The thing is the game itself takes care of these people anyway.

Reality collides with perception. Reality wins.

It annoys me when I am kicking some opponent's butt for the whole game and I win, and then they say "I should have won that game!".

Yeah, whatever. The result that happened in my view is usually the result that "should have" happened.

Am I allowed to draw analogies on this site? It reminds me of some the debates you take part in and win but the loser becomes invalidly triumphant and claims a win - and he has been doing it for years

Actually, in a way that person has won. Namely, because I have been enough of a blockhead to actually get involved in a debate with him/her in the first place. I need to learn not to feed the trolls!

Thank God for elected moderators.

There's absolutely no proof nor any evidence that moving these wooden pieces around black and white squares for hours, for days, for years, is considered mental fitness.

In biology, the relevant concepts are physical fitness, biological fitness, social fitness. Fitness encompasses all the abilities of the individual and relates to the environment, physical and social. And whatever is meant by "mental" is simply an abstraction from a complex life situation, not easy to define, not easy to measure.

In fact playing this silly game for hours and for years would indicate some serious lack of fitness, some mental disease, some obsession. Any healthy woman would be extremely wary of committing herself to a man who's dedicated wasting away his only life moving those pieces around those squares. Women, who have a major biological commitment to the continuation of life, are in general only put off by this occupation, and most of them prefer to stay away from wasting precious time in people who push those wooden men around those colored squares. At best, they see it as what it is, a child's game that adults have only very recently in history professionalized into an occupation. But this is a distortion of modern society.

In fact, quite a few top players ended up insane. Playing this game is a mark of some deep imbalance in life, and some inherent unfitness. A society of chess players would be quickly wiped off the surface of the earth by competing groups who would descend on them to steal the wooden pieces and wooden boards for their own fires.

Simply look at the faces and appearances of the players in top tournaments. Are they likely to attract the groupies who fall for the Beatles or Robert Redford, or or any top tennis player, movie star or musician?

Look at the grandly glorified Fischer! He was so surrounded by hordes of female groupies that he had to abandon the game to spend all his time carousing with them - not! The poor guy ended up like a tramp, even looking like one.

Speaking of mental fitness, fitness is success in life, success with women, and success in understanding the dialogue of communication within one's social group. You want to see success in communication within one's group? Look at the rhetoric used by Obama in his presidential campaign in the States. And compare it with the communication rhetoric of Kasparov in Russia.

According to the book "Kluge", -the haphazard construction of the human mind; we get pleasure from absorbing information, from mastery, and from control. Chess can deliver on all three. That these things are good from an evolutionary standpoint in most circumstances makes sense.

Chess and other games might be helpful from a developmental or social perspective. On the other hand they might just be an accidental pleasurable by-product of other more survival/skill learning developments of the brain.

Chess itself is by far, way to recent of a development to have any evolutionary impact. And I cannot see how it could in the future.

So you are saying we just play chess for enjoyment and nothing more to it than that? If so, I agree but its actually the winning I find enjoyable, not really the game itself. The game is just a means to the winning.

So you are saying we just play chess for enjoyment and nothing more to it than that? If so, I agree but its actually the winning I find enjoyable, not really the game itself. The game is just a means to the winning.

Bejesus...what is wrong with u J2G.