Einstein called chess a waste of time, what do you think?

Who made the blunder?

The god who does not exist

His parents by not bringing him up well.

Yes, he was.

of course its a waste of time, it is among the best wastes of time there is!

a man of average built can go to the gym for 10 months and have lots of social media praise, a man can play an instrument for two years and easily impress the uninitiated , whereas a man can spend 5 years mastering a craft some people with all their efforts can only dream of replicating, and still be outearned by a mcdonalds manager.

a worse of all, once you get the bug, like a really persistent veneral disease, will not let go of you, even if something else grabs your interests, ambition or sanity, you will soon feel the itch to return to our hopeless game.

Resist and for fight the temptation for life, or yield and sacrifice years of productivity and possible sanity to satiate a fire that time will inevitably quell.
and all we get for our efforts from the vantage point of the outside world is occasionally being seen as smart or impressing the uninitiated with a blindfold game. But unlike say playing an instrument where the base of entry for skill mastery is high, the appreciation threshold is relatively low (for the most part, jazz fusionist and prog rockers dont kill me now lol ) in chess both mastery and appreciation require a high threshold and there lies our visual problem. Its one of the reasons exciting chess commentary is so difficult to milk .

could be worse though, you could be into professional yugioh , and pay 2k for a viable deck, for basically almost no reward. At least i could coach for 50 an hour and indulge others with the same cognitive venereal disease

it is and thats one of the reasons im deleting my account tonight

ngl everything is a waste of time

No he said other silly things instead.

Good mental exercise. E would have benefitted from it.

Maybe the guy who recorded the claim was hard of hearing-

If Einstein had played chess, he would maybe have realised he was a bit thick and everyone would have benefited.

Einstein did play chess, including games vs Emanuel Lasker. Opponents considered him a strong player, but not master strength.

As this is about the level of play you have often claimed for yourself, does this mean you ought to consider yourself "a bit thick"?

That isn't true so far as I heard before they started changing history. He wasn't a strong player. Einstein didn't take chess seriously and the loss was his. He was considered to be weak and it was thought he didn't play many games. I'd be interested in who those opponents were and whether they existed at all.

I think that chess as a diversion woiuld have done him a lot of good. His aversion to the New Physics as presented by QM was so severe that one thinks he would have benefitted greatly from a kind of neutral, diversionary mental pursuit like chess. It could have increased his mental skills.

A case in point was my son. He was beating first team players aged 11 to 13. A friend of mine at the time who knew Bronstein and many other current GMs thought he would become an IM at the least. At 14 he gave up chess and took up BMXing with his friends. I wasn't concerned. He went to university to study maths, partied his way through the first two years and then buckled down. Ended up with a groundbreaking PhD in theoretical physics. That means the thesis was groundbreaking. Now he's in data analytics and could get a job anywhere. I suppose my son's a bit thick though, according to your metric. Well, I suppose I think he is too.

Well what is not a waste of time, if you think of it? "Playing" makes life worth living: be it chess, Xbox or a role on stage.