Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
Disclaimer: not calling myself smart or anything.
I always found chess boring, for some reason. Like, not because it is too complex, but because it isn’t complex enough, in a way. As an example, the first time I tried my hand at Medieval II: Total War, I fell in love with all things strategy.
I still can’t do chess, though… It’s like my mind goes to its happy place halfway through a match and I start making moves just to progress the game and be done with it. Gimme a 4X game, and I’d need reminders to pee every 12 hours.
Well there is not a lot of action going on in a chess game and you are a lot of patience, I guess that makes it feel boring for you.
Honestly, I don’t think the action’s the problem, I enjoyed creating interlinked databases with tens of thousands of entries in Spreadsheets. I think it’s strictly to do with the complexity itself, I need more. I like the concept of every piece having a specific move set, I’d just need more of them. And add more complexity to them, but at that point may as well just play grand scale combat games, like 40k.
Edit: plus, to be honest, this lack of complexity doesn’t even let me properly enjoy a victory. Maybe it has some fetishistic tinges at this point, but a protracted victory is so much sweeter, make me feel like I pulled my brain through high intensity training for a couple of hours. Either that, or something which can start acting as a reflex, like backgammon.
I dont play a lot of chess and I’m bad at it but I recommend playing chess puzzles or timed chess. If it helps, just think of it as a mini skermish on one area of the “map”.
While there is competitive chess, I think the advantage it has over most things is that many people know how to play and that most of the time its a casual background game. Like you aren’t trying to win, you are trying to not lose.
When someone is playing at a house party, it’s so much fun to make wierd faces after they played a move or so.
In my teenage years I really tried to master it well. I score relatively high in chess.com and lichess but I share your sentiment. If you are a chess master it doesnt mean you are super smart it means you are super good at chess.
Science confirms this in a way. Prof Andrew Huberman has a podcast episode about games in general and their effect the brain development and the takeaways:
Yeah I always laugh when movies or TV portrait a character being good at strategy by depicting them being good at chess. Those two have zero relation. Total war on the other hand, get good at that and you’re cracked at strategy