6 masters who proved that chess kills your brain and your life - YOU ARE WARNED

Bro ain't no way you said that

how is chess bad for you bro

Hi! 🙂

they are die

didn't alekhine die by choking on meat?

#x: Kyobir: He has a life outside of chess

@nimzomalasyian, I think that GnrfFrtzl is saying legit stuff. Not that you are lying, I just think he has a point, sometimes better than your point.

I am not denying that some GM's died of mental illness, but for most of us we don't need to fret because we will never be that good.

No offense.

i dont think chess is related to every death of each GM

Chess grows your ego just to destroy it and regrow it every single time.

Yeah, some people make it sound like diphtheria.

Srsly, people, chess is fun and good for you.

Chess Can be Good and healthly & excellent.Like water,like the gym,like foods,like 
coffe,like a lot of things.If you excede the use of any of thing I mentioned you can have problems and feel bad.The good and the bad can be observed in much circunstances as the extremes of same wand.One wand.2 extremes.Many wands need to being taken for the middle balanced to work well.The problem is the obsesive behaviour.Obsesive behaviour can make all good things as bad.People mentioned and champs and featured masters also are humans individ.We ignore many aspects of their lifes,environment, problems.We ignore their story detailed many times.We dont know about circunstances and how,why ,and when...perhaps without Chess their lifes would did was worst...Also is posible that a person take the Chess as scape.Even in not properly way.Nothing diminishes the excellent legacy they gave.Nothing diminishes all the good about chess.

Elo has a sporting use in chess. Used in other ways it can cause psychological problems. The Elo purpose is not judge people.We need to cultivate mental health by promoting good education. Mainly those who work with chess in an educational way.

... and yet Boris Spassky lives on and on and on ...

The only GM that I know that genuinely ruined his health by playing chess was Tony Miles. That was not because chess itself is harmful, but because he needed to play continuously just to earn a basic living. A real shame because he ought to have been a serious contender to be World Champion.

Miles's contemporary John Nunn, a World Champion Chess Puzzle solver, has had a long highly success career as a mathematician as well as being a very successful chess writer. As a healthy 69 year old he still has a FIDE ranking of over 2500. I believe that he remains married to his only wife, another chess master.

Years ago a played against Miles's wife Jana. A WGM and former British Champion. She has not only managed to cope with playing a lifetime of chess, but also the stresses of working as an anaesthetist into her late 70's.

I think it's a conspiracy theory. He traveled a lot, so he was always a foreigner in his life. When you have talent, you can still afford to drink a bottle of wine before entering a tournament.

1. Paul Morphy - Regarded as the first unofficial world champion, within 2 years of playing international chess, he went nuts. Chess rearranged his neurons and he was never the same again. He spent the last 10 years of his life wandering aimlessy talking to himself. He died a beggar.

He had been a great chess player since he was a lot younger, then he quit chess forever, pursuing a life in law instead. It didn't work out very well, but he didn't die a beggar or talk to himself, those are all lies. Also

2. Willhelm Steinitz - This was the first official world champion but he died in an insane asylum, broken and flea infested. Chess manipulated his brain and destroyed his emotional quotient. He was eventually left to the dogs.

He didn't die in a lunatic asylum at all I'm 99.9% sure that's just another disgraceful lie. He was put in a lunatic asylum for a time like a lot of people to keep a watch on him. He played chess with some of the other inmates and was in good spirits, claiming later that he oughtn't have been there at all, and there is no reason to suspect any differently since he conducted his life very well and wrote several great books on chess.

3. Jose Capablanca - This guy never did a day's work in his life. Everything came to him easy in life. He was such a genious at chess that he did no training, he read no book. All this developed in him the biggest egos the chess world has ever seen. All he did was eat gourmet meals, flirt with the best looking ladies and play poker smoking home made cigar. Eventually he died when he was analyzing a game in a chess club in New York when an artery in his brain burst due to high blood pressure. He was wearing a $1500 suit when this happened.

I don't know why people like to say this lie - Capablanca studied chess tremendously when he was younger. He also prepared extensively for his world championship games. The idea that anyone could become world champion without studying chess is simply a fantasy, stop repeating it. Also he wrote at least two books - one of which is about teaching fundamentals of chess to young people (ie. he cared about people improving). Books aren't easy, they take a lot of time to write, so he did do a day's work in his life. He was also inspiring in showing that chess wasn't just all about who studies the longest, what a lame game it would be if that were the case. He lived a good life doing what he liked to do while still having the time to play a good game of chess.

4. Alexander Alekhine - This guy spent 12 hours a day playing and analyzing chess for over 40 years. After beating Capablanca in the world championship match, he took his life for granted and became a drunkard, he used to arrive for a game stinking of alchohol. Once, he even peed in his pants during a game because he was too drunk to stumble to the toilet. He was assasinated in Portugal, his dead body was found hunched over a chess board.

More lies - Alekhine had a very lively life full of politics and social events and he said himself chess only played a small part, he had a good marriage - some people tried to tar his reputation later by saying he was racist or something, but there has never been a shred of evidence of that. A very friendly man, there's a video on youtube of him smiling with Euwe at the chessboard and you can tell he's quite charismatic. He may have been the first to treat chess as a professional, to professional standards, at least the first world class player to (lots of chess addicts at the lower levels unfortunately). A packed life.

5. Mikhail Tal - He was a genius over the board at spotting tactical combinations, his games are shocking. But, he was also a chain smoker and a drug addict, he executed masterpieces over the board under the influence of narcotics, he saw his own things on the board. He died prematurely at the age of 50, he looked like an 80 year old man. He died of kidney failure due to his lifetime indulgence in vodka, drugs and ciggarates.

Nasty to judge people based on their vices in life - we all consume too much of what we shouldn't, drug addicts are dime a dozen in society but we don't see them. Such habits were so incredibly common in the Soviet Union, the fact that Tal stood out by doing them says much more about chess - as in it's a way of steering away from them. If you look at Spassky (still going), Averbakh (lived until 100 years old), Karpov doing amazing in his new roles - chess seems wonderful for having a long and healthy life. The life expectency of the soviets for men was something ridiculous like 65 or so and that has continued in the same countries today - and yet all these chess guys living until their 80s, 90s.

6. Bobby Fisher - This person needs no introduction, he was arguably the greatest player of his time. But for the last 30 years of his life, he was the chess world's mad uncle, an embarrassment that cannot be expressed in words. He eventually died of kidney failure, he refused all his medicines

That may be so, but the thing about mad uncles in that a lot of the time they're actually completely right.

No, I meant ego