Game never ceases to be contagious
Saturday, November 13, 2010 02:54 AM
The Columbus Dispatch
Shelby Lyman
Chess has attracted a growing number of adherents in its 1,500 years or so of existence.
Virtually every country in the world has chess players and a chess federation.
Electronic games come and go, but chess continues to gain popularity.
As a camp leader for nine years, I’ve learned that the game is simply contagious.
When I arrived at a New Hampshire summer camp in early July, only two among 40 boys knew how to play the game. Within two weeks, everyone was playing – with no special effort from me. The game spread like wildfire among the youths.
I witnessed a similar phenomenon when I conducted chess programs in Long Island, N.Y., elementary and middle schools in the late ’70s. Shortly after we started, it seemed that everyone – especially the boys – wanted to play.
Stacks of quotations extol the game; only a few disparage it.
The poet, writer and philosopher Goethe called chess the “touchstone of the intellect.”
His more down-to-earth countryman Siegbert Tarrasch, a physician and superb player, observed that “Chess – like love, like music – has the power to make men happy.”
Why the game wields such magnetism has yet to be adequately explained.
Source: http://www.dispatch.com
Everyone loves chess.
Like the 3 R’s extolled as the foundation for learning, if chess is made compulsory from age five we would have a prosperous and peaceful world … more clarity to solve complex problems of the future. Go chess!
Raymond Chandler wrote: “Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”
The query ‘chess waste’ discovers the other side of the argument.
This blog is pro-chess but I hope that does not prevent a rational examination of the arguments for and against chess.
‘Everything in moderation’ seems a good principle here.