Meadmaker wrote:
this is truth here. in order to play chess at the best of your ability, you really do have to be stable mentally, you can't, say, be having nervous breakdown.
what he refers to as "cunning" is also important in chess, although I think what he is talking about is just a lust for sports, competition, battle, blood, war etc. if you don't naturally have this lust, it can be incredibly difficult to progress beyond a certain level I feel, much more challenging than it would be for someone who does.
I've got plenty of cunning and more than enough blood lust, so that's not it. I have good pattern recognition skills and incredibly good memory, though in middle age it is not so strong as it was in youth.
just to clarify, I wasn't implying that all that is required is a predisposition for sports, battle and competition, just that it is indeed a significant factor. one which most people neglect to take into proper consideration. I think someone who doesn't like sports all that much, doesn't really enjoy fighting with people, will improve at chess much more slowly than someone who is the opposite, if both started at the same time and everything else was completely equal.
Until I took up Chess, I had never met an intellectual challenge that had bested me.
It isn't an "intellectual challenge," it's a game challenge. People constantly seem prone to equating chess with raw intelligence. It's not--it's a game, and takes a lot of practice and study to learn.
The bold above is the best summing up. +10
The OP has long since left this thread. We should follow him. This dead horse has been kicked so many times in his IQ-addled head in these forums.
But new blood keeps reviving the issue, without knowing any history. Blah Blah Blah.
The reason some topics come up again and again is because they are interesting to a large number of people. Although this topic has been explored over and over in many, many, ways, it hasn't been explored in depth by me, or by other participants. We find it interesting, whether or not someone else may have already plumbed the depths of the topic.
Would you walk into a Physics 101 lecture and tell everyone in it that they are wasting their time because other people already know the answers? Of course not. Don't make that same mistake here.