How to Stay Sharp

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago, people figured out an unparalleled way to stay sharp and train the mind for the logical rigors of life.

Those people played chess.

Chess didn’t used to be just a game. It was part of military training, used to illustrate strategy and teach long-range planning. Invented in obscurity around 500 A.D., it quickly grew from a dice game to one of "perfect information." You know everything your opponent does, as you both can see every piece on the board. And it was believed to prolong one’s life, by keeping the mind active and extending attention-span well into old age.

Kings and queens played it. (King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain were excellent players, and many attribute the sudden explosion in power of the queen — once a relatively insignificant piece — to the power of Isabella as a ruler and her skill as a chess player.) Even when religious prohibitions against other games were in effect because they were seen as “gambling activities,” chess was often excepted because of its beneficial cognitive effects.

Being good at chess was seen as meaning you were a good ruler and thinker, a smart person. Hitler hated chess. Napoleon was a poor player — and it upset him greatly. Thomas Jefferson thought he was a genius at the game, as he was at so many other things. While visiting France in the1780s he sauntered into the Café de la Régence, the chess center of the day, and had his ass handed to him on a croissant. Better at the game was colleague Benjamin Franklin, who used chess as an excuse to spend time with many beautiful and intelligent women.

It’s important to go outside and inhale the fresh air and play golf or tennis. It’s equally important to shut yourself indoors and play a game of chess — against another person, against a computer, against a remote opponent online. (There has never been so many ways to enjoy the game as there are now.)

There are rich complexities to chess, from the different ways to play (open games vs. closed, tactical vs. positional, classical vs. hypermodern) to varied formats and rules.

There is blitz chess (the whole game is played in five minutes) and Chess960 or Fischer Random, where the first line of pieces for each player is shuffled with each game, so that you never play from memorized openings. There are strategies ranging from direct and forceful attacks to crazy-looking sacrifices (trading off better pieces for inferior ones) to quiet positional games where you slowly take all the good squares away from your opponent, hemming him or her in.

Oh, and chess is addictively fun, too.

Chess teaches you how to think ahead and avoid rash impulses. And punishes you if you fail to learn the lesson. (This is the voice of experience speaking.) It works in a way that brain supplements never can and never will. And if you don’t know the game, take some time to learn it. The rules are surprisingly simple; mastering the strategy takes a lifetime. Supercomputers are still finding new things, and even ChatGPT got humbled recently—by a 46-year-old Atari gaming console!

After 1500 years, chess is still full of surprises.