation could calculate deeper and really find attacks that would overcome the defense, and that's why Karpov lost more. Disregarding the computer annotations, the commentary of what a top player was thinking during the game, can still be an awe-inspiring display of mental abilities.

[tzs]

Chess in person with other people is quite different from chess online with random internet people. A chess tournament is usually more than just sitting down and playing your games--it is typical a social event.

You don't say if your kid was just playing in school tournaments, or if he was playing in tournaments open to all players. If the later, chess tournaments (and local chess clubs) are one of the few places kids can interact with adults and be treated as equals.

It's really a lot like sports. If your kid takes an interest in, say, basketball, will you stop him from getting on the school team because he has very little chance of becoming an NBA player?

[cpleppert]

>> One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.

Really? Is Chess somehow different from any other activity? My teacher escaped from Kazakhstan simply because he could play Chess really well. Does the fact he chose an activity you have decided you don't like have any bearing on what type of person he is? Of course not.

>>In other words, you need to turn a fun game into a job.

To excel at something, you need to work at it; what is your point?

>> What they have to become in order to play at these levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was a kid.

How would you know? Have you ever played at a high level or known a world champion?

>>In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database.

This is demonstratebly false, rote memorization is meaningless in chess. Openings are the LEAST productive element of the game you can spend time on. Only ideas and concepts matter at all. A chess master does not automatically have a greater capacity to memorize than an amateur.

I have never seen a comment of such amazing paternalism directed at any other activity. How does studying music help one in politics or business or even as a lawyer? The answer: Just as much as chess. Simply the self-discipline required to play on such a high level must have some benefit. Even if everything you said was true, so what? Why does one take up activities except to interest herself personally? At least with Chess you are guaranteed to see moves or games of spectacular beauty. It does take time to develop a level of intution where one can recognize such beauty.

[narag]

You're being a little harsh. I can relate to the frustration a player feels when progress seems to stall, unless you put some effort studying openings and endings.

Anyway, I agree with you. "To be a human database" is like saying that a musician is a "human sequencer". The joy of playing a good game or a difficult song has nothing to do with feeling like a machine. And you don't need to be a master to enjoy. In FICS there are enough players of my level so I can win... sometimes.

As for the discipline thing, there is something very important that chess teachs: the discipline of what works. It's following the rules that you win, not doing just what you would like. The frustration usually disappears when you accept that.

The sequential forced way of combinations is in particular a habit that helps me with my work.

[mquander]

I agree that you don't learn how to be a good person or do anything terribly useful by studying chess, but how is playing music or building cool things with Legos substantially different?

Just do what you please.

[robomartin]

The point is that the extremes are bad. If someone spent ten hours a day doing nothing but building legos the observation would be exactly the same: It's not good for you.

Chess can become a sick obsession. I know. I've been there. I have played chess for 12 hours straight on more than one occasion. It leaves you rattled and with nothing good to show for it. Contrast that to spending twelve hours with a mixed bag of skills: learning to play the guitar, watching a tutorial or two, taking in a couple TED talks, etc.

My greater point might be that if you have x amount of hours per day to devote to something it is probably a bad idea to devote too much of it to Chess. You are going to get nowhere by playing chess the way you learned it. The only way to start climbing up the ranks is to become a human database. That takes you in a very different direction.

[D_Alex]

"extremes are bad"

I disagree, a little. Extremes are good, because a bunch of worthwhile things get accomplished by people going to extremes.

As far as personal costs of going to such extremes go - they are difficult to judge objectively, from the outside. A study I recall claimed that elite athletes are "happiest", based on self-assessment, and it further speculates that one reason for this is because they have a clear goal and a clear way to advance it.

[jinfiesto]

All the same, I don't think playing that much really does much for your chess skills either. There's really only so much information you can absorb in a day. As an analogue, Richter, one of the greatest pianists of all time, regularly only practiced 3 hours a day.

[lancefisher]

A few years ago, I ran into a guy from the local chess club at Barnes & Noble. I asked him how it was going, and he replied, "oh, you know... Good at chess. Bad at life." That has stuck with me too, and I can't justify spending too much time playing. It would be nice to share some games with my son when he gets older though.

[robomartin]

And when that time comes it will be fun.

BTW, by far the best tool I have found to teach kids Chess is the Chessmaster game on the Playstation. It is very, very well done and has a nice progression of tutorials and exercises. Best time to start is when your kid can read as not all prompts are verbal.

[mattiask]

I've had a similar experience, in school I got hooked on chess. Having an unfortunate tendency to try to master anything I suck at that I find interesting I dedicated quite a lot of time to learning chess, playing in the swedish masterships and even attending a special high school with chess on the curriculum.

The thing is though with chess (as with anything I'd guess) the first 20% of skill can be really hard to acquire since you need to "get started". The next 60% is usually a challenge that's fun and stimulating. Going beyond that it gets rough (unless youre exceptionally talented). I think chess is especially bad from that aspect, at higher level the amount of pure database knowledge you have to memorize is tremendous and IMO takes some of the fun out the game. Fischer tried to solve this by inventing a version where you randomized the position of the pieces each time. Games like go also seems much better since it's more about skill and intuition than rote memorization.

A big part of becoming great at chess is actually retraining the part of the brain that remembers faces to absorb board positions. I'm not talking about absolute recall , but a grand master has seen so many games that he can "intuit" a board drawing from his experience.

"Good hobbies", IMO, form either new brain connections , improve body coordination or just generally improve mental or physical health. I'd be surprised if learning chess didn't change the brain pathways in some ways that are beneficial but it probably doesn't increase much after a certain skill level. Learning to play an instrument, juggling, snowboarding , meditating, jogging are probably all "better hobbies" quantiatively

Anyways, I realized that while playing at a top level was probably achievable, the effort wasn't worth it. Working with computers and playing chess is a little more sitting down than I'd like in my life and time was better spend moving around and enjoying the company of others :)

I wish I could spend chess "just for fun" but alas it's hard to do at that level. Better to play some of the more clever board games where memorization isn't such a large component and you actually socialize as well

[snippyhollow]

It is exactly the same for competitive gaming, and for everything else that's competitive I think. At some point, I was competing at a national level (France) on Warcraft III, I realized that if I were to be in top8 or above, I had to play 50 hours / week. That's a full-time job, and the level of specialization and skill specificity you need is really high. I chose to work on my studies instead. Now I sometimes play StarCraft II (not really got time recently), but not above "for fun" nor more than 5 hours / week, or I quickly get frustrated that I'm no longer at a top master / grand master level.

Games are fun, they teach you a lot of things, they can be recreative if you're not all-in. If you don't want to make it your career though, keep focused on the main thing you want to do with your life.

[baddox]

It's minor, but competitive gamers generally do at least acquire mechanics that can be used for other games. I'm not sure if chess is like that.

[mmcnickle]

I found my ability to perform well at certain board games (even those previously unknown to me) to improve after spending some effort studying chess. I attribute this to the improved ability to analyse abstract positions, to construct an increased number of possible moves and opponents' responses in my head in a short amount of time. Though confirmation bias etc.

[Bootvis]

As far as that is true, it's because all RTS or FPS games are essentially the same. I say this as a once avid chess player and gamer.

[csallen]

I think this rings true at the highest levels of skill for most activities. The better you get, the more specialized your skillset has to become to continue winning, and the less applicable it becomes to other things.

Regardless, I think there's something to be said for competing at a high level. It provides more than just entertainment, as some skills do translate if you let them: The confidence you gain by knowing you have what it takes to be among the best at something. An attitude that refuses to settle for less. And a deep appreciation for what hard work and deliberate practice can accomplish.

[b0rsuk]

"""To evaluate brain activity in players of differing ability, Ognjen Amidzic and colleagues measured so-called gamma-band activity in the brains of 10 grandmasters and 10 amateurs, using a new magnetic imaging technique known as magnetoencephalographic recording. While test subjects played against computers, the researchers studied which parts of their brains experienced gamma-bursts during the five seconds following the computer's move. They found that whereas the amateurs' brains exhibited more gamma-bursts in the medial temporal lobe, grandmasters had more gamma-bursts in their frontal and parietal cortices.

The team proposes that the use of the frontal cortex by the grandmasters�who have memorized thousands of moves� indicates that they recognize known problems and retrieve solutions for them from their memories. Use of the medial temporal lobe by the amateurs, in contrast, suggests that these players are analyzing unknown moves and forming new long-term memories.""" http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-study...

I think what your parent meant is that at some point Chess becomes a glorified dictionary lookup. An exercise in memoization.

Many, but not all board games end up being about memorizing which strategies work and which don't. This is especially true in case of deterministic, turn-based perfect knowledge games. Tic-tac-toe has been solved, period. Checkers has been solved. Chess will be next, because it's next in terms of complexity. Go is also a solvable game, but it will take a while.

I think this is the more true the more rigid (deterministic) a game is. Legos and Minecraft are at the opposite end of the spectrum. They even lack a victory condition, but they're all about making new combinations.

Chess may boost analytical skills and foresight up to a point, but as a war game it has become very abstract and detached from reality. It seems to be inspired by the era of melee combat, specified battlefields and powerful rulers.

[robomartin]

I agree as general points. I'll disagree as it applies to Chess. The only way to escalate the ranks in chess is to become a living database. That transforms people. I've seen it and it's ugly. The chess you learned as a kid was a game. This chess is a very different animal.

Off the top of my head, a profession that requires people to become a human database is something like pharmacology. These folks have to know a lot about a tremendous number of medications. The difference between pharmacology and chess is that the former is actually useful and has a purpose. Once chess becomes "who is the better database" it stops being intellectually or practically useful as far as I am concerned.

[asynchrony]

In my opinion, up to a very, very high level, the importance of opening knowledge is vastly overrated.

The two highest rated players in the world (Carlsen and Aronian, neither of them participating in this world championship match) frequently just aim to get a playable position out of the opening and still succeed in outplaying very strong opposition in the late middlegame/endgame. This despite the fact that it would difficult to find two better examples of "human chess databases".

[adeelk]

> The only way to escalate the ranks in chess is to become a living database.

This happens in any field with significant theory. A chess grandmaster isn’t any more of a “living database” than a mathematician, for example, who spends about twenty years learning theory (from elementary school to Ph.D.) before working on original research. And in chess, just as in mathematics, learning theory is not as simple as memorization.

> Once chess becomes "who is the better database" it stops being intellectually or practically useful as far as I am concerned.

A player who knows some theory will always have an advantage over an amateur, but when the difference in players’ knowledge of theory is negligible, as it is in the top levels, it is strategy and tactics that win games.

I do understand your frustration, as an amateur chess player myself. But telling yourself that you would be a better player if you just spent some time memorizing opening lines is just a cop-out. That won’t make you a better player, it will just put you on equal ground with your opponents.

Edit: heh, coincidentally today’s game speaks for itself.

[koide]

I agree what you say, but chess is not only who is the better database, though. Analytic reasoning (and home preparation) is still what defines who wins among similar "databases".

[Fuzzwah]

I've hit the same wall a number of times in my life across a variety of games/past times/hobbies.

Two things which I have always come away with is a wonderful collection of amazing people and a keen understanding of how to improve at something as quickly as possible.

I think that is pretty much what life is all about.

PS: in case anyone is interested, my obsessions in chronological order have been; quake, skydiving, paintball, quake3fortress, online poker, starcraft 2.

PPS: online poker was different to all the others in that I actually made money doing it, which had the upside of granting me "spending money" and the downside of turning it into a second job.

[mattikl]

I used to play lots of chess, then stopped when I thought the game was taking too much of my time and couldn't give me much more.

Still I think I learned a lot by going to chess tournaments. Most of that you'd probably learn by playing any competitive sport. I transformed from someone who resigned inferior positions easily into a stubborn player who didn't give up. It was a good experience to learn to handle the pressure at tournaments when the time on your clock is running out and there are lots of people around you watching.

Moreover, I find it very interesting who can win when there are many players of the same skill level competing. That's very psychological. Some people are better at it naturally, but it's amazing what you can learn.

[sneak]

Recent 48-hour obsessions of mine that follow a similar pattern: Starcraft 2, Minecraft.

I indulge them as long as they don't suck up more than 100 productive hours or so of my life. At that point, I chop them off and file them away.

[dgant]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960 addresses some of these concerns.

Since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, it's also worth considering that playing chess could be likened to poorly reproducing the output of existing software; wouldn't writing that software be a more meaningful challenge?

There may be lessons to be learned from chess beyond what one might derive from a short stint of it. Achieving a higher level of mastery -- in many domains -- reinforces an appreciation of the extent of one's ignorance in others.

[btilly]

Your comment about the human database is exactly why I prefer the game of go to chess. I'm good enough at chess (B-level player) that to improve I'd have to become more of a database.

Your comment about game vs life is why I have not studied go very seriously.

[kamaal]

>>His point was that, unless your goal is to become a world champion and somehow earn a living out of playing Chess the game can very easily become a huge waste of time. You don't learn anything more than playing Chess. It is false to assume that good Chess players are really smart people. Yes, they might have the ability to achieve deep concentration and focus on the game. One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.

I realized this while playing Sudoku. During my college days I had become a super expert at solving Sudoku. So much so the I would just start writing number as I saw the puzzles. All my college buddies though I was a uber genius guy with special abilities to solve Sudoku puzzles. But internally I new I was just a 'Human Database' as you would put it. Soon Sudoku go boring and I stopped playing it altogether.

I find the same with programming. I have far too many code templates and patterns in my brain. For every problem you throw I know a bunch of code patterns that can be inter played to form a solution. So much so that coding has become typing now.

Its just not fun anymore!

[emmelaich]

Similarly, an acquaintance of mine used a lot of his post-grad Computer Science year conquering sokoban. Awesome and sad at the same time.