Profile of a 19-year-old chess champion: chess and madness

"Chess should not become an obsession. Otherwise there's a danger that you will slide off into a parallel world, that you lose your sense of reality, get lost in the infinite cosmos of the game. You become crazy."—19-year-old chess champion Magnus Carlsen. (thanks, Susannah)

• [pxlpig]

  Chess.com app for the iphone. Makes it easy to play at work!

• [kc0bbq]

  Chess doesn’t make you crazy; I think the dividing line is when you invent your own chess game *froth* *froth* massive Jewish conspiracy they’re out to get me *froth*

• [Megan]

  I believe this is exactly what happened to Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin in Nabokov’s “The Defense.” It’s a wonderful read for those interested in the intersection of chess and madness.

• [scifijazznik]

  “Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”

  -Raymond Chandler

• [Anonymous]

  “Chess should not become an obsession.”
  Classic example: Bobby Fischer.
  The black hole that chess can become is why I dropped the game after high school. If you think computer geeks can become obsessed, wait till you see a chess tournament.

• [holtt]

  Sounds kind of like World of Warcraft…

• [SKR]

  World of Warcraft is not a waste of intelligence. No, that is not a defense of WOW.

• [Anonymous]

  1st poster you’re talking about fischer international chess right?
  fischer was maternally jewish himself, and had quite a funny time of it with chess as politics,
  more interesting than the average conspiracy nut.

• [Anonymous]

  Replace “chess” with almost anything, that is a just a generally good piece of advice

• [dargaud]

  “Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.” — George Bernard Shaw

• [machinelf]

  Wow, chess Haters? HaHa. Magnus rules. I wish that Hikaru Nakamura had a fraction of his humility.

• [SamSam]

  I always enjoyed chess, although was never terribly good at it, but I’ve now started playing arimaa and it’s really fun. It’s one of the few chess-like games where humans can still completely kick computers’ asses, and yet also extremely easy to learn.

• [pinehead]

  I was not previously aware there was such a thing as chess groupies.

• [semiotix]

  “I am chaotic and lazy”

  I roll for initiative and win. My paladin casts Dispel Chaos and gains +4 against your attacks. 1. e4.

• [DJBudSonic]

  Thanks so much for pointing out this article – by coincidence I was just at the site looking for an upgrade to Fritz software (my copy ver.6 is too old to use).

  I had my son read the interview; he is a 9-year old new player and I have been trying to teach him all I can. I loved the part about pattern recognition- I think that is what drew me to chess in the first place,and maybe my son, too. He has jumped right in with both feet and I have had to sit in on his lessons and go back to book study just to keep from getting whipped by him.

  As far as the groupies go… that must only come after one achieves a certain rating; I have played thousands of games and never got so much as a wink!