When I was young, I enjoyed playing chess. The game has a very clear objective, very clear rules and each player must choose a piece to play among many possibilities. I am quite sure that chess helped me to take decisions when pressed. However, as time passed by, I considered it a waste of time. I installed some software applications in my computer such as gnuchess, but generally for very short periods because it somehow boring to play with computer because it has no emotion, it rarely makes mistakes and it doesn't feel the pain of loosing. Recently I began to play with chess.com. It enables humans to play with humans as in a championship. Each player receives a score. I began to think why on earth, I became addicted again on chess. I think that the main motivation is to look the score going up and down after each game.
I know that I am wasting my time. There are so much more on life than chess. The question is: "what is important in life?". Certainly is not chess, and even less significant is the score on chess.com. So, why do I strive for higher score? It is number that helps to measure some kind of intelligence among the chess.com addicts. Thus, if one of my students say he has such score, I rapidly tag him as "intelligent" or "dumb".
Youtube suggested me a video about Bob Fisher who had a very high IQ. If I heard correctly, it was higher than Einstein, but obviously Einstein made much more than Bob Fisher who died as crazy guy in Iceland. Kasparov is the great genius of chess, but he lost to the IBM computer, deep blue. Is any advantage for a human being to train hardly to improve some chess score? I don´t think so; but as said it must be useful for improving some decision making, although it in a limited way. For instance: a chess player must restrain himself when in a great advantage over his opponent because he may commit a big mistake leaving some holes in his defense; and a chess player must be patient when loosing by some margin in hope that his opponent make a mistake. This behavior is very similar when investing money in stock market. Chess is a school that teaches, transfers some learning, a proper behavior in other games. However this transference is limited. The proper way to became a better investor is to apply the time, studying companies, and not playing chess.
