Benefits of playing chess

Chess enjoys a unique reputation as a ‘thinking person’s game’. Non-players often associate chess skill with overall intelligence, or even believe that chess practice can increase someone’s IQ. Despite this, I’m not aware of any evidence that playing chess makes people generally smarter or improves problem-solving skills in a generalized (and measurable) way.

However, that’s not to say that chess doesn’t teach some broadly applicable lessons. Like many sports, chess training can be a vector for improving discipline, focus, and composure. I first learned to play chess as a child and, while I never achieved much success at the scholastic level, the process of learning the game certainly helped me develop these essential attributes.

Although my competitive chess career ended in grade school, I rediscovered the game as an adult and began to practice regularly in my 20s (recently achieving a 2000+ rating in the Rapid time control on Lichess). As a so-called ‘adult improver’, I’ve encountered several generally-applicable lessons whose origins are more chess-specific than things like discipline and focus:

Expecting the best move

In every chess position, your opponent will have one or more optimal moves that maximize their advantage (or minimise their disadvantage). Evaluating your own potential moves is primarily an exercise of finding your opponent’s best response (and your best response to that, and so on) and making the move where they have the least-good options available to them. This is in contrast to hope chess (a typical beginner mindset) where you make moves with the expectation that your opponent will simply blunder for no reason.

The ability to reflexively find your opponent’s best move maps wonderfully to most critical thinking exercises; this is related to the concept of steelmanning an argument where you present it in the most charitable or compelling way.

Recognizing qualitative value

The first way that chess beginner’s are taught to evaluate positional balance is by assigning a quantitative value to each piece: pawns are worth one, knights and bishops are worth three, rooks are worth five, and queens are worth nine. Each piece’s value indicates which trades are advantageous and the sum of each side’s piece values indicates who has the advantage or whether the game is balanced.

This is an effective introductory model that can be expanded on as students learn the game. In reality piece ‘values’ are contextual: bishops and rooks are better (effectively worth more) when both are on the board and can coordinate; knights can be worth less in very open positions but can be more valuable than rooks if they influence a large or critical area of the board.

This evolution of understanding piece value builds an intuition for both the usefulness and limitations of quantitative value proxies and trains recognition of the McNamara fallacy. More advanced students discover a similar progression when using computer analysis of their games: the computer can assign a scalar score to any position but assumes perfect play, omitting the human element of position ‘challenge’.

Acknowledging your mistakes

In sports, business, and most areas of life, there are nearly always ways to pass blame or avoid recognizing your own mistakes. The inability to test counterfactuals combined with the prevalence of chance events makes it possible to argue that even seemingly-questionable choices were better than an alternative.

Fortunately, powerful computer engines like Stockfish have rendered such self-delusion impossible in the realm of chess. Improving as a chess beginner is primarily a pursuit of mistake reduction (mistake identification being a forgone conclusion). This is a humbling exercise: the path to performance is a trail made from your own failures, identified unambiguously and dispassionately by the computer’s analysis.

Game of the mind

All of these abilities transfer well away from the board and are trained naturally in the pursuit of chess mastery (Go is possibly the only other popular game that can make a similar claim). But unlike mastery itself, these skills are well within the amateur’s reach.