Chess Players 'Are Paranoid Thrillseekers'

Tardigrade submitted a brief little article that claims that chess players are paranoid thrillseekers. It's a fairly amusing little piece and definitely makes me wish that my high-school chess club would have got into epic battles with the groups that were capable of stretching us into pretzel shapes, if only for the thrill. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

Comments

Moderately OT, but about chess anyway...

[trims]

As a previous post reminded me, I fell in love with chess about 4th grade, and kept going strong until I suddenly realized in 7th grade that it was totally artifical - there was no "porting" its lessons to real life.

And that's when I gave up on Chess - when I realized that it was a completely constrained, artifical environment just like I was creating for myself in Real Life. The thing about chess is that its almost completely a game of recognizing previously-identified patterns of play, then countering them with a pre-selected strategy. Not until you get to beyond Grandmaster is there room for innovation. And even then, its constrained to a couple of moves in a 30-move match.

What I look for in my games nowdays is the element of outside interference - items not in the control of either player (or any player, in the case of MP games). That's where the real creativity and brilliance comes in - the capability and flexibility to cope with situations which could not be reasonably forseen (though adept planning will make coping much easier).

I wish we would have more games for kids in this manner - ones which not only met that "Creative Problem Solving" mantra, but also give their players a taste of what they'll need to really know: how to expect the unexpected (and unpredictable) and to cope with them.

Chess is fun, insofar as it teaches good pattern recognition and a disciplined mind. I would argue, though, that if you haven't move beyond it after a couple of years, you really are hurting yourself.

-Erik