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."
Why play chess with Moriarty when you can just bash him in the head with a chessboard?
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.
The only famous douche I know that's very good at chess is Andrew Tate lol
Being skilled at a game has little bearing on your intelligence beyond maybe "above average". Intelligence is often best reflected in learning speed.
People need to stop putting chess on a pedestal. Its a game. General intelligence has no bearing. Its a specific skillset you can hone by practice and research, just like any other game.
It is a super deep game for how simple it is, i think that's the "genius" part. But remembering openings in chess and their names doesn't make you a genius, it makes you a genius in chess.
Almost anything where memorization is the primary skill is going to be dominated by people with specific interest, rather than general high intelligence (certainly doesn't exclude it, but it's just statistics). Gotta look for something frequently requiring novel problem solving and adaption to filter for high probability of high general intelligence.
Then there's also a lot of games requiring very narrow intellectual ability. Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast, without needing to be able to handle anything novel. You'll certainly find some "interesting individuals" around those kinds of games.
Based on the number of comments in this thread, apparently this is a common misconception. Memorization is not the primary skill of chess. Knowledge of chess principles and common ideas, strategies, and tactics and the ability to synthesize those ideas with elements of the current position are the primary skill of chess. In fact, novel problem solving is very fundamental to the game.
Opening theory prep ultimately makes up a pretty small part of the game (though it is more pronounced at top levels of play). The primary purpose of studying openings is not to just memorize a bunch of lines (though having lines prepped is helpful), but to understand the common thematic elements that arise from said openings and common middlegame positions and ideas.
Being able to parse a specific ruleset, or doing a specific kind of math fast
Oh man, I would love competitive tabletop games, where the goal isn't to min/max your build, but to min/max your build after being given a brand new system and 45 minutes to read the rules.
Lol, I can relate. My friends are always surprised how good I am at a game when I'm playing for the first time (mostly card games, and board games). But I quickly get bored, so never get to be actually good at any of those.
Same with language. I can pick up a little bit of any language fairly quickly, but to actually learn it, I basically need to be forced e.g. live in a place where most people don't speak anything else.
Exactly, Chess is Mario Kart.
Anyone can learn how to play Chess. Anyone can learn how to play Mario Kart.
You slap a controller in someone's hand tell them "A" is go and they can play Mario Kart. Sure they have to learn the track, where to collect power ups, where the shortcuts are, and eventually they have to learn about and master drifting.
But being a genius in Mario Kart doesn't make you a genius. No heist movie ever said, "And this genius over here? They scored first place in 200cc Special Cup."
Would be hilarious if Hollywood moved away from chess to show someone being smart and instead showed them yelling at teammates in League of Legends.
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 not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don't really play chess?
Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there's so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It's about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It's about tempo and conducting the initiative. There's a reason it's the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It's an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).
It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call "prep") is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don't know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.
Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I've met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who's 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I'm a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I've definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.
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.
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.
If you want to beat all of your friends at chess:
learn how to mate in endgames with a few different combinations of pieces.
Castle early and on the same side of your opponent.
Learn to defend scholars mate.
Focus on piece development early on, get you back rank pieces out (bishops knights)
Fight for the center
When attacking a square, just count how many other pieces are attacking and defending that square and see if you have more than your opponent, this is a great way to quickly analyze an attacks value.
Trade when you have a piece advantage, this is like taking a math question and simplyifing the terms. It greatly simplifies the game and brings it in to the the end game with an advantage.
Learn any one opening system just a few branches that can consistently bring you into tactics (static analysis of the board state) even or with a slight advantage.
These tips can be accomplished in a week and will dominate anyone who 'just knows the rules'
Got it. To beat my friends at chess i just need to learn to play chess.
Funny, but really, those things are marginally more effort than learning the rules and are a far cry from the level of effort it takes to actually be considered broadly 'good' at chess.
Learning one opening system can be done in about an hour and most of the tactics advice is just things to think about as you play.
I also think it’s a generational thing.
Back then, since chess was associated with intelligence, a lot of academic types tried to play it and get good at it.
I would say once we had computers, there was another much more practical thing you could get good at.
But seriously, chess sets used to be part of the house decor.
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
This couldn't be further from the truth, and it's pretty clear you don't actually play the game. I had no idea this misconception was so common.
Chess is ALL ABOUT creativity and figuring out how to outplay your opponent and secure a win. It's a game of strategy and tactics, of timing and technique. The way "memorization" works is that players tend to have some number of moves in their opening(s) memorized (typically 5-10, though top players can go to greater depth), at which point they are "out of book" and into the middlegame, which is where the game is actually played using some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation. Many players opt to play less theoretically viable openings (that is, variations that are not quite as good with best play), because it gets their opponent out of book faster. "Novelties" (a move in a variation not previously played by a master/grandmaster in a tournament) are played all of the time, even by grandmasters.
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.
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.)
Disclaimer: not calling myself smart or anything.
I always found chess boring, for some reason. Like, not because it is too complex, but because it isn't complex enough, in a way. As an example, the first time I tried my hand at Medieval II: Total War, I fell in love with all things strategy.
I still can't do chess, though... It's like my mind goes to its happy place halfway through a match and I start making moves just to progress the game and be done with it. Gimme a 4X game, and I'd need reminders to pee every 12 hours.
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.
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.
That’s because playing chess doesn’t make you smart it just makes you better at playing 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.
„The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.“
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.
Guess I'll start with the same disclaimer: I don't think I'm too smart for chess or anything.
I always thought chess is kinda boring. Don't get me wrong, it's fun enough as a novice. It's probably also fun for people who mastered it, I'm not denying that.
However, for everything inbetween, it's mostly about memorizing stuff. You just learn hundreds of openings and how to counter them. From what I've seen, a lot of intermediate players fall apart once they go off-script. It takes years until you're good enough to strategize properly on your own, like a novice would, without some going "That's the 'double helix chin twister'" and beating you.
It's kinda like the problem multiplayer games often have for me. There's a set meta and you either learn it or lose. To experiment yourself successfully, you have to invest a massive amount of time. Experimenting myself is the fun part. I'm don't want to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours before I get to have fun.
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.