
“Chess-Playing Excitement” in 1859 - yarapavan
https://medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your-mind-78ad1034521f
======
briane80
I love chess but stopped playing around the age of 20.

I played a lot in school and was captain of my school team. I played in league
and cup matches for 2 years and every day I practised on fellow students in
the sixth form prefects room. There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as
sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the
first moves. On the other hand there was the excitment of knowing when you had
beaten your opponent and just had to finish him off. I remember going to a
tight end game with a top table opponent and had just Queened a pawn with
another one 2 moves away. The referee gave me the Queen and said "Shall I
leave another Queen here?" I replied "no thanks I just need the one" and
grinned at my opponent. It's been said chess is more brutal than war.

I had to give it up as I began obsessing about the game. It was driving me
slowly mad. I was having nightmares about being chased around a large chess
board by the pieces. I haven't played a game since.

~~~
mholt
> "Shall I leave another Queen here?"

I realize it was probably obvious in your case, but I would have been bothered
by the ref making a comment or question like that during the game for fear of
tipping off my opponent.

~~~
nathancahill
I'm sure his opponent knew.

------
pattisapu
My Starcraft coach tells me that if I want to get better I have to practice
about 10 hours a day.

So although, like chess, the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1],
the opportunity cost is astronomical.

Improving your brain while destroying your life . . . well, one could do
worse.

[1]
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0070350)

~~~
dimino
Are you already GM level? If not, then your coach is nutso.

~~~
mafuyu
Agreed. StarCraft is not as hard as people make it out to be. The path to
Masters is pretty straightforward and achievable in under 3 hours a day. You
just need to be smart about how you practice.

------
tzs
> Here’s the thing, though: We can chuckle at what seems like a nutty, off-
> base argument — except the author makes some extremely good points. Take,
> for example, the argument that chess is too sedentary a pasttime for people
> who were living increasingly industrialized and sedentary lives. This was
> true, and still is!

Idea: make a chess clock where the two sides are independently powered by
rechargeable batteries that start with low charge.

Each clock side is hooked to a separate treadmill, which charges that side's
battery.

If your side of the clock runs out of power during the game while the other
side still has power, you lose. It is up to you to decide when and how much to
use the treadmill during the game, as long as you can keep your clock powered.

Implementation Note: it would probably be better to not do this by actually
having the treadmill control the power supply for each clock side. It would
probably be better to just do this abstractly. The clock would keep track of
an allowed run time parameter, a treadmill distance to run time conversion
factor, and then would flag if "allowed run time" \+ "treadmill distance" x
"conversion factor" \- "actual run time" < 0.

~~~
nvader
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing)

------
davelnewton
I was a low-level recreational player as a kid, got freaked out when I beat a
state-ranked player, and have never been able to finish a game since then.

That's not chess per se, it was a reaction to perceived stress. Plus I know
that if I really got in to it it'd take over. Chess scares me.

~~~
marktangotango
>> champions are afraid of losing, everyone else is afraid of winning [1]

I found this to be true of myself. Chess afficianatos probably know better
than me, but wasn't Bobby Fischer a big proponent of alternative rules for
chess that removed the advantage of "merely" memorizing strong opening games
and mid game strategies, something the soviets of his era trained specifically
for? please correct me if I've got that wrong.

[1] billy jean king

Edit spelling

~~~
Nadya
Yes, Fischer wanted the back line to be drawn such that the order of the
pieces was not set in stone but still imposed some limitations to retain
castling and bishops being on alternate colors (instead of having two bishops
on black)

Typically called Chess960 or Shuffle Chess:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960)

------
platz
Nice piece about "chess sickness" and Duchamp (and he created less art and
became more consumed with Chess) that echoes this post:
[http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-
game](http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-game)

“Much of an exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss
by creating a new world to rule,” wrote Edward Said. “It is not surprising
that so many exiles seem to be novelists [and] chess players.”

------
dang
Nabokov wrote a wonderful novel, "The Defense", about a chess player who goes
mad.

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dimino
> "I have wasted too much time on it already; I cannot afford to do this any
> longer; this is my _last_ game."

Who wants to take odds on whether or not this guy stopped playing after that
game? I can't even remember how many times I've said this about various
activities...

~~~
unclebucknasty
Would posting comments on HN happen to be one of those activities?

------
billforsternz
My main programming activity these days is working on my chess GUI. Working on
problems like; How can I quickly search 10,000,000 games for a given position
without creating a fully indexed multi-gigabyte database? Etc. Sometimes it
bothers me. Am I wasting my life?

------
dimino
So I'll reach out to you guys because I've been racking my brain to no avail
for the name of a particular blog, and have come up empty.

The blog in question would have been _perfect_ for this article, as it had
both chess related questions, as well as articles of historical curiosity.
Math articles, as well, would appear, and any sort of other kind of post that
would interest folks who find these kinds of things interesting. I thought the
name was related in some way to "meandering" or "useless" or something
"trivia" related in the title, but I'm completely blanking.

I would have sworn up and down that I heard about this blog from an XKCD comic
(the same one that brought me here 3 or 4 years ago), but when I went back to
look at the comic in question, I couldn't find the blog.

I apologize if it's off-topic, but it's sort of inverse-relevant, I suppose?

~~~
gjm11
Almost certainly Greg Ross's "Futility Closet".
[http://www.futilitycloset.com/](http://www.futilitycloset.com/)

[EDITED to be less diffident -- I'm at least 95% confident this is what you're
thinking of.]

~~~
dimino
This is absolutely correct, thank you!

------
EGreg
I spent my late teenage years and early 20s often playing chess with old guys
in the park. I regret I didn't engage in more productive pursuits, like
chasing girls and taking them on dates. I am not kidding. If I had to go back
I'd seriously cut down on the chess and up the dating.

------
daveslash
Arthur C. Clarke had a short story (so short, it fit on a postcard), in which
chess defeats AI.
[http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html](http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html)

------
thesteamboat
To play chess is the mark of a gentleman; to play chess well is the mark of a
misspent youth.

------
fsk
I lost interest in chess when I realized that, in order to be really good, you
had to spend a lot of time studying and memorizing openings. That seemed like
a boring waste of time.

------
agentgt
Its sort of funny how the original SA article sounds like a beautifully
crafted work of satire. I had to constantly remind myself that the original
article is genuinely sober.

~~~
Jtsummers
Just like articles on the evils of video games the past couple decades.

~~~
Roodgorf
This is exactly what I kept thinking of. You could basically do a
search/replace of "chess" with "video games" and be pretty close to the
sentiment towards gaming in most media until very recently. And with the
advent of eSports, the comparison seems all the more apt.

------
twerkmonsta
"Why Clickbait Article Titles Will Destroy Your Mind"

~~~
brayton
I hope they post the Medium stats on Views vs Reads

~~~
mromanuk
I entered the website for a sub-second, glimpsed the first line of text, and I
was gone.

------
tequila_shot
some one please change the title. It looks very close to a link bait.

~~~
stephengillie
The article feels rather click-baitey. It's basically a submarine for the
book. While it does offer an interesting historical position, it completely
fails to compare and/or contrast that to modern opinions, despite
foreshadowing this in the opening paragraph.

