Since my years of playing chess, I have become quite a niche nerd, chess dnd ect.
However, I wonder very often how nerdy really is chess? Well, looking back, chess was played as a casual game to play full of many tricky situations and sly ways to sneak in a piece for checkmate. Now coming forward to today, many people find chess to be a game for nerds or people who have a high mental capacity and this can be true to some extent by the extras of castling and en passant. But at the end of the day, chess really is just what it was made for, people of many places come together to play an international game, known by all, for some a new challenge, others to conquer people from all over the world. Chess isn't really about how smart you are, just how you are able to handle moving an object from one square to another. In summary, just enjoy chess and don't worry because chess is a community, not a test of knowledge.