Chess World Championship 2012: A First Win

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.

KingsCrusher + Chessexplained are also doing indepth analysis of every game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZvOgTclCSM&feature=plcp

Sadly audio isn't great on this video but the analysis is still very good.

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.

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.

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.