Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Queen's Gambit, chess, and gifted children

I am only on this site occasionally and coming back, I was surprised there wasn't a discussion on chess given the popularity of Queen's Gambit.

Chess is a cerebral game that was a natural fit for my DYS. He happened to excel at it, but I think it's wonderful for all skill levels whether played just for recreation or competitively.

Queen's Gambit is such a big hit that interest in chess has increased immensely. It's too early to tell, but the biggest impact might be on more girls playing in what was primarily a boy's activity. Let's hope they stick with it.

I'm a little surprised there hasn't been chatter on it either...but it's been quiet on the forum recently.

I agree; I hope the biggest impact is encouraging young people of all descriptions to view chess as something for them. (And this from someone whose chess-minded sibling gave up on teaching the game to! I'm not a very visual spatial person...perhaps a different approach would have been more successful.)

I haven’t watched the tv series, but thought I’d post that DH & DS love chess and have studied it quite deeply (separately & together) but they only play against chess computers. They don’t enjoy the adversarial nature of actual ‘over the board’ games against human opponents.

DH has played in three tournaments as an adult and because his ELO rating (from his youth) was so far below his actual ability (he can even play simultaneous games of blindfold chess although he regards this as just a parlour trick to impress his father-in-law & my uncles), he caused tournament upsets which were written about in chess news. DS doesn’t have an ELO rating so he could make quite an interesting debut one day if he chooses, but he prefers activities where he can focus on PBs (track & field athletics, speedcubing). He is training for maths olympiads which is a competitive arena, but he’s mainly in it for the enjoyment of problem solving and his biggest passion of all is music composition. Although I’ve never sought to influence his choices, I am pleased with how he elects to spend his time.

Your DH must be quite good to be able to play multiple games of blindfold chess. My son is a Master and he can do one game blindfold against a player about 400 points below his level.

Anyway, Queen's Gambit is excellent. Everyone in our family enjoyed it, and my son reported that the chess is portrayed very accurately. But note it's not meant for young kids given the substance abuse.

Congrats to your son for his Master title!

My father & uncles were just amateur players (only played against each other), so that’s why DH says it’s just a parlour trick (DH has played quite successfully against a number of IMs & GMs online). DH & DS do have very good visuospatial skills and they’ve honed it in other areas (MRI, speedcubing, Olympiad level geometry).

Whoa! That doesn't just happen without serious natural talent given how little he has actually played. If he wanted, DH could win many regional tournaments and win some prize money.

He did win a local tournament & prize money a few years ago. As I first posted though, he did study the game quite seriously/deeply on chess computers for a few years, so it’s not like he hasn’t explored most of his potential. As it was, I think, after he took his age and the social scene into consideration, he decided he’d explored it sufficiently & turned to other things (such as currently being an examiner in his field of specialty).

At one time, he’d also gone back & progressed from Grade 3 violin level (achieved in his youth) to Grade 7 and played as an amateur in a semiprofessional orchestra which he thought was also as far as he wanted to go, considering his age. One lifetime, with its cares & responsibilities, limits how much an individual can explore their interests. We’ve been in a comfortable financial position to offer our kids the opportunities of professional coaching in any area of interest (‘a leg up’ at a young age so they can get further than we did without any parental support or encouragement) but they’ve preferred to explore their interests on their own. I guess they’ve seen that being a Jack/Jill of many trades even if master/mistress of none (DS isn’t notable in any area, but he has nine state/national rankings across his wide range of different interests), can be sufficiently satisfying.

It’s interesting to note that Magnus Carlsen is quite athletic and attended a sports school.

Chess got very popular about 15-20 years ago and then it fell off. It was assessed to be a game about memorization of all the moves. Hence, the reading of all the series of moves. When it became a game of memorization, rather than strategy, it fell off in favor. I think that achievement anywhere is worth noting, but this started out about chess and popularity.

I watched Queen's gambit and enjoyed it.

The openings are memorization. But afterwards it isn’t. To think that it is all memorization fundamentally misunderstands the game.

I am nowhere near the strength of my son, but among strong players the middle game is really about creating tremendous pressure on both sides until one side finds a small weakness in the other to gain better board control or win material. This is where deep visualization, the part where Beth saw moves on the ceiling, is most important.

Anyway, my point of this thread is that it can be a wonderful game for gifted kids, and for a while at least, is likely to be a popular social activity.

Have to agree that chess is not about memorization!

I am also hopeful that this surge in chess interest will bring new players into the game, and perhaps result in more opportunities for play and competition in areas that currently don't have many. This is not related to Queen's Gambit/popularity, but one silver lining of the pandemic for our family has been that our 7-year-old obsessive chess fanatic suddenly has access to all sorts of chess classes, camps, and tournaments that are now online. We live in a small town with no organized chess activities for kids at all, so this is a huge opportunity for him, and he is loving it! Maybe with increased interest in chess, combined with so many chess schools/orgs learning how to run their classes/competitions online, these opportunities will last beyond the pandemic. Even better, maybe there will be enough interest for smaller towns like ours to have in-person offerings!

Chess is a great activity to do online. What does that mean for tournaments going forward? Will it become more of an online event?

There are two main reasons for in-person tournaments. The first is socialization, and the second is cheating.

Chess is not a particularly social activity, but certainly more so than staying cooped up at home. And this actually becomes more important as a player becomes more nationally competitive and there are fewer local players that are challenging.

Cheating is also unfortunately a consideration. We have seen in-person cheating even for as little as $50 prize money, and the tournament director suspected it was happening for months before he was caught (the telltale sign was that it was an adult player that rose quickly, which rarely happens). It's much harder to see/detect online cheating. It might be only a tiny percentage of players doing this, but they will ruin it for everyone.

My son has played this year in some of the national tournaments that have gone online. At least one of them required two cameras active at all times, the first being the laptop camera and a second being a phone video stream taken from the side to see if someone is looking at a chess engine while playing.

DH, who doesn’t at all enjoy socializing, particularly enjoys the deep analyses required for correspondence chess, with games that typically stretch over months. He worked his way up the Oz rankings of the correspondence chess section on chess.com and just joined the US group where he debuted at number 1 in the rankings.

WRT chess within the broader context of life and earlier posts about memorisation vs analysis, it’s interesting to note that these facets are mirrored in his radiology profession. In tutorials, many young trainees just want to get through a lot of cases and be given the diagnosis for each so that they can develop their pattern recognition skills, whereas DH has a thorough knowledge of anatomy and pathophysiology, so when he sees a ‘soft sign’ indicating the possibility of a disease condition (including incidental finding(s)), he is able to apply extensive reasoning to look for other soft signs to determine disease from artifacts (which abound in diagnostic imaging). He gets a lot of specific requests for his ‘second opinion’ for cases when life or death hang on diagnostic accuracy. A person with great integrity who would never stoop to cheating.

EM, what excellent examples of functions where deep abstract reasoning is far more valuable than fluency and volume of output. (Quality over quantity, as is sometimes said.) And so wonderful that your children have a close-up, real-life exemplar of how one's specific form of gifting can be appreciated in the right professional and social circles.

I overheard an interesting discussion this morning between DH and DS who both play blindfold chess. DH plays with full visualisation of an imaginary board (when probed by DS, he says he usually imagines it at an angle from a seated position at a table, but he can easily rotate the image for an aerial view). DS plays solely with the information as data in pgn format, since DH has frequently chatted to DS, for years, about games and chess problems when no boards were handy. I was surprised that father and son played so differently.

DH has suggested that DS should try visualisation of the board. DS is already quite strong at visuospatial tasks having been a speedcuber and trained for the mathematics Olympiads. I wonder if he will take up DH’s suggestion and whether it will have any benefit for him, at chess and in his chosen field of engineering.

I remember a discussion about chess visualization with my son back when he was applying to college, as chess was a key point in one of his essays.

He said that when he played a tough opponent he might have dozens of complete boards in his head. Some were different variations of the current board several moves ahead, others were him replaying past games that were similar, and others still were famous games he had studied to see if there were lessons there that could be applied here.

Interestingly, his heart rate during a difficult game is often 120-130, even while completely still. His resting heart rate is below 60.

Mithawk, that's quite a huge visualisation load/capacity! Your son probably has the potential to play multiple simultaneous games of blindfold chess if he trained, but it sounds like he has more important things to do with his time.

Yeah, chess has taken a back seat due to a combination of being busy with college, and the pandemic resulting in far fewer tournaments until recently.

But there is a good chance he will end up working in NYC next year, and if so, he will be able to get chess fix as often as he wants.