BBC: Should every child be made to play chess?

Linky

Well, should we teach all children to play chess?

No, Go.

Forced? No. Encouraged to learn? Yes.

While it should definitely be made available, it probably shouldn't be mandatory.

Fuck chess. Like Tzetze there said all real men learn go. Go is the game you can pick up in nine minutes and not master for ninety years. SHIT'S HARDCORE, YO. SO HARDCORE COMPUTERS CAN'T PLAY IT AT A DECENT LEVEL.

edited 25th Apr '11 10:38:17 PM by Aondeug

Chess, Go is too complex for kids. Chess teaches people to think three four five moves ahead in life. You will not believe my frustration when I find that people in their 20's and 30's don't even know how to play, Chess is much more useful than most activities in school, it should be added to schooling for sure, right next to art and music.

I don't know about that, one of my friends was awesome at chess but not so good at life. Sorry sorry, but it's how I feel!

Go is too complex for most adults. Hence why you force it on people when they're young.

I'm a terrible Go player (aiming for mediocre), and I never learnt to play chess. I have never been beaten (by a human opponent) at bagh chal[1]

Smart People Play Chess is a minor Pet-Peeve Trope for me, so... no.

edited 25th Apr '11 11:16:47 PM by Jeysie

Get people to play Magic the Gathering, it'll be good for the economy.

No. Force everybody to play tabletop RP Gs. It'll teach them numbers, statistics, the importance of diplomacy...

Hey, children are required to take gym class...

Wouldn't, I don't know... martial arts or something be more valuable? Or a maths club which uses numbers really creatively, so students learn to enjoy maths, which is often found to be a bore? Or... well... anything but chess?

As impressive as a chess players logic needs to be... it doesn't really merit mandatory education. Though it would guarantee Britain winning the international chess championship (whatever its called) every single time, seeing as we'd be the only country crazy enough about the game to mandate everyone learning.

But given the state of our finances, lets get the stuff we need working properly without running further into the red before we mandate the learning of logic games.

edited 26th Apr '11 2:38:20 AM by GameChainsaw

Chess is mostly about pattern recognition and memorization anyway.

Not necessarily chess, but yeah, most if not all kids should be made to play some intelligence-based game in a communal manner.

This. Playing Chess just makes you better at Chess.

No, if you want to teach them military tactics, teach them Star Craft or something.

Britain should only do that if it wants to launch an invasion of South Korea.

That's a big No for chess. There are much more interesting games out there. Go is one, for example. Although please note, I'm quite biased, as I probably think that this is a form of traditionalism, something that bugs me. While I think that game playing is something that children should be exposed to, it should be a much broader variety of games and not focusing on a single thing. Chess is fine from that perspective, but there are also modern games as well, such as yes, Magic, or Catan, or Power Grid or Pandemic, or Race to the Galaxy, or Dominion or....

Actually come to think about it, if you forced me to pick one game to teach children it would probably be Dominion, or another game in that genre, where early card picks and coming up with a defined strategy depending on the situation of the game is key. It can also be played in a relatively non-conflict fashion as well.

Well, I suppose the advantage of recommending chess is, it's famous, it's in the public domain, and most adults already know how to play it.

I'm all for encouraging kids to play chess, but I think the article is greatly overestimating the benefits. I learned how to play chess when I was little. Aside from learning a small amount of strategy and pattern recognition, it had no real benefits. Heck, I learned more about strategy from video games than chess.

Mandatory chess? No. It's a waste of time and resources.

Chess clubs for kids who want to learn? Sure.

I'm all for teaching kids to play a variety of table games, really.

What about Mahjong?

Who knows, maybe global politics will one day revolve around it

edited 26th Apr '11 8:38:05 AM by Thorn14

I recommend Backgammon. It's simple(r), it's faster-paced, and it is a very useful workout in pattern-recognition / risk management / adversarial reasoning. Then perhaps Poker or Bridge.

Chess lends itself to convoluted, five-to-twenty-moves long Batman Gambits which keep track of all possible answers of the opponent, prepare countermeasures for all of them, set up countermeasures to the countermeasures and so on. All of this is really satisfying when done right, and is part of the reason why Chess appeals to me more than Go does, but it is not really applicable to Real Life all that often.

My experience with Go is minimal, but as far as I can see it seems to be mostly about keeping and furthering evanescent, delicate positional advantages. This is mystical and stuff, and I am sure that if I understood anything about Go (hint: I really don't) I could try to get some high-level lesson from all of that, but the strategic principles of Go playing seem to me to be quite apart from Real Life decision strategies.

Backgammon, on the other hand, is all about recognizing useful patterns in what random chance gives to you, and to attempt to set yourself in such a way to take the maximum advantage of future opportunities while maintaining a manageable risk profile. There are a number of complex tactical and psychological decisions to be made, especially when it comes to the use of the doubling cube; but the focus is less on trying to second-guess every possible move of the opponent, and more on setting your position in such a way to reduce the number of the opponent's "lucky throws" to a minimum while maximizing your own. Furthermore, you really cannot be a decent Backgammon player without having a fair grasp of probability theory and basic mathematics, and anything that gives people more reason to learn probability theory is good in my books.

I am not particularly good with card games - that's something I want to fix sooner or later - but it seems to me that both Bridge and Poker could also teach important lessons to children. While Poker would, of course, be valuable for teaching about bluffing and about recognizing other people's bluffs - and let's not kid ourselves, that's going to be a hugely important ability for their future - I think that Bridge and its focus on private signaling and message passing could also give plenty of important learning opportunities.

So, if it was my choice, I would rule as follows. Backgammon would be compulsory, for the first year; and after that, the students would have to decide whether to take Poker, to take Bridge, or to keep playing Backgammon. Chess and Go would be offered as electives, of course, but would not be compulsory. And it goes without saying that the student's proficiency in their chosen game would count for their grade averages.

edited 26th Apr '11 8:43:45 AM by Carciofus