Sports Then and Now

Whenever we read about sports we find ourselves reading about the muscular, physical sports like soccer, football, basketball and the many others.  We almost never read about chess in the context of sport.

One obvious reason is that Americans don’t like chess all that much.  The second is that most people don’t see chess as sport.  Here we’ll try to dissuade dear reader from both attitudes.  Chess is indeed a sport and one that has endless potential for enjoyment.

Brain Food

There are by now thousands of articles that extol playing intellectual games to stimulate the brain.  Anyone who has tried a difficult Sudoku has realized that sometimes the next move may come after an analysis that runs to several steps.  How many times have we given up on a line of thought because it was too complex?

Chess may very well be the mother of all brain foods.  After the first few moves, which admittedly have been catalogued for decades, even though there are 318 billion possible ways to play just the first four moves—more than the possible permutations in blackjack which is considered the primary intellectual online casino game—the permutations get ridiculously complicated.  Even if you play chess at far less than master level, if you are at all competitive, you’ll want to see the “best” move.  Even masters often miss the best move because its value is hidden so deep within the game that it’s hard to find.

In chess, small advantages can be won move by move realizing a more powerful attack than the opponent’s defense.  But small advantages are hard to find and any move that doesn’t result in a small advantage may very well give the overall advantage to the opponent. Read the rest of this entry →