What is chess? Is it sport?

Read meckchate's post #12 in this thread again. It's the one post I found most worthwile reading.
 

meckchate explained it perfectly in my mind. Chess is a game.

 But now you're mixing things up. Chess hardly takes any skill to play but to be good at it you need to practice it and gain skills. The same with running, running itself doesn't take any skill but being good at takes alot of practice and skill. If you claim that you don't need any skill to be a good chessplayer then I'm not sure I agree with your arguing.

 That ruling is no more than an excuse to grant the same privileges to chess as to sports, since it is equally important.  Politics often leads to incorrect classifications, in this case it's a good thing, but not always...

 1X1x1x0x1=0

chess is not a sport 

 In every sport I can think of, there is a rule involving forfeit.

 I am talking about just being able to play, and just being able to run. Again, you have assumed something that I don't agree with: running itself doesn't take any skillI think running takes quite a bit more skill than being able to move chess pieces. It takes small children many attempts to learn how to walk, and then many more attempts to learn how to run. When they do know how to run, they still fall over all the time! A small child will tip over chess pieces or mess up a couple of times, but learning to move them correctly could be done in a single afternoon. I think the problem is that you take the incredible skill that you have of running for granted. You don't remember how much you struggled to get this skill.

this sums it up best (which is sort of a non-answer):

"If chess is a science, it's a most inexact one. If chess is an art, it's too exacting to be seen as one. If chess is a sport, it's too esoteric. If chess is a game, it's too demanding to be just a game. If chess is a mistress, she's a demanding one. If chess is a passion, it's a rewarding one.
If chess is life, it's a sad one. " -- Unknown

for me, it's a passion. 

 Very wise words Mr..Unknown!I like that review

 I don't believe I am mixing anything up. I know that there are physical skills, and there are mental skills. When discussing sports, the only skills that seem to be important are physical skills, so I decided to focus on this aspect. I can see that this commits a fallacy, given the definition of a sport being one that involves physical skill is the very item under debate.

I thought that you were willing to view chess as not requiring any skill. I guess it was when you said: "I agree with chess not requiring any skill." If you are no longer willing to accept this, then it is true that we have nothing further to discuss on this point. I guess it is just back to whether a sport must involve physicality.

 You're saying that a child can learn the rules of chess easier than to walk or run? I don't know about you but I learned to walk before I learned to play chess, given that this is partly because I started to learn chess later than I started to learn how to walk, but if you claim that you can learn a child that's less than a year old to play chess in an afternoon I'm going to doubt you until I see it.

 Are you really still confused?

I think it is more difficult to run than to learn how to move chess pieces. It may or may not be more difficult to run than to learn to play chess, but this is not what I claimed.

Moving the pieces is the only physical skill involved in chess. I have ignored all other skills involved since I think they are not pertinent to a discussion of sports. You seemed willing to do this with me (post #23), but apparently you were confused. If you are not willing to view moving the pieces as the only skill involved in chess, then there is nothing left to do but return to the main debate of what defines a sport.

TonightOnly, Then I misunderstood your first post, I didn't think that you only refered to physical skills when you said skills. If you just meant that chess takes no physical skills then I agree, I also agree that chess isn't a sport as I said earlier but it all comes down to the definition of the word sport so it's hard to objectively say wich activites are sports.

On a sidenote I think it's silly that people claim that chess require any physical skill at all. It's obvious that this is just because it fits into one of the definitions of the word sport. Sure a healthy living improve our performance in most aspects of life but this doesn't make physical skills a requirement for chess just as your performance in chess isn't relative to the ammount of carrots you eat.