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What do we think about chess? My 5 year old daughter has become enamored with it lately, wants to play multiple times a day, doing some puzzles, all that good stuff. She's definitely improving fast - she impresses adults she plays who know how to play but aren't good haha - I'd benchmark at her at like a Class G player (ELO in the 600-700 range). I'm probably around an 1100 ELO, maybe a bit higher when I'm really focused.
Basically, trying to decide how much to encourage improvement in this vs other skills she enjoys (soccer, reading, etc) given Chess is a bit of a dead end? But if she enjoys it then it is a fun hobby and I like playing her...thinking we might try out a local scholastic club and see what we think.
I am a serious chess nerd, and to be honest, I enjoy it purely as an end in itself. I don't think it's making me smarter or better at anything - I just really like chess, and so I play it and study it because it's fun. It brings me great happiness to have something like that.
I wonder if this is sort of a luxury of the middle-aged: I do not need to be getting better at "real" skills to give myself a shot in life, because I'm married, mid-career and so on. It certainly would be more valuable to do something else with her time from that perspective. But it's not as useless as some other things. Like others have said, it's socially acceptable and even cool to some people; and it is certainly possible to meet folks and make friends (admittedly odd ones) through it.
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