Is chess really an anti-brainlet game/hobby or is it just a useless waste of time that could be better spent reading?

Once you are above beginner level it's pretty much 100% memorization.

Not sure if you guys are being satirical but this unironically true. You learn basics and remember some common positions and then you just use a chess engine to study your games and memorise the best moves to make.

The real anti-brainlet hobby is staring at a wall for hours in Tsarist Russia while you're freezing to death and suddenly come up with a revolutionary math theorem

>X is something worthless people can be good at. The best Xers can't do anything else well.

>or is it just a useless waste of time that could be better spent reading?
What the fuck is it with people and "wasting time"?
People feeling like the things they're doing are not legitimate enough uses of time so they make a thread on Veeky Forums about it is deeply ironic.

I think Go is more complex and fun than chess, but I've only found weebs playing it at my campus, who suck at it.

Dota 2 is much more complex. And even more of a challenge against AI.

theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143392/dota-ai-openai-bot-win-elon-musk

Only if you aren't playing with a bunch of Peruvians.

Kek

Imo the intelligence a game grants you through its study is realative to how good ai's are at it

So chess will make you very smart but starcraft takes more brainpower because ai's cant win it unlike chess

reading is a useless waste of time that could be spent on chess

chess is fun but not necessarily a great use of time. But, a hobby is never really "useless"; like if you're a productive member of society and playing a stupid game keeps you from drinking battery acid, that seems like a legit use of free time

Stop playing chess.

I bet this guy sucks

math is something worthless people can be good at. the best players can't do anything else well

>Is chess really an anti-brainlet game
No

sauce?

medium.com/message/why-chess-will-destroy-your-mind-78ad1034521f

We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess', like the formula 'art for art's sake'. We must organize shock-brigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.

being good.at chess is the skill of observing your opponent and recognizing patterns that other players use from hard work, experience to make the best move possible.

>tfw 200 Chess.com ELO

how the fuck can you fuck up this bad
I was trying to sandbag my way to 100 ELO by playing the fucking Halloween gambit and doing dubious queen sacs and I couldn't get below 600. People are really really fucking bad.

Chess is iq dependent more than anything. Its why there are 10 year olds with elos of 2500. Bad chess players should be sterilized quickly.

Go is a better game.

go contains no horses and therefore it is not as good as chess. you can try to prove me wrong but such attempts would be futile

Are you maybe playing on a different site with another rating system?
I started at 800 ELO as a beginner and kinda fell down after I started losing.

Yes but you can make up your lack of foresight, strategic thinking etc with good reflexes.

No it's chess.com
I heard you can get banned for resigning so I just decided to play the most unsound moves possible. People are really, truly, terribly awful at chess once you get to around 700 elo. They won't take your queen even if you allow them to for several consecutive moves. They don't know how to exchange. It's like playing against a computer set to a difficulty level so low it shouldn't even exist. I wanted to believe that all of them were small children but a good lot of them have profile pictures of men aged 15-50. Some of them have played over 1000 games in the shit bracket and never improved.
Maybe they're all sandbaggers like me. It's hard to sandbag against a sandbagger. Sometimes it feels like playing anti-chess.

I guess proper sports make you a genius then

what is applied logic?

go has dragons, tho

Shogi has dragons and horses. Checkmate bitches.

this. as a go player of several years who has recently taken up chess (Im about 2200 elo (2d euro) at go and 1400 elo at chess) there are many problems with chess.

1. at pro level, every single game is a draw
2. at pro level, memorizing what computer play in the opening is extremely important
these are way less important at amateur level, but once you get to about 2000 elo you can definitely lose games in the opening because some guy is playing some memorized line against you.
it's pure cancer.

last but not least:
3. chess does not have a good handicap system.

in go giving handicap means you can have even games (even chances of winning for both players) up to an elo difference of 900 (1 stone per 100 elo difference).

lastly, go is much more strategic.
chess is a single batte, go is an all out war.
thus chess is extremely tactical.
go also has incredibly deep tactics, but since there are many battles going on at once, whole board strategy is much more important than winning every local fight tactically

shogi actually sounds very comfy, but literally no one plays it. And I wouldnt want to start playing a game I can only play online. and Im not planning on moving to glorious nippon anytime soon

>at pro level, every single game is a draw
false
I'll grant that the draw rate increases as skill level rises, but that's because knowing how to force a draw is itself a skill.

Idk I find chess really fun. I stopped playing video games when I was like 17 chess is far more mentally stimulating and the planning ahead needed in chess has translated well into my life. As you get better though it becomes more about pattern recognition. I've been playing for around 5 months and im 1600-1700 elo on lichess

shogi is less comfy, more cutthroat: because pieces are recycled, every single game ends in a race to checkmate, no boring wars of attrition heading to a theoretical endgame.

(But if endgames are in your comfort zone, you could try out Makruk from Thailand. It is the closest living relative to Chatranj.)

Don't worry about playing in person, there are plenty of online places to play. Or make a posting at a local game store looking for opponents.

reflect > read > chess