From my experience most smart people learned and played chess at some point but few get the point of memorizing stuff. Especially if they are not good memorizes. Its a great game to teach and play with kids as it does stimulate the mind with the way the pieces move and having to think about the changing board and next move. That being said I was not even aware of en passant until I met a guy in college who actually went to competitions. Heck I rarely could remember how to castle due to how rare it was to get into a position to do so. Really though any type of stimulating activity is helpful. Someone mentioned rubicks cubes and like suduko and crosswords and really any gaming. They all have limitations. I often say crosswords is more about knowing the crossword author than anything else. They all have favorites and biases in their puzzles.
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Aha. That's because they all play go!
Right?
More about interest than intelligence, honestly.
Guess I'll start with the same disclaimer: I don't think I'm too smart for chess or anything.
I always thought chess is kinda boring. Don't get me wrong, it's fun enough as a novice. It's probably also fun for people who mastered it, I'm not denying that.
However, for everything inbetween, it's mostly about memorizing stuff. You just learn hundreds of openings and how to counter them. From what I've seen, a lot of intermediate players fall apart once they go off-script. It takes years until you're good enough to strategize properly on your own, like a novice would, without some going "That's the 'double helix chin twister'" and beating you.
It's kinda like the problem multiplayer games often have for me. There's a set meta and you either learn it or lose. To experiment yourself successfully, you have to invest a massive amount of time. Experimenting myself is the fun part. I'm don't want to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours before I get to have fun.
I largely don't agree with this, I played chess (Battle Chess) as a kid, I wasnt the best at chess but I had fun. I hadn't played it in over 15+ years.
My coworker plays chess on a regular basis, against other players and against the computer at 1,700. He knows quite a few strategies that I never bothered to ask what they entailed, which is a part of your point, but I just play off of the moves I see on the board, I don't know any technical moves or strategies other than checkmate the king, castling, and en passant.
I literally wing it every time and my opponent is always thinking about future moves to try and destroy me. Our matches include blunders and typically end up with only a couple pieces left on the board. Its such a fun experience when it's played without expectation and you're relying on pure personal strategy in real time.
I've won twice In a row now. Its usually back and forth
Can confirm, my brothers are both very good at chess. One is smart, the other is dumb as rocks
I consider myself reasonably intelligent but I also have ADHD so … I completely suck at chess.
Yeah... everytime I see it in movies I kinda cringe. However it still is an effective narrative tool to say that the person is a stategist or is in a higher tax bracket ( or honestly any quality that the common viewer doesn't have). Even so, I wish writers would stop doing this.