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.
Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.
After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.
Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…
“Ah ha! I see you’ve played the Frenchman’s Cumsock. I will have checkmate in 4 moves!”
Wait, my hand is still on the piece… I… have … not… completed… my… move
“I understood that reference”
KOLANAKI
Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the ‘meta’ strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it’s like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
I’ll gladly eat shit for a controversial opinion, but I mentally put chess pros in the same basket as those guys that would queue solely for Office in counterstrike and reach global elite. Like sure, it’s still an impressive time commitment, I just feel like there were better things to put that into. I hate MOBAs and yet I’d respect a professional DOTA player more? But I’m more than familiar with the fanbase of Chess and how defensive they get.
The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
I have a mishmash dialect as we moved around a lot when I was a child; very rural, too. I’ll say “hambag” and “ain’t” and “me an’ this guy” and my sister says “ambliance”, but we spell it all correctly.
Did your chess expert know the spelling and say it wrongly, or was there confusion about the spelling too?
They thought it was because the leather was from a pig…
I think it’s a good name if it’s a pigskin bag. Gonna start calling my wife’s bag that now. Most of her other bags are nylon or whatever, but on she’s had for 20 years is some kind of leather.
Ain’t ain’t a non-word. I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.
this is inaccurate. edit tbd