onegoodmove

did he just play an opening moving from the black side of the board? lol

He did indeed, and of course you noticed that the set was not the standard Staunton design the standard used when actually playing the game.

AND did you notice that Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray?!

I saw an article, it might have been Scientific American or New Scientist, about this. As far as I can remember, just like this guy is saying, they didn't say that chess per se helps, but exercising your brain. They talked about a famous genius chess player that towards his last days he was still playing great, but just not as genius as before, and when he died they discovered he had Alzheimer's. Maybe you know the name of the guy. I have no idea about chess.

Here, found it.

Requires a subscription, though, but the name of the guy is there. I was thinking he was a very famous player whose name I recognized when I first read it, but it wasn't. I don't know how good 8 moves ahead is, but I remember in the article they said it's genius, and 5 moves is still great.

Something went wrong with the link.

Here it is again.

The beginning of that article about Richard Wetherill is interesting... Perhaps I should play chess more often.

not sure about chess but Canadian scientists have found astonishing evidence that the lifelong use of two languages can help delay the onset of dementia symptoms by four years compared to people who are monolingual.

I found the interview annoying -- vapid questions looking to fit grossly oversimplified answers into too short a time. The bit with the chessboard was stupid.

Based on that interview alone, I would never have bought a book by that author, who comes off, I thought, sounding full of BS. Fortunately, I already own Shenk's book on The Immortal Game. I had never heard of that game until I browsed the book in a store one day. Even though I am a patzer among patzers, I could see how cool that game was.

His book on Alzheimer's gets good reviews on Amazon, so I'd definitely at least browse it next time I'm in a bookstore.

I'd forget my own name if I didn't know it.

A much better game, and not at all as boring as chess, is the old Chinese game of Go.

You can find some relatively good software on internet to play on your computer, particular for beginners or intermediates.

Another thing to notice is that the board wasn't set up right. It should have been rotated ninety degrees.

Don't know if I would characterized chess as boring, but I haven't played for years, having switched to go when I moved to Japan, and if given a choice would always choose go over chess. For me, it has everything chess has, plus more scope for intuition.(In support of this contention, I would point out that computers can't play go worth a damn!) They were oohing and aahing over the chess numbers, but the go numbers are much much bigger. Chess feels somehow claustrophobic in comparison. Also, there's a greater possibility to fight back from an early loss. But if you're happy with chess, no problem, it's a great game too and afforded me many happy hours in years past.