Once one has learned how to concentrate, the next thing to learn is to be able to concentrate on the right thing.
Chess taught me to concentrate, but I've always had trouble concentrating on what I should be concentrating on, and instead wasted too much time concentrating on chess and other diversions.
The real trick is being able to focus on something even when it gets frustrating, painful, or boring, and being able to do this for extended periods of time. Then the world is your oyster.
We nerd types have made this mistake for the last 75 years or so. This mystique about chess has been completely misplaced in my humble opinion. At first the claim was that Smart people played chess, therefore if you made a computer that played chess well it would be Smart. That turned out to be hilariously untrue, but durable: nerds were finally relieved of their arrogance after about 5 decades only when it became clear even to them that the game-winning systems required brute force methods.
Thoughtful people absorb life lessons from almost everything they care to study deeply. You can make virtually all of his claims about martial arts, child rearing, studying and playing music, competitive video gaming, gardening, playing golf, meditation, religious study, farming, marksmanship, other board games, programming—the list is endless.
The author doesn't dispute this at all. He's a chess grandmaster who is not mystifying chess, but pointing out how a lifetime of rigorous chess playing has taught him the value of concentration. He acknowledges that the very same thing occurs in people in other disciplines, athletes for example.
It's not an article about the virtue of nerds but about the combination of attention, flow experience and concentration, in the face of a culture that neglects all three but the latter in particular.
And I think he is very right and chess can teach us important lessons here, as can programming, or craftsmanship, or participation in the arts among other things.
Particularly important is the point about autonomy. Making concentration and understanding of our own mind through games like chess a priority is liberating. Through things like chess it is possible to move from being distracted by external rewards towards understanding one's own cognition the focus of life, without which no genuine thinking is possible.
What you are saying is true. You can get life lessons from everything. Nevertheless, in some cases implicitly we talk not about the average or best case but the minimum. A university degree means you meet some minimum requirements. Being a doctor means you meet some minimum requirements. Of course, you can diversify well above the minimum.
Here, also, we are talking about the minimum. Sure, you can do gardening and think deeply about something, or you can feel very tired and the years just flow by.
In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.
It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference. Not the expected and not the max as in other stories we tell ourselves.
AlphaZero, formerly the strongest chess playing program/player, searches the game tree via Monte Carlo tree search, which really isn't brute force.
But more to the point of your comment, it makes sense to make these claims about chess in particular because chess more or less is exclusively about pure concentration. There is no physical ability you must develop like you would usually have to for sports or music or gaming.
A nerd should have understood that for a game with finite search space, a sufficiently fast brute-force solution will always beat (or not lose to) a smart person. It's the nature of brute-force solution.
The first claim is a strawman and deserves no further refuting.
The second is...true. Everything we do is something we can learn life lessons from. And chess is a lesson in concentration and focused mental activity, which remarkably few things are.
I got out of chess before it consumed my life and I never regretted it. It's a game, not something to spend your life on. Doing anything well is a lesson in concentration, so from that point of view you could replace 'Playing chess' with a very large variety of other skills and it would all send the exact same message.
I understand your point. It's a very addictive game. But I feel that the point of the author is that it's a game that requires skills that are useful in life. I kind of agree. Also it's easier to concentrate on something fun, challenging and in the case of blitz or bullet, fast and intense.
So, as someone with ADHD-C, and someone who's been playing a lot of chess recently in the wake of its resurgence online, can I expect some important insight or self-realization from practicing the art of concentrating?
I can concentrate for hours and hours on certain things, I just don't always get to choose the things. Will chess and its nature of honing concentration force me to enhance that?
I listened to this article on the drive to work this morning, and I found it very interesting, and yet a bit hard to relate to. For neurotypical players, maybe it's a lot more rewarding to sit down and concentrate on chess. When I play, I have some good streaks and then streaks where I get tilted out of my flow, and I try and force myself to stay in the chess box, and I burn up and find something else to do. I used to be 1600-1700 in high school, and now I'm barely treading water at 1250-1350 on lichess.
I'm hoping there's someone with a brain like mine who has more experience to share.
Great link. Best I've seen in the front page in quite some time, imo.
Enhance it in other areas? I doubt it. If you go by Barkley's model, ADHD is mainly executive dysfunction and might just as well be called intention deficit disorder. Hyper focus conversely is what is called perseveration and it is actually not a good thing in most cases. If you find an interesting angle that keeps your mind in the zone then that's probably how you could learn chess more deeply (aka if you really like studying chess openings and books from Alekhine, and if you enjoy finding those patterns in your own games for instance). Of course there are ways to improve the situation, break down your tasks into smaller tasks and so on. Or do boring small tasks immediately. Get enough sleep. Exercise. Also I would strongly recommend medication. Meditation seems to help some people as well.
Highly recommend HealthyGamerGG's videos "How to Deal with Your ADHD ft. Mizkif" and "Solving Laziness with Asmongold". (Her's a Harvard psychology professor who has surprisingly-wholesome live therapy sessions with famous streamers).
The presentation is a tad corny in some areas--like awkwardly phrasing psychological phenomena in terms of RPG mechanics--but that doesn't make up the bulk of it, promise.
I'd be lying if I claimed to be coming from a place of any more expertise than you, but I suspect that some of the framings he discusses will resonate.
It's actually hard to practice concentrating with a game or active activity. If you truly want to meet your mind, sit down and do nothing, i.e. meditate. You'll notice your mind racing, and you'll see just why it's hard to concentrate on anything. You can then practice letting go of intervening thoughts, without self hate, and just observe the breath, sounds around, but in a passive, calm manner, not reactionary or impulsive with the attention.
This reminds me of a question posed by an online user of a message board I frequent: Will the likes of Deep Blue and Alpha Zero kill competitive chess?
My initial thoughts were, "No, of course not! Cars and trains didn't kill track-and-field competitions!".
But now that I think about it, I really do feel a slight aversion towards getting back into chess.
Although practiced concentration is a side-benefit of playing chess regularly, the fact of the matter is that nowadays, it is impossible to play in a manner that hasn't already been thoroughly examined by some AI.
There's no new ground to discover; no interesting techniques or thought-processes that an amateur or a world champion can invent; there is no more sense of human innovation in the game.
If I picked up a chessboard for the first time in a decade, there would always be a chance that I can come to defeat Gary Kasparov someday; that is not the case with AlphaZero or DeepBlue.
Say what you want about the benefits of forced concentration or the social benefits, but that desire to play chess has been extinguished for me, and I'm sure for many others, once AlphaZero and DeepBlue hit the scene.
I don't get this line of thinking at all. It seems like such a random goalpoast. Why does it matter if the computer is better? If you're an 1800 rated player, you're still so far behind the best humans that it's irrelevant. Or why care if a computer has examined some similar positions before? As an amateur the positions won't be novel in qny way anyway.
No more human innovation is blatantly false. If anything, computers have led to lots of new ways to play. And humans play humans, what a computer would do in a position is irrelevant.
I (used to) play go competitively (European 4dan). AlphaGo took me by surprise, but apart from the occasional cheater, its consequences are mostly great:
- I have a superhuman teacher available anytime, ready to analyze all my games and answer all my questions (though the "why?" question sometimes takes a fair bit for the teacher to explain).
- A lot of widely accepted dogmas in go were shaken, that was just a whole lot of fun.
- Learning joseki (corner sequences) finally makes sense (they used to develop and change every year, which on my level wasn't worth keeping on top of).
- It's a sneak peek into what's coming with AI. I watched the Lee Sedol match live, some of the AlphaGo moves were amazing. The human commentary was enlighteningly wrong: "oh he lost the first game, surely he'll win the next four"
I see where you're coming from, but I think the practical chances of a given chess player who hasn't played in a decade becoming GM-level are realistically similar to beating Alpha Zero. Ben Finegold tweeted about this once: https://twitter.com/ben_finegold/status/1316936206844821505?...
> but that desire to play chess has been extinguished for me, and I'm sure for many others, once AlphaZero and DeepBlue hit the scene.
It was extinguished in 1996, when DeepBlue played? Or 2018, when AlphaZero was announced? In the intervening time, an entire generation of chess players - and many generations of chess computers - has come and gone.
I understand the feeling that there's nothing new to discover - but if you conflate the state of competitive chess in 1996 with that in 2018, you probably don't know how much you don't know. And if you could have hypothetically beaten Kasparov, you'd certainly have had a chance against Deep Blue.
Here's a link to the game Rowson mentions against Yermolinsky. The critical position ("Yermolinsky offered a pawn as bait...") arises on move 18.
It's not spectacular - I would say mundane, but you can't say that when someone beats a top GM in just 24 moves. What Yermolinsky overlooked is a famously missable type of move - a backwards move to a square that was occupied at the start of the variation - but still trivial for a player of his class.
It looks to me like he did not like his position after move 16 and sought these complications partly as a bluff. The computer says Black's position is not all that bad after 16...dxe5 or 18...dxe5, but he will have to either defend a passive position with a weak d-pawn or sacrifice a pawn in a different way.
I think the move Rowson's referring to is move 9. Since in the essay he says
"Yermolinsky offered a pawn as bait, and I very nearly didn’t take it because doing so would allow him to play a series of forcing moves"
So the only pawn that was offered and that Rowson took was on move 10 in reply.
The only reason I checked was to see how far a grandmaster was looking ahead, in this case 14 moves, which i find impressive.
"...I discovered a surprising detail right at the end of the line, in which my knight could retreat back to its original square, "
Like you, I wouldn't be impressed if he only saw from move 18 to move 24.
Chess can be like fucking crack for some of us tho. I personally have went down the rabbit hole of watching one game after another. A binge which lasted for months, that started with watching a few AlphaZero games.
> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.
~ Paul Morphy
I question how much buzz about chess lately is the direct result of a certain Netflix Original.
The effects seem to cascade. Chess blog posts on HN... a flood of sales of Chinese chess sets on Amazon... game night pics featuring chess on your social media feeds.
How much of our behavior is dictated, or at least seeded, by Big Ns?
As someone who is following chess more intensively for over two years now, I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Netflix.
With the pandemic there was a huge influx of new chess players. You can see it in [0], the player count rose over 50% from February to April.
After that chess suddenly got popular on Twitch as well, which I would attribute mostly to GM Hikaru, who played chess together with well known streamers such as xqc. That rise is well visible in June/July [1] in the twitch chess category.
Queen's Gambit was just recently released (end of October). This of course led to chess being even more popular, but I wouldn't attribute all the chess posts to it. I maybe would even go so far and attribute it partly to frequency illusion [2], now that you're watching out more for chess posts I assume.
I recently introduced chess to my kids (6 & 11 years old). They both immediately got hooked and we have been playing several games every night.
It's high-quality time for you & kids (no screens!), and also teaches the kids to think complex sequences (or combinations of the future) in their mind, and patience in general.
Concentration (on anything) as an escape hatch away from the otherwise general noise on the mind (which games and music can give) needs to be distinguished from concentration resulting from a general and deep availability of one's being for any activity at hand.
Ultimately after several attempts at trying to like chess, I find its determinism bit boring. Games with random elements have gameplay elements like evaluation of risk and rewards, so I gravitated towards them(like Scrabble).
Strange, because chess definitely has elements of risk calculation based on your uncertainty. Without a computer, you cannot calculate all the lines ahead, so many decisions come down to trade-offs involving uncertainty. Colloquially, this usually is called "strategy", which involve decisions that are much longer term than calculated tactics, and therefore involve a great deal of uncertainty.
Tactics still dominate, but strategy leads to tactics.
You're often left making decisions on the basis of, well, maybe if I do this I'll be able to poke my rook through later, but maybe they'll win counterattacking the file I'm leaving.
Why concentrate on playing chess when you can concentrate on solving math problems? They are deeper, more fun and also related to the real world. I never liked chess but thinking about random math problems kept me up at night. If you think math problems aren't interesting then you just aren't trying to solve hard enough math problems, there is no end to them.
Maybe because not everybody who is good at chess is also good at math. I knew a chess prodigy who could not add two three digit numbers if his life depended on it. It's a bit like catching a ball: when looked at it analytically you are solving a whole bunch of equations in real time, but in practice it is a skill that even a dog can perform with remarkable accuracy. Obviously, chess requires some analytical skills. But it does not necessarily indicate an ability - or a desire - to do maths.
You're right, though. I started playing chess to improve my concentration as a teenager, mostly for the purpose of improving my ability to focus on math. Then I realised that I got better at concentrating at math by... doing math problems instead of wasting my time playing chess.
According to Wikipedia: G. H. Hardy described proof by contradiction as "one of a mathematician's finest weapons", saying "It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."
You don't even need to proof theorems in algebraic geometry to start seeing the beauty and power of mathematical thinking. Get a mental arithmetic app on your phone and spend a few months routinely practising some sums. What first appears as a dry activity will soon become a highly personal exercise in creative reasoning, of finding the best way to represent and manipulate with numbers. For example, I solve arithmetic problems visually but my friend works best by reasoning aurally (I don't get it either, but seeing as he can multipy two 4 digit numbers in seconds it works for him). I'll say that learning to multiplying large numbers in my head has done more for me in terms of mental training than chess has!
Why focus on solving math problems when you can solve political problems. They are deeper and more interesting. Or maybe different people find different things interesting?
I suppose the transparency and the basic uniformity is what really separates chess from other mental activities. That is to say, there is no hidden information or any advantage that isn’t equally available to everyone. there are not too many activities that operate on that same sort of classless, egalitarian level, and so I can understand why the author is so passionate about it as a tool for learning the skills of concentration. With that in mind, I am terrible at it, and go makes me look like a drooling idiot... I can’t even understand when a game is over even though I try to practice every day.
Chess teaches concentration, but also other skills as well. As I wrote in 2002[1], it also teaches things like strategic planning and resource management, ability to persevere despite setbacks, time/focus management, etc. It's certainly not unique in this, but it's a pretty good mix.
I appreciated the author's life story, but I don't understand the point of learning a certain quality through a peripheral pursuit. The best way to learn real life things is to engage with real life things. There are so many things to do and so little time to do them.
The hours you spend playing chess/video games/whatever else is marketed to boost some ability are better spent pursuing what you want out of life directly. Or spent doing these same things, but out of genuine interest and for their own sake.
The great thing about these peripheral pursuits is that they reduce opportunity costs and the consequence of failure.
There are only so many games in a season, and only so many practices in between games. In athletics, if you want to build a new skill you're best doing drills so you can independently work on that skill without sacrificing valuable practice/game time where you should be focusing on higher level strategy stuff.
If you're a consultant and your approach is to get on a client site and send it, that's probably an effective learning strategy right up until you tank your reputation and can't find any more clients to practice with.
I remember playing some speed chess with someone my level (I'm not an experienced chess player). It's a really different experience from the regular long-contemplation chess. What really stood out to me was how dramatic the effect of deep deliberate breathing was. My ability to make quick and good decisions would improve immediately. Similarly in tennis (I've played like 3 times), or badminton, concentrating on the ball would have a huge effect on being able to return it well.
Eh... Yes, it requires concentration. But it also requires really good working memory and visuospatial skills. These don't have particularly broad applicability in real life.
Exactly. Chess and (less so) GO are all about reading. If you study, you can learn all the tactics. The problem is never missing a single piece and its relevance across the whole game. That is something computers don't fail at, they never misread. I've wondered if Lee Sedol could beat AlphaZero if he was given AZ's top 50 potential moves on each of his turns.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
Chess taught me to concentrate, but I've always had trouble concentrating on what I should be concentrating on, and instead wasted too much time concentrating on chess and other diversions.
The real trick is being able to focus on something even when it gets frustrating, painful, or boring, and being able to do this for extended periods of time. Then the world is your oyster.
[+] [-] tomcam|5 years ago|reply
Thoughtful people absorb life lessons from almost everything they care to study deeply. You can make virtually all of his claims about martial arts, child rearing, studying and playing music, competitive video gaming, gardening, playing golf, meditation, religious study, farming, marksmanship, other board games, programming—the list is endless.
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
It's not an article about the virtue of nerds but about the combination of attention, flow experience and concentration, in the face of a culture that neglects all three but the latter in particular.
And I think he is very right and chess can teach us important lessons here, as can programming, or craftsmanship, or participation in the arts among other things.
Particularly important is the point about autonomy. Making concentration and understanding of our own mind through games like chess a priority is liberating. Through things like chess it is possible to move from being distracted by external rewards towards understanding one's own cognition the focus of life, without which no genuine thinking is possible.
[+] [-] myle|5 years ago|reply
Here, also, we are talking about the minimum. Sure, you can do gardening and think deeply about something, or you can feel very tired and the years just flow by.
In chess, if you play a bit, you need patience, you need to imagine next possible moves, you need to manage your time and perhaps also your emotions.
It is this minimum (or perceived minimum) that makes the difference. Not the expected and not the max as in other stories we tell ourselves.
[+] [-] tehnub|5 years ago|reply
But more to the point of your comment, it makes sense to make these claims about chess in particular because chess more or less is exclusively about pure concentration. There is no physical ability you must develop like you would usually have to for sports or music or gaming.
[+] [-] powersnail|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ummonk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joseph_grobbles|5 years ago|reply
The second is...true. Everything we do is something we can learn life lessons from. And chess is a lesson in concentration and focused mental activity, which remarkably few things are.
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adenozine|5 years ago|reply
I can concentrate for hours and hours on certain things, I just don't always get to choose the things. Will chess and its nature of honing concentration force me to enhance that?
I listened to this article on the drive to work this morning, and I found it very interesting, and yet a bit hard to relate to. For neurotypical players, maybe it's a lot more rewarding to sit down and concentrate on chess. When I play, I have some good streaks and then streaks where I get tilted out of my flow, and I try and force myself to stay in the chess box, and I burn up and find something else to do. I used to be 1600-1700 in high school, and now I'm barely treading water at 1250-1350 on lichess.
I'm hoping there's someone with a brain like mine who has more experience to share.
Great link. Best I've seen in the front page in quite some time, imo.
[+] [-] kitsune_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alteriority|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddxxdd|5 years ago|reply
My initial thoughts were, "No, of course not! Cars and trains didn't kill track-and-field competitions!".
But now that I think about it, I really do feel a slight aversion towards getting back into chess.
Although practiced concentration is a side-benefit of playing chess regularly, the fact of the matter is that nowadays, it is impossible to play in a manner that hasn't already been thoroughly examined by some AI.
There's no new ground to discover; no interesting techniques or thought-processes that an amateur or a world champion can invent; there is no more sense of human innovation in the game.
If I picked up a chessboard for the first time in a decade, there would always be a chance that I can come to defeat Gary Kasparov someday; that is not the case with AlphaZero or DeepBlue.
Say what you want about the benefits of forced concentration or the social benefits, but that desire to play chess has been extinguished for me, and I'm sure for many others, once AlphaZero and DeepBlue hit the scene.
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasuki|5 years ago|reply
- I have a superhuman teacher available anytime, ready to analyze all my games and answer all my questions (though the "why?" question sometimes takes a fair bit for the teacher to explain).
- A lot of widely accepted dogmas in go were shaken, that was just a whole lot of fun.
- Learning joseki (corner sequences) finally makes sense (they used to develop and change every year, which on my level wasn't worth keeping on top of).
- It's a sneak peek into what's coming with AI. I watched the Lee Sedol match live, some of the AlphaGo moves were amazing. The human commentary was enlighteningly wrong: "oh he lost the first game, surely he'll win the next four"
[+] [-] pea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
It was extinguished in 1996, when DeepBlue played? Or 2018, when AlphaZero was announced? In the intervening time, an entire generation of chess players - and many generations of chess computers - has come and gone.
I understand the feeling that there's nothing new to discover - but if you conflate the state of competitive chess in 1996 with that in 2018, you probably don't know how much you don't know. And if you could have hypothetically beaten Kasparov, you'd certainly have had a chance against Deep Blue.
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
It's not spectacular - I would say mundane, but you can't say that when someone beats a top GM in just 24 moves. What Yermolinsky overlooked is a famously missable type of move - a backwards move to a square that was occupied at the start of the variation - but still trivial for a player of his class.
It looks to me like he did not like his position after move 16 and sought these complications partly as a bluff. The computer says Black's position is not all that bad after 16...dxe5 or 18...dxe5, but he will have to either defend a passive position with a weak d-pawn or sacrifice a pawn in a different way.
https://lichess.org/oLuNYymZ/white
[+] [-] pso|5 years ago|reply
So the only pawn that was offered and that Rowson took was on move 10 in reply.
The only reason I checked was to see how far a grandmaster was looking ahead, in this case 14 moves, which i find impressive. "...I discovered a surprising detail right at the end of the line, in which my knight could retreat back to its original square, "
Like you, I wouldn't be impressed if he only saw from move 18 to move 24.
[+] [-] throwawaychess2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imposter|5 years ago|reply
> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life. ~ Paul Morphy
[+] [-] hellodang|5 years ago|reply
The effects seem to cascade. Chess blog posts on HN... a flood of sales of Chinese chess sets on Amazon... game night pics featuring chess on your social media feeds.
How much of our behavior is dictated, or at least seeded, by Big Ns?
[+] [-] Dumbdo|5 years ago|reply
With the pandemic there was a huge influx of new chess players. You can see it in [0], the player count rose over 50% from February to April.
After that chess suddenly got popular on Twitch as well, which I would attribute mostly to GM Hikaru, who played chess together with well known streamers such as xqc. That rise is well visible in June/July [1] in the twitch chess category.
Queen's Gambit was just recently released (end of October). This of course led to chess being even more popular, but I wouldn't attribute all the chess posts to it. I maybe would even go so far and attribute it partly to frequency illusion [2], now that you're watching out more for chess posts I assume.
[0] Games played per month on lichess (open source chess server): https://database.lichess.org/
[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/743
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
Running a guild in World of Warcraft can teach you more about management than most MBA courses.
Building Magic the Gathering decks can teach you how to find good tactics that aren't obvious at first.
[+] [-] Yaggo|5 years ago|reply
It's high-quality time for you & kids (no screens!), and also teaches the kids to think complex sequences (or combinations of the future) in their mind, and patience in general.
[+] [-] sriku|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billfruit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Enginerrrd|5 years ago|reply
Tactics still dominate, but strategy leads to tactics.
You're often left making decisions on the basis of, well, maybe if I do this I'll be able to poke my rook through later, but maybe they'll win counterattacking the file I'm leaving.
[+] [-] dylanfw|5 years ago|reply
The order of the back-rank pieces is randomized (but identical for both players).
[+] [-] adverbly|5 years ago|reply
You also might want to give "Liar's Dice" a look - some of the variants are similarly great for bigger groups, and still rely heavily on strategy.
[+] [-] PartiallyTyped|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philshem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maverickJ|5 years ago|reply
One thing that I have discovered is that one can’t concentrate intensely on different hard things at the same time.
The why behind the concentration is also very important.
The blog article here https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/do-not-engage-the-mi... explains this further.
[+] [-] username90|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akuro|5 years ago|reply
You're right, though. I started playing chess to improve my concentration as a teenager, mostly for the purpose of improving my ability to focus on math. Then I realised that I got better at concentrating at math by... doing math problems instead of wasting my time playing chess.
According to Wikipedia: G. H. Hardy described proof by contradiction as "one of a mathematician's finest weapons", saying "It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."
You don't even need to proof theorems in algebraic geometry to start seeing the beauty and power of mathematical thinking. Get a mental arithmetic app on your phone and spend a few months routinely practising some sums. What first appears as a dry activity will soon become a highly personal exercise in creative reasoning, of finding the best way to represent and manipulate with numbers. For example, I solve arithmetic problems visually but my friend works best by reasoning aurally (I don't get it either, but seeing as he can multipy two 4 digit numbers in seconds it works for him). I'll say that learning to multiplying large numbers in my head has done more for me in terms of mental training than chess has!
[+] [-] confidantlake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesmehaffey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|5 years ago|reply
[1] http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2002/05/what-chess-has...
[+] [-] Bakary|5 years ago|reply
The hours you spend playing chess/video games/whatever else is marketed to boost some ability are better spent pursuing what you want out of life directly. Or spent doing these same things, but out of genuine interest and for their own sake.
[+] [-] jonfw|5 years ago|reply
There are only so many games in a season, and only so many practices in between games. In athletics, if you want to build a new skill you're best doing drills so you can independently work on that skill without sacrificing valuable practice/game time where you should be focusing on higher level strategy stuff.
If you're a consultant and your approach is to get on a client site and send it, that's probably an effective learning strategy right up until you tank your reputation and can't find any more clients to practice with.
[+] [-] dmos62|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ummonk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarf21|5 years ago|reply