Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history

1. The biggest one is probably that there is already so much interest and depth in regular chess. "Everyone" focuses on it, so that's what your friends know and where you can find competitions and community. This leads to a chicken-egg problem where it hard to kick it off. It's basically like another board game.

2. Some opening positions in Fischer chess are quite awkward: The pieces are on squares where it takes a while for them to come into proper play. This can make the opening phase quite unsatisfying to play. You need to make a lot of extra moves before you actually get into the interesting parts. It's not necessarily more "fun" to play this way than regular chess. There's also some positions which are much better for white (although it's on average more balanced I believe)

3. IMO, regular chess is easier for lower-rated players. The choice of openings don't matter so much (either way the game is decided by someone hanging a piece), and it's a lot easier to follow existing games. In Fischer chess it can be even harder to know "okay, what do I do?", while in regular chess there's both general principles and systems to follow. This means that most newer players keep being exposed to regular chess instead of Fischer chess.

> Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

Magnus Carlsen is promoting and advocating for Freestyle Chess (same game as Fischer chess, but with different name): https://www.freestyle-chess.com/. Maybe it'll take off.

My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons.

Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back.

To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota.

Don't do Dota kids. Try drugs.

True! It was a rhetorical point, but similar examples abound in the Tier 3/4 cities and small towns that represent the majority of India.

You're still at the mercy of the DC's office and the associated State PSC to let the transaction go through, and local bias will abound. And in these kinds of places, if you get into a land dispute, the entire apparatus will rally behind the local even if they are in the wrong, because the local can leverage their local family/social network.

> Same Constitution, same legal framework

Absolutely, yet dependent on state PSC to implement. And local customary laws can often take precedence over central rules and regulations due to Article 13(1).

> There are many all-India services and people are transferred all across India. Many work in different states than those of their home state

There are, yet at the end of the day, Home Bias remains, as IAS officers posted outside their home state are significantly less likely to climb up the ladder and tend to get hamstrung [0].

Anecdotally, in the early 2000s, my ancestral district got an ethnic Tamil DC/ADC, but they were completely frozen out by the local panchayat, MLAs, and MP because they were viewed as an "Outsider", and the man was quietly transferred within 2 years and an ethnic Punjabi officer was brought it (still an "outsider" but viewed as "closer").

> Same religion

At a broad level Hinduism sounds unifying, but in action, the regional variations are massive.

It doesn't matter as much to sharyi/city folk, but local deities and practices vary massively and what one regions treats as "Hindu" can appear entirely alien to another region.

Tamil society doesn't bat an eye at cousin marriage while that would be grounds for a honor killing in HP/PB/HR. Meanwhile, in my region we revere a number of Muslim mystics like Lakhdata and in some cases even practice Muharram (Hussaini Brahmin), but to a Hindu from Gujarat or Karnataka, that would appear Muslim.

> I think if you go deeper you will notice the unifying characteristics

There absolutely are unifying characteristics, but I think these are much more prominent in Tier 1/1.5/2 cities which are melting pots.

Most Indian urbanization is being driven by Tier 3/4 cities which tend to be much more insular.

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Big picture, I think differences are significant when outside the Tier 1/2 cities, but this is part of the power of Indian federalism.

The loosely coupled nature of Indian federalism allows regional ethnic identity to continue to exist with a unified "Indian" identity and act as an outlet to ethnic insurgency.

This is how ethnic insurgents in NE India were able to merge into the BJP in the 2010s, and regionalist and linguistic parties such as Shiv Sena, DMK, TDP, TMC, etc are able to create loose political alliances and coalitions with "national parties".

Also, this imo is a major reason why BJP has been so dominant over the past decade - they are able to co-opt localist movements into the state branch of their party.

The INC used to be able to do this, but these local leaders split off to create their own parties by the 1990s.

[0] - https://www.nber.org/papers/w25389

Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really.

Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.