Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
Learning a few chess pro tips will make you better than anyone trying to figure that game out.
The top levels of chess are skill but the bottom is people doing pre-learned openers.
That checks out. I think I beat most of my friends simply because I remember a chess aficionado mentioning the center as being important to hold.
As a child I attended a chess club. There were no lessons. People simply played chess against each other.
I learned less in my entire years there than I did later in life in reading chess tips such as this page.
https://lichess.org/study/y14Z6s3N/A9uqbWxr
Looking back at those games I could recognize ways in which I was beaten by two moves in hindsight. But I had no idea about macro such as controlling the center or moving out the knights early were generally advantageous moves.
I recall some top player saying that he’d deliberately do a really ‘bad’ move at the start of a game and watch his opponents head explode because they’d never seen any top level player do that.
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing chess
Good chess players, though, exhibit some common traits which are shared with “smart people”: the ability to think in abstract terms, and a good memory.
Your success at chess is often based on how far in advance you can plan a game at any point on the board, greatly supplemented by your ability to remember entire games of famous matches. These skills are frequently exhibited by people considered smart. However, as you and OP point out, you have to play, practice, and memorize to get good; merely knowing the rules and being smart doesn’t get you there.
Same with rubiks cube
Some of the smartest people I know do the cube
Paul Morphy, chess genius and sometimes described as best in the world in the mid-1800s:
“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”
I know someone who is pretty good at chess but also thinks vaccines are fake, Musk is a genius, and Ukraine belongs to Russia.
So not all chess players are smart.
I don’t think a minority of rightwingers are dumb. I think they’re invested in their idea of their team, and any insult to their team is an insult to them. They root for Trump. It’s like that one guy you know who owns a lot of Lakers memorabilia despite living in Texas. The media, expectations, their own investment, the threat of being wrong or misguided, “Me? Never!”, vastly outweigh any sort of critical thinking. Its straight denial to the core.
But a vast majority? Yeah, dumb as an absorbent trash bag.
Do you know their rating? Tbh most people’s idea of being “pretty good at chess” is actually not very good at all (I don’t mean that as an insult, more lack of familiarity with the game).
That’s not to say that it’s impossible for someone to think those things and be a strong chess player, but it’s probably not super common. I’ve actually ran into a couple people at a local chess club with “interesting” ideas about vaccines and uh… let’s just say they were not hard to beat (I think I mated one guy in like 12 moves). And btw, I’m not even a super strong chess player myself (~1134 USCF). But like, they probably would seem really strong to someone that just occasionally plays chess at family gatherings or whatnot. Chess is a game with a low skill floor and very high skill ceiling, so you have a huge range in ability.
2000 ish, apparently.
Can confirm, my brothers are both very good at chess. One is smart, the other is dumb as rocks
Yeah… everytime I see it in movies I kinda cringe. However it still is an effective narrative tool to say that the person is a stategist or is in a higher tax bracket ( or honestly any quality that the common viewer doesn’t have). Even so, I wish writers would stop doing this.
Chess requires dedication, conviction, and patience. Anyone with average intelligence can learn the game to the point of competence in 30 minutes.
It requires much more time to become an expert, or master.
And most people don’t have that much time to expend on it. That’s not something to be ashamed of.
Much of the game of chess, particularly becoming an expert or a master, relies on memorizing every possible move and, then, every possible counter move. Mastery of chess is almost always reliant upon that memorization.
The game itself is not that complex, and most people can learn how to play chess fairly quickly. Much of the apparent wizardry of chest mastery is actually just a sign of excellent memorization of every possible move and it’s possible counter moves.
There’s not a lot of creativity in chess
I think DeGroots work in the 30s and 40s shows otherwise. Grandmasters know rather quickly what they were going to do in general as they orient to the board state. Then they explore a small set of moves and explode them into a few moves into the future and pick the best candidate. Finally, they spend time verifying their selection.
They have good memories, for sure, but for real game states. This is a quote from Herb Simon, an important early researcher in psychology and computer science:
The most extensive work to date on perception in chess is that done by De Groot. In his search for differences between masters and weaker players, de Groot was unable to find any gross differences in the statistics of their thought processes: the number of moves considered, search heuristics, depth of search, and so on. Masters search through about the same number of possibilities as weaker players-perhaps even fewer, almost certainly not more-but they are very good at coming up with the “right” moves for further consideration, whereas weaker players spend considerable time analyzing the consequences of bad moves.
De Groot did, however, find an intriguing difference between masters and weaker players in his short-term memory experiments. Masters showed a remarkable ability to reconstruct a chess position almost perfectly after viewing it for only 5 sec. There was a sharp drop off in this ability for players below the master level. This result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, for when chess positions were constructed by placing the same numbers of pieces randomly on the board, the masters could then do no better in reconstructing them than weaker players, Hence, the masters appear to be constrained by the same severe short-term memory limits as everyone else, and their superior performance with “meaningful’ positions must lie in their ability to perceive structure in such positions and encode them in chunks.
That makes sense. Here’s a video of Magnus Carlson identifying famous chess positions without seeing that actual pieces in the board and usually knowing what happens next. It’s incredible
Apparently Carlson loses his keys regularly as well. So this type of memory is domain specific.
I’d argue that there is a certain kind of creativity in coming up with those moves. But since it’s mostly a solved game now, modern players probably don’t experience it anymore.
A lot of it is bluffing, like in Poker.
If you get to that level, you know all the strategies and moves.
It’s all about tricking someone into making a mistake.
I’m certainly happy to hear that climate change is “solved” now, but that doesn’t really address the problems I raised. Particularly, what is the OP’s opinion on the advancements in green initiatives/goals that Apple has made as discussed in the article?
Do you understand this is discussion about chess?
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
Huh?
If you can’t make sense of your own proposition, repeated to you, then don’t be surprised when nobody else can make sense of it either
Wtf are you talking about? I’m gonna give you the benefit of doubt, and assume that you’re replying to the wrong thread.
removed by mod
Might be an AI Bot?!
You also need a sharp memory. I’m good in math, but terrible in remembering things. I forget terms that I’m actively doing research on, and constantly need to look at notes. (Aside: I work on modular forms, and often write them down as MF in my notes. I have more than once read that aloud as motherfucker, once in front of my advisor. Dude is chill, so it’s fine. But I dread the day it happens during a talk lol.)
There’s also a similar trope with the Rubiks Cube.
Bonus points is when there’s a game theory department in a movie. Then they all will be masters in any game.
Lol. Just in case someone finds it useful, the math of game theory has very little to do with games.
I remember Crazy Rich Asians was a great offender of this. The main character is a teacher in game theory, which naturally makes her great at any game (which also becomes an important plot point later in the movie).
Folk always seem to underestimate the effect of training and experience. In a match between two unpracticed players, sure, the more analytically inclined of the two will have an edge. This is true of any game with a strategic component. General intelligence helps but specialist knowledge is better.
Im gonna say it… i dont care, im gonna say it!
CHESS 👏 IS 👏 FUCKING 👏 DUMB
The best you can do is lose to a robot. Good job 👍
You know what is not stupid? Hot dog competition. Try to alphazero this wrustel now robot. 🥖
Robot can’t win hot dog competition 💪
The best you can do is apparently lose to a robot.
Oh yea? We do chess shaming now? Did you know that many people have a proper disease and can’t play chess too well? Do you think it’s fair to mock them like this? Look it up on google, it’s called “having a life”, very debilitating.
/s
Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.
After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.
Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…
this is inaccurate. edit tbd
“Ah ha! I see you’ve played the Frenchman’s Cumsock. I will have checkmate in 4 moves!”
“I understood that reference”
Wait, my hand is still on the piece… I… have … not… completed… my… move
KOLANAKI
Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the ‘meta’ strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it’s like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
I’ll gladly eat shit for a controversial opinion, but I mentally put chess pros in the same basket as those guys that would queue solely for Office in counterstrike and reach global elite. Like sure, it’s still an impressive time commitment, I just feel like there were better things to put that into. I hate MOBAs and yet I’d respect a professional DOTA player more? But I’m more than familiar with the fanbase of Chess and how defensive they get.
I have a mishmash dialect as we moved around a lot when I was a child; very rural, too. I’ll say “hambag” and “ain’t” and “me an’ this guy” and my sister says “ambliance”, but we spell it all correctly.
Did your chess expert know the spelling and say it wrongly, or was there confusion about the spelling too?
Ain’t ain’t a non-word. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
They thought it was because the leather was from a pig…
I think it’s a good name if it’s a pigskin bag. Gonna start calling my wife’s bag that now. Most of her other bags are nylon or whatever, but on she’s had for 20 years is some kind of leather.
The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
More about interest than intelligence, honestly.
One of the daftest people I ever met managed to beat 3 of us at once at chess. Would routinely kick my ass every time and it wasn’t even close.
The kind of person who absolutely would have injected bleach to cure covid.
True, but 10% is probably higher average than usual.
