Chess – a tough sport, or toughest of all-time?
Alice Riddle
Posted: 2/12/07
I spent Friday and Saturday in Peoria, supporting my brothers as they participated in the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) State Finals. Competition was stiff, and nerves were running high. What sport, you ask, was I experiencing this weekend?
Chess.
Yeah, that’s right – chess. As I sat in the “skittles” room (the large area for spectators to chill and for participants to go between rounds), I began thinking about the common perception of this game that was the affection of all these people milling around me.
Images of stereotypical nerds came to my mind, alongside memories of the classic Spartan cheerleaders. But after years of being a sister in what one might call a “chess family,” I know that many of these ideas can be thrown out the window. My brothers, Matt and Joe, are actually pretty cool, and contrary to popular belief, chess can definitely be a hardcore sport.
…I’m not trying to knock on athletes here, either. I played more traditional sports in high school, so I understand the physical pain that can go into a hard run or a dive across the court. But in the same way that you need a certain level of grace and athletic ability to excel at a game like basketball or football, you need a unique kind of mental finesse to do well at chess.
At the end of the day, while baseball players ice their shoulders, basketball players have floor burns up and down their bodies and football players struggle to get the grass stains off their jerseys, chess players likely grab a couple aspirin and leave it at that. What they all have in common, though, is their ability to practice till it hurts, their aspiration to be great and their love of the game.
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Nice article.
I always wondered about calling it a “sport”, but after seeing that description (the total exhaustion) compared to a sporting activity like running, it does make much more sense to call it a sport.
Gee, I am less exhausted after a round of golf maybe it is because I get to ride around in a cart!
Personally, I think this whole business of whether or not chess is a sport to be pointless and a waste of effort. In the end, does it really matter? We’re better off spending energy on improving the game by helping out at our local clubs or at a higher level.
A rose by any other name…
As Petrosian himself once said famously, “Grandmasters are not gladiators.”
I think harder than chess is ludo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludo_(board_game)
Till today nobody has succeeded in devising a strategy for winning 😉
I also attended this event. Indeed the game is beginning to be treated somewhat like a sport in Illinois. 1200 players participated. It is also interesting how the individual game of chess is taking on the Team flavor with 8 board matches. Team members hanging around after their game is finished to see how a fellow team member finishes their game and if the team wins.
Interstingly, also a good number of girls participating and on at least one team, a girl was playing board 1 for their team. Imagine, girls against boys at the hightest level.
I think the term sport should be restricted to activities that require physical prowess.
Chess is a fantastic game that requires some intellectual prowess, do people consider painting portraits a sport, they do have competitions.
Ultimately, whether or not chess is a “sport” is a pretty much arid semantic dispute. If you require that a sport be “extremely physical”, then you get to say chess isn’t a “sport”, I suppose.
Having said that, I think you need to work on your definition a bit. Thinking is a physical process in the brain and doing it intensely for several hours is fairly extreme and unusual.
How physical does it have to be? For example, there is a another sport like chess where you basically just sit in a chair and manipulate some controls with your hands and feet. Auto racing.
You might want to rethink your definition.
Motor Sports are not like chess they require a high level of motor coordination skills chess does not, it is not really a good comparison. But I understand your point.
I think everybody understood what I meant when I said physical prowess, but perhaps athletic ability is more apt. How much athletic ability, of course that is subjective, but I would say a hell of a lot more than is required to play chess.