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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2695 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 18, 2025

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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.

The others are right, chess at its highest level doesn't feed into anything but itself. If your daughter had that rare acumen and you wanted to support her and she made WGM, chess would be her work and her life. I think you might wonder if this would be so bad. WFM Anna Cramling is the daughter of WGM Pia Cramling and GM Juan Manuel Bellón López. There's this video of her watching as her mother plays an amateur at a chess bar in Paris, and it's idyllic. Titled chess players also generally come from moneyed families; there are worse people to fall into crowd with.

But there are examples of highly successful non-career chess players who were good at it, namely Stanley Kubrick and Peter Thiel. I'm not attributing, obviously it's that the traits that made Kubrick a superb filmmaker as an adult, saw him interested and successful in chess as an adolescent, same with Thiel. Maybe chess is the nascent flame of something much brighter in her future, why not encourage it?

If you want to brush up yourself, IM Jeremy Silman wrote the best general book: How to Reassess Your Chess

Edit: linked the wrong vid, updated the link, the old vid is below

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_xFS2X-sHlQ

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