People, especially chess players themselves, utter the stupidest things about chess and about chess players. Here are some of our favorite myths about the royal game. Some of these sayings are unquestionably off-target, some of them are uninformed opinion, and some of them are arguments that may or may not be valid.



1) Chess is hard to learn.

Chess may not be the easiest game to learn, but it is far from the most difficult. You have to have to learn the moves of the six pieces, where the piece with the least value, the Pawn, has the most complex moves. Then you have to memorize the principles about attacking and defending the King, including castling. Then there are a few about games where not one nor the other player wins. One aspect of this myth is true ? it is difficult, very difficult, to learn to play chess splendidly. One player in a hundred achieves supremacy.

2) You have to be brainy to play chess.

There is some connection between chess talent and general intelligence. A bare minimum of intellect is compulsory. Cats and dogs will never comprehend the rudiments; no one has attempted giving lessons to dolphins and chimpanzees. Chess does involve, after all, using numerous sophisticated sections of the mind as efficiently as possible. People from all walks of life have fun playing chess, several achieving mastery. Some very smart people enjoy playing but never go beyond beginner.

3) Chess is for nerds.

As a matter of fact, this isn't a myth, since chess is for everybody. It is for nerds, geeks, eggheads, and boffins, as much as it is for anyone else. People who want to call other people unpleasant names should better say, 'chess is only for nerds', but this is decidedly false. Even if it were true, so what? Intelligent, clumsy, offbeat people have established more contributions to the development of society than have the rest. If they want to play chess, that's their concern

4) Computers play chess better than people.

In 2006, the finest computing machines played chess better than 99.99% of people, but are evenly matched in games against the best humans. If, as some experts think, computers are attaining 20 - 30 rating points per year, the time will soon come when humans have no prospects of winning against the best machines. It should not be overlooked that computers are always trained by squads of human specialists who encode programs in them in psychological areas like opening repertoire. Removing this help would eliminate their excellence.

5) Chess is a sport.

Here we run the risk of displeasing the several prominent chess organizers who have exhausted years trying to prevail upon the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that chess should be admitted as an Olympic sport. Hoisting light pieces of lumber or clicking rapidly on a computer monitor is not physically challenging work. As any quantity of photos from foregone high level chess events will demonstrate, chess players don't always cut a slim, trim, athletic profile.

6) Chess isn't a sport.

Here we try to make amends with those same organizers who nearly won over the IOC that chess is a sport. Chess has been included as a medal sport for the 2006 Asian Games. A game between two top chess masters is full of tension, where good nerves can make the difference between a victor and a loser. Grandmasters have been acknowledged to drop off a lot of weight during the course of a month-long match.

7) Women can't play chess as well as men.

To date it is true that women have not performed as well as men in chess events. There are numerous conceivable reasons for this. One may be that male players are habitually adept at making female players feel ill at ease at chess events. The Polgar sisters have gone a long way to convince the chess world that women can play very well. Perhaps one day we will discover that women can even play better than men. No one truly knows.