Comment Re:chess? (Score 2) 449
you are right that it is unsurprising — as is the result of a game between a tennis champ and an amateur — but you are wrong in saying that the skills one squires in chess are unrelated to everything that matters in life.
you obviously have never taken up the sport, or you would soon see how it disciplines and trains the mind to meet everything else in life with more and better discrimination — just like science enables one to cut out a lot of the crap that people superstitiously believe — chess teaches your mind how to think clearly in a better way than anything else. it shows you how to overcome superstitious instincts, and train them towards better results — and this helps in almost every area of life.
As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1750 in his article, The Morals of Chess — The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess... By playing at Chess then, we may learn:
1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action.
2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action—the relation of the several pieces and their situations...
3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily...
two cents from toronto island
j