[ardemchenkov]

Of course. It improves not only memory, but also logic, prudence, attention, etc. And you can easily use the same skills in real life. Let's take a situation when you're trying to convince an investor to invest in your project. And now imagine that you're just playing chess against him. At the beginning he has more power, this means he's playing white. And you're playing black. To be able to win (to get money in this case) you should think at least 3-4 steps forward, trying to take an initiative and wait for his mistake. Perhaps at some point you will sacrifice or exchange something to get benefit in the future. And so on. And chess can teach you how to do it.

[Lewton]

If you're gonna open your post with "of course" then there's a serious lack of citations going on.

[ardemchenkov]

Sure, thank you for this notice. There's one interesting scientific research about it, which I read before http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00.... As you can see there's no simple yes or no.

But another very good example is a book of Garry Kasparov "How life imitates chess", where he explains how it can be transparently connected with each other.

In my opinion chess can be used as a model of real life and if someone wants to learn something useful from it, he can get it.