what does chess help you improve?

 does it make you smarter or what?

Getting better at chess helps you play chess better.

Does it make you smarter?  No.

what  does it help you with??

I think if you stretch the definition of smart, maybe it could in fact make you a little smarter if you reflect heavily on analogies between life and chess. 

Nothing unless you get better at it.

And when you do that it helps you play chess better.

what else?

In life it is very important to learn that everything is a double edged sword. Every move in chess has its advantages and disadvantages.

The game of chess itself is a double edged sword.

hmm

On this topic, I would heavily recommend IM Waitzkin's "The Art of Learning." A great book on how thinking about chess (or thinking about thinking about chess) can be extended into life. 

Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess is another book on the topic that I enjoyed. 

Training in something usually makes you better at something you training for.

By studying and playing regularly you may learn things like patience or hard work.  If you're competitive you may notice something like how your diet affects your play and make some healthy life choices.  If you choose to memorize a lot, then you may learn some memory tricks.

None of this is unique to chess though.  You can play without patience or concentration.  For example speed chess.  You can also play without getting any better, just for fun.  So you can play chess and have it do nothing for you.

To get better at chess you don't need to increase your memory or logic, you need to learn more about chess.  Chess itself only offers chess.  Anything related to intelligence is a myth believed by non players.  Just like how grandmasters are so good because they see so far ahead when studies show people rated in the 2000 range calculate the most.  GMs calculate much less (but what they calculate is more relevant because they know more about chess).

And what area of the brain lights up most when master play chess?  Pattern recognition.  They're remembering what they've studied.  They're not super calculators or using difficult logic.

That said, it's an incredibly rich game and fun to play.  Even after you've learned a lot (or maybe, especially after you've learned a lot) there are many difficult decisions to make.  And when you make the right decisions and play well you win, and that's a great feeling because there was no luck and your opponent did everything they could to beat you.  When you lose there are things to learn and applying those lessons in your next game is fun too.

So it's a great game.  I'll play it till I die.  But it's not going to make me or you smarter :)

Chess has helped me develop some rock hard abs.  I am a real ladies man now thanks to chess.

I agree about the intelligence myth. However, the "GMs don't calculate as much as experts" is turning into a myth of its own. GMs definitely calculate way more than experts in a game. There's just no doubt about it, watching their post-game conferences where they share the variations they considered during their games. Any analysis of a serious tactical GM game is more than enough evidence. They routinely go amazingly deep and miss very little relevant stuff.

There are intricacies into this issue. A grandmaster would probably beat an expert in a simul where he would basically spend several minutes for the game where the expert has an hour, and most likely the expert will have calculated more than the GM. The GM's intuition would be more than enough to beat the hell out of the expert. However, when you take two experts playing against each other for an hour, and two GMs playing against each other for an hour,  the total *mass* of the "variation tree" of the GMs would certainly outweigh that of the experts', given that all four take the games equaly seriously. It is not that GMs calculate "very little variations yet the most significant ones" whereas the experts calculate "a lot but insignificant ones". The GMs calculate a lot, and very deep. The expert sucks at it in relevance and significance, yes, but also in width and depth. 

Well I'm not basing it on simuls or post mortems.  It was some psychology test in the 50s IIRC.  It was reproduced in part in some old USCF article I read... again IIRC (it may have been a different chess publication).  I do remember reading it though lol.

Yes, in forcing situations like an attack or endgame I'm sure the GM will calculate deeper... sometimes.  Remember all they need to do is reach a position they understand and then they can stop.  It seems the person who knows more wont need to keep going.  This of course applies to the breadth of calculation too.  No need to look at additional lines if you've already calculated the relevant moves.

Also in those postmortems you see Kramnik or Anand give a short little 3 move variation where people like me are thinking "that's an interesting position!" but of course they say "this is just bad for black so this will never happen" lol.

By the way, neat to see you philidor position, seems like it's been a few years since I've seen you on the forum.

This is the best post ever.

Yeah I remember that study. Well, maybe not that particular one but still, I remember the discussion. I just can't imagine it being true after having watched Anand's or Kramnik's post-mortems with my jaw dropped to the ground.

Same here

I like where IM Silman says you can impress non chess players with your end game knowledge by sounding very intelligent when you say something like,  "Yeah, I just used triangulation to win the opposition and put my opponent in zugzwang."

So it can make you sound smarter to non chess players.

And before you laugh too heartily, take into account what you thought of chess players before you learned.

They were "smart" right?

I used to be in awe of some players, who, looking back now, were probably only intermediates or strong beginners...but boy, did I think they were in league with Einstein.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1261614