[mi100hael]

I've noticed that the #1 positive thing I learned from chess is rarely mentioned by others, and I'm not sure why that is. For me it was:

Pattern recognition.

I many cases (at least at the intermediate level), winning/losing games doesn't come down to who can "think three moves ahead," it comes down to whether someone can recognize that a pattern of three moves will result in a particular outcome. It may be a nuance, but it's actually an important one because it eliminates the notion that someone has to be of above-average intelligence and discover new moves on the fly to succeed.

In actuality, that skill of pattern recognition can be practiced, honed, and applied in numerous areas of life. Playing chess is such a pure form of the skill that it opened my eyes to how many other activities can benefit from a similar approach.

[riotnrrd]

That's a well-known aspect of "expert" level chess player thinking! There's a famous experiment that demonstrated this. Researchers briefly showed set-up chess boards to novices (little to no chess experience) and expert players (2000+ ELO) and then asked the players to recreate the board they just saw. If the set-up was from a real game (not necessarily a famous or studied game) experts performed far, far better. However, if the chess board was just a random scramble of pieces, novices and experts had the same recall ability. Essentially, expert players saw the patterns at work in legitimate mid-game set-ups and this helped the recall task.

[prmph]

Yes this is an interesting result that I recall from my days when I was into chess.

But this result speaks to something more general that is interesting as well. It seems high levels of skill in many other fields is associated with incredible ability to recall details about a performance in that field. If I recall correctly, Bobby Fischer was able to perfectly recall positions (and his analysis of them) from games he had played years ago (and consider how many games a professional chess player might play in a career).

The question I have is, what exactly is the connection? Is this association essential? And is it the incredible memory that leads to high skill, or the it's the reverse?

[curiousllama]

Definitely agree. It’s not even super purposeful recognition. It’s a feeling like “this seems bad”, and looking for why, only to figure out your opponent’s likely plan.

It’s much better to be less intelligent and have that feeling, than be more intelligent and not even know to look for the danger.