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A record 62 million households watched "The Queen's Gambit" in its first month.
Chess players know that if you’re exceptionally good at the game, you’re rare. The popular board game is not just for fun, it’s for strategy and intellect. Your moves are crucial, similar to the game of life. And it’s becoming more mainstream than ever.
The game of chess comes with an in-depth history of difficulty. Mastering the game of chess isn’t just about winning. It’s about understanding how to own the game board and understand the moves that need to be made - to win or sometimes lose. The pieces in chess are crucial, the moves are even more crucial.
Modern technology has granted us the ability to play online, and this in itself has made the game more mainstream, and more players understand. However, do not take its modern methods for granted. The name of the game remains, be it on an actual board or online on your smart device.
Online access to the game has created more exposure and interaction for the game. Chess.com estimates that it has 20,000,000 members on its site, which is already a staggering amount of people who are learning, and who are less intimidated by the game.
The Fédération Internationale des Échecs or World Chess Federation (FIDE)—the organization that connects and governs international chess competition—estimates that globally there may be as many as 600,000,000 chess players worldwide.
Chess is now a part of popular culture considering how the strategic game is more understood and embraced. Now, that more people are becoming exposed to the game and its intent, there are now more chess clubs, tournaments and initiatives that popular culture has clung on to the idea of chess as a staple in culture. More grade schools and high schools offer chess as an extracurricular activity. In doing this, more young people are drawn to the idea of learning how to play and teaching one another the strategy.
]]>The benefit of chess can have some impacts that the player barely even realizes. For example, playing chess can result in increased problem-solving skills. When deciding moves on the board, it’s important to keep certain pieces safe, move certain pieces accordingly.
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The benefit of chess can have some impacts that the player barely even realizes. For example, playing chess can result in increased problem-solving skills. When deciding moves on the board, it’s important to keep certain pieces safe, move certain pieces accordingly. Sounds familiar? Let’s associate that idea to life: When working and maintaining survival, one of the main things to do is stay afloat and make good choices. Problem-solving skills in life are very comparable to the problem-solving skills used in chess. Many chess players view multiplication tables differently than nonplayers. To them, a multiplication table is a slate to apply a strategy.
Another example: Playing chess in a social setting requires you to interact with others, and this, too, can be an advantage of playing the game. Playing chess may help adults and even children socialize better with others; especially others who share their same interests. People who have problems with socializing may gain more. Imagine an introvert becoming an avid chess player. With social action comes social development. Even if a person or a child has a problem expressing themselves, they may find a better way to do it through the chessboard, where they otherwise could not.
Due to the many ways that chess can stimulate the brain, it can be good to help lead people down different avenues of thought. One of the main things a chess player can bring to the table is a different perspective, an alternate train of thought, something new that everyone else at the table had not thought of before. That is because of the sheer number of alternatives that chess forces a player's brain to experience on a daily basis. It might lead a chess player to be far more open and accepting in their thinking, instead of being narrow-minded and only focusing on one solution to a problem or issue in a discussion.
To be clear, just because someone chooses the game of chess does not guarantee a sense of intellect. In fact, for most avid players, chess can be the only thing that he/she is into it that could even be categorized as intellectually stimulating. What it does mean, however, is that playing chess could easily create a better understanding of how to strategize in everyday life.
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Legendary players known for their dominance in the game include Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, Vishwanathan Anand, Wesley So, Hikaru Nakamura, Magnus Carlsen and many more. These players are known for their extreme skill and the sheer difficulty it took to defeat them on the board. Successful grandmasters who have made their own marks on the game, and in doing so inspired millions of chess enthusiasts to follow their path. Check out an informative article on important chess players on Chess-site. Chess-site also has many reviews, product recommendations and in-depth information on all things chess.
However, this musing is not about grandmasters, but about celebrities in various time periods. Writers, musicians, actors, politicians, professional sports players, scientists, humanitarians, world leaders all around, and just your average, every-day person—all of them have played chess. You have people like boxers Vitali Klitschko and his brother, Vladimir, not only professional boxers but also known for their avid chess skills. Vitali is also the mayor of Kiev and a well-known important Russian politician.
Napolean Opening is named after the French general and emperor Napolean Bonaparte who had a deep love for chess.
A long list of U.S. Presidents played the game. Chess.com has a list with anecdotes that includes George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt , William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.
Famous physicist Einstein is known to have played chess, not competitively though. Albert Einstein was a friend of former world chess champion (and mathematician) Emanuel Lasker. Frank Morgan learned chess to play it on trains with the stage manager of a traveling drama company, who is a chess addict.
No one pursuit of life, one field that chess players come from, whether you are successful at the game or not, casual or competitive, people from all walks of life already play or want to play chess.
From world leaders to intellectuals and pioneers of science, to famous sports players, plenty of great, famous, successful people in the world all agree on this: chess is worth their time.
]]>Chess is an ancient game compared to some other games that are more recent in near centuries and decades, and it has an established, proud history with players all over the world. It is one of the greatest games that people have ever created—a completely fair, almost-perfectly-balanced game of strategy where the only thing you need to do to win is being able to outthink your opponent. Easier said than done, but it is the truth.
Why play it, though?
There are so many reasons that if this article was going to attempt to list all of them, you'd be here reading it all day. It can be summed up in a shorter way, however, more concise and easier to process. Chess' biggest, most noticeable, and most obvious benefits are the impacts it has on the mind after playing it for a long enough period of time.
Besides the fact that the game is just fun to play, there are many mental and behavioral benefits to playing chess. One such thing is different patterns of thought, like critical thinking skills, logic skills, problem-solving skills, and creativity coming up to the front of the mind where they may not have been used as much before.
Chess can be played by nearly anyone at any age, and because of that, the game is extremely accessible, being easy and cheap to play while having deep strategic depth and an incredibly high skill ceiling, meaning it is also a great game to have as a hobby or on the side to work on while you go about your daily life, even if you don't want to focus on it too hard. This makes it a good game for kids to play, too.
Chess can improve your concentration, imagination, memory, and more. You have to focus to play chess, think about different moves and what your opponent is going to do, and do your best to react and counteract to that while you prepare your assault or defense against them. In addition to all of that, you must remember so many different kinds of famous openers, strategies, defenses, and tricky tactics that will trip you up if you don't memorize them.
Chess can even be used for something like teaching your brain how to organize things better, as when you are accessing chess resources or staring at a board in the middle of a game, you will be pushing your brain to put everything together in a better way to achieve a victory or be more efficient with your time.
Because of its accessibility and the number of people that play it globally, chess is also good for many social ventures and it is a good way to meet different kinds of people across the world. This is one of the main social benefits of chess.
If you choose to compete at a higher level, maybe after several years of practiced play, learning openings, and practice against skilled opponents, you will find that chess can also help and teach you to deal with pressure and nerves in high, intense situations. This kind of ability may help you later or in other areas of life, such as test-taking or working under difficult conditions at your job.
It is obvious and clear to see the many benefits of playing chess, and they haven't even all been listed here. The final one is easy to see and even easier to understand: chess is just also very, very fun to play.
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It is easy to argue the position that chess is one of the most difficult strategy games ever to play, especially on a high level. Playing it on a casual level is fun, and fine, and there's nothing wrong with it, but once you begin to attempt to climb that hill, you realize what you are actually attempting is not a hill, but Everest itself, and you have no idea how to attempt to tackle this monster.
Chess has many, many different kinds of strategies, different variations on defense and attack, sacrificial play, aggressive play where you attempt to destroy your opponent quickly, defensive play where you value keeping your pieces more than taking your opponent's, and more, and more, and on and on it goes.
The number of technically possible positions increases exponentially as a game goes on. The number of positions after White's first move is 20. After Black moves for the first time, this changes to 400. Just in two moves, it goes from 20 to 400, the different ways the board can be arranged. This is because of how many pieces there are, how many ways they can be moved, how many ways your opponent can respond, it's simply ludicrous.
Just in case you were curious, after just 5 moves in the game, there are over 800,000 possible positions of the board. After just five moves.
Now, of course, many of these will be similar with minor differences, but in the end, that part doesn't really matter. It's very unlikely that any chess game will play exactly like any other, and this is just another strength of the game.
Having to memorize so many moves, so many ways the pieces can interact, every opener, every strategy—it's a strain for the human brain at best, and slow play while gaining experience can probably help a lot towards being able to recognize certain things from your opponent that you would have certainly missed at some point.
Now, as if the sheer number of moves, openers, and strategies was not already enough, the intelligence of your opponent must be considered. Baits, sacrifices, and any trick or play in the book that is legal can easily tempt you into making one or two moves that will utterly ruin your position on the board if your opponent is skilled enough to do it, or if you are inexperienced enough to fall for it—or even if you just make a mistake at that moment, once it's made, it can't be undone. You then get to watch your opponent pick your board apart with his or her superior piece strength and mobility while you struggle as your defenses crumble.
If you have ever been crushed by a grandmaster, you will know what it feels like to be taught how to play chess by someone who knows. This kind of game rewards skill, experience, practice, and knowledge, and it's a pursuit worth your time should you ever want to attempt to dive into the deep ocean that is competitive chess. There are monsters lurking at the bottom: behemoths, ancient ones. Players that have been playing for thirty years, geniuses and prodigies like Magnus Carlsen, ancient grandmasters like Kasparov, and more, the list goes on.
Despite the intense difficulty, however, one thing is certain: it's a game we all love to play.
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Everyone knows that chess is a game that is played with almost solely the mind. Besides the physical necessity to move the piece in order to make your move—and not even that is technically necessary, as there have been and continue to be physically disabled chess players throughout the game's history—the rest of the game entirely plays out between the head of two players as they jockey for a better position on the board.
Just from this alone, it is obvious something like chess is intensely stimulating and uses the brain in a way that many activities do not.
It can be an intense game to play. What this can lead to, however, is an even greater stimulation of the brain, and there are benefits from that. Learning benefits, educational benefits. For example, in some studies, it is found that the ability to problem-solve goes up by a very decent margin—to almost 20% for some kids, which is astounding when you think about it.
Because of the sheer amount of moves in chess, openings, strategies, defenses, gambles, gambits and more, chess players also have to be creative. No one move or strategy will work forever and being able to adapt on the fly and adjust yourself is important, even if you understand a lot of moves and what their intentions are. 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games by László Polgár.
This creativity, as well as things like critical thinking, can come out of a player in chess, but once honed or turned toward something else, it can also be used for other things. Problem-solving and critical thinking can be applied to many academic practices, mathematics just one of them.
Creativity, on the other hand, is useful in music, and while a player of chess may use that creativity on the board to win, they also may exercise it in other areas of their life, such as in music class when they are younger in elementary school—or, when they get older, maybe they may pick up an instrument of their own out of sheer curiosity or desire. It may even have effects into other creative pursuits such as painting.
Anything that stimulates a child's brain to think is good for them (Kids wooden memory match stick chess game), but something that is not only a great game historically but has other benefits is definitely a wise choice for any adult to encourage their child to continue to play. It isn't going to make your child a genius overnight, but perhaps having them play chess may lead to some benefits, or failing that, there is always the social aspect of the game that can help towards a child's development.
Of course, they don't apply just to children either, which fits chess—as a game anyone can play.
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No matter what your style is you could always find the chess sets that suits you.
Check out our collection of Chess Sets.
Play away!
]]>As a chess-loving family chess has become part of our lives and we (esp our daughter) would like to go beyond just playing chess. Hope you can find something for you or your loved ones in our store!
If you are looking for something in particular and can not find in our store do drop us a note and we will do our best to fulfill your request.
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