Does chess help in life?

I remember a study where people from the general public were recruited to do some quick maths problems. They were given a few examples from a series (e.g. "1, 2, 3..."), and could ask if any number was in the series ("is 5 in the series?") as many times as they liked. Then they had to state the general rule for the series.

In this case, an answer could be "all positive whole numbers", but it could equally well be "all positive whole numbers less than one million", or "all prime numbers plus the number 1", or "all whole numbers, including negative numbers". What the researchers disovered is that most people did the following:

1. Try a few numbers. 2. Notice a pattern of some sort ("small positive whole numbers are in it...") 3. Check their hypothesis by verifying it with more of the same (here, more small, positive, whole numbers). 4. Declare the rule, often extrapolating or generalising quite far (e.g. "all positive numbers" even if they didn't check whether fractions were allowed).

Different portions of the population did differently, of course, and the researchers tracked this. People with scientific and/or mathematical training generally did better than others, unsurprisingly. But there was one tiny subsection of the population which did better than everyone else: chess grandmasters.

The difference with the grandmasters was that they were the most likely, after generating a hypothesis, to try to falsify it, rather than verify it. If they thought it might be positive whole numbers, they would try negative numbers, or fractions. If they were hoping to generalise their hypothesis, they would try extreme cases, like very large numbers, or unusual numbers like zero. The experimenters had a hard time making up a series that would fool the grandmasters. It turned out that the grandmasters were better, on average, at this empirical, scientific process than even the scientists!

This squares with our experience of chess pretty well, I think. One of the first things I believe anyone has to do to get good at chess is to doubt: doubt the first move that comes into their heads, doubt their king's safety, doubt the opponent's king's safety, doubt the apparent lack of traps and tactics in the position... When I'm playing my best chess (which isn't that great, but hey), then I'm thinking, all the time, "Is this really the right move? What if the opponent does this? If I was my opponent, how would I kick my arse in this position?"

So, it seems (though obviously we need to be careful of correlation vs. causation), chess trains skepticism, and patience. Reading these forums I get the same impression - almost every interesting suggestion about chess is met with a majority of well-backed "no"'s from the community! Just read this thread itself!

And in my opinion, skepticism is very healthy. It makes you challenge your assumptions, and it stops you having delusions (hopefully!). And patience is good too.

So, perhaps there is some sort of added benefit! :)

NO ... Chess is 100% escapism

chess can tell you a lot about yourself ...

it will tell you if you can keep a cool head or are impatient, can tell you if you are practical or whether you just rush in and hope for the best, it can tell you if you are geeky, dorky or dweeby, whether you can learn something sensibly or not, whether blah blah blah

what he said was ridiculously funny. The fact that you failed to grasp an obvious joke makes me assume you have no humor, which is essential to making friends, relationships. Do you also have a hard time connecting with people? 

Well then, guess I learned some new things about myself :) I appreciate that you were nice enough to create an account on chess.com just to help me out :)

But yeah, I didn't really think it was anything special. It's pretty much the same old "chess is a waste of time but people try to find meaning in it" sort of thing.

All the chess players I personally know are heavy drinkers.

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Chess is cheapest cure for boredom. It's not the game's fault players drink and smoke.

the answer is no. chess is just a dumb game. all this coping about chess being a metaphor for real life, yeah ok. and so is candy land.

just.....

I can,but it very hard to escape the powerful queen right?

Will becoming "good" at chess improve how you "succeed" in life? By this intrinsically, I say the short answer is "no." However, what it takes to become a better players may be applied to other aspects of your life. For example, chess clearly takes a lot of motivation, time, effort in study and so on; all of these things are certainly helpful in many areas of life. Will increasing your chess rating automatically help you in life? No. Of course, the skills that becoming better at this game may teach could easily prove useful in your life. 

Bobby Fischer had had a terrible and unhappy life. How might his life have turned out if he hadn't had chess?

No. Checkers is a better game to help improved problem solving in real life

Chess makes people think you are smart, but only you know that you are completely dumb🥲.It doesn't necessarily make someone better though it has the potential to do so.

Yes, chess helps in life, it improves logical thinking.

It depends on what you think of as helping in life. Chess has helped me make many friends and connections that i wouldn't have had if I hadn't played chess

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