How does chess helps to develop life skills?

Playing chess is about effective Decision Making. Chess players often have to make quick, important and more effective decisions than the opponents while playing under time pressure ( Every chess game has a chess clock. ) in order to win the Chess Game. Which just makes the process of effective Decision Making instinctive and a bit easier for the chess players.

Chess needs full attention while playing and the nature of chess itself will incentivise you for your concentration. Chess players needs Focus and concentration to make good moves and eventually win the games. As we play longer games we get into the habit of staying focused over a longer period of time.

Thinking for 5 min with full focus Without thinking about another thing than the chess move will lead to better moves in the game than 15 min of divided attention or multi-tasking while playing.

Chess makes you think about every move you make and its consequences in the short term and long term.  We have to always consider the profitable trades, bad trades and equal trades before trading each piece. Which provokes us to think logically while making every move. 

Solving all types of chess puzzles is absolutely necessary to improve in chess. Many Chess Puzzles have repetitive themes ( Not the same puzzle but the idea behind it is the same. ). While playing players have to recognize the idea behind the moves ( Which they have cracked in puzzles. ) and implement the correct idea in the game. This process helps to improve Pattern recognition skills. 

You might wonder how does the Board with 64 boxes makes us creative?

1) Our thinking capability is unimaginable. There are unlimited possibilities in chess (  AI and humans couldn’t calculate it till now.)  Chess players often have to calculate many moves ahead and have to come up with a creative solutions to their chess problems on the board.

 2) There are many different themes of puzzles. Different themes of puzzles provoke different thinking abilities in Chess players. There are chess books dedicated just to developing certain thinking abilities.  For ex.

 There are books dedicated to developing only creative thinking. One good book is “Imagination in Chess” by Paata Gaprindashvili. Which only

focuses on Creative thinking ability.

Of course in our courses of UpskillChess, we have included Creative solution based puzzles.

 As we get stronger in our chess journey. The opening becomes a crucial part of the game. These openings are developed by humans over thousands of years, Chess engines and AI ( Artificial Intelligent Engines ) like Googles Alpha zero. It is extremely important to keep updating ourselves with the latest developments of the ever-evolving openings. All players have to constantly remember openings to play in tournaments. This helps Chess players to Practise, logically learn and Develop Memory skills

As kids will finish Our Upskill Beginner Courses. Kids training for 3/4 moves ahead calculation will start. The calculation is an essential part of chess improvement. While calculating it is not allowed to move the pieces. So, with Calculation players have to Visualize the game in their head 3-4  or more moves ahead. In Classical games ( longer time control games )  it is a must to calculate long variations. The practice of this routine will improve kids in overall Calculation and Visualization skills.

1) After a few games, the child learns that making moves without thoroughly looking at the whole board and noticing where important pieces are Vulnerable eventually ends up with losing these games. They will learn that the lack of patience will most likely cause them to end up losing the game.

2) Kids will be rewarded for their patience. They will notice as they think more patiently, they will start winning more games.

 3) There are chess puzzles for each level and there are answers kids won’t get within a minute. They must think patently at least for a few minutes to solve those puzzles.

As kids get stronger the difficulty of the puzzles also increases. Because of all these reasons, kids will start thinking more patiently and also it helps kids to increase their attention span.

Chess thinking often involves a complex, hierarchical structure of problems and sub-problems, and the capacity for retaining and manipulating such complex structures of data concurrently never deviating from the goals, all correlate with having a high IQ. Chess has been shown to raise students’ overall IQ scores.

No wonder Former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov and Former Female World Chess Champion Judit Polgar both come in the list of Top 10 Highest IQ ever recorded.

 No chess player can calculate an entire chess game from beginning to end. Even the best ( AI ) computer programs running on the fastest hardware can only “see” a limited number of moves ahead. Beyond what you can calculate, you must rely on strategy to guide you in finding the best plans and moves in a given position.

Chess strategy includes a wide range of concepts, from how to value the pieces to evaluating a position. Mastering these principles will greatly improve your understanding of chess.

 Chess is considered to be a strategy game –  in order to win, you must have better plan of action than your opponent.

Thus, strategy becomes integral part of the chess and it improves ability to develop and make new strategies and plans.

To improve in chess, Players constantly need to analyze their games ( Losses especially). By analysing the games kids will get to know their weaknesses and strength. ( We would also give it in Feedback. ) It’s always better to analyze the games with coaches. We at Upskillchess have kept regular analysis sessions in our Courses.

Analysing more and more games with coaches would definitely help kids to improve their Analytical skills.