Everything "bad" eventually becomes "good" for you.
150 years ago Scientific American bemoaned the "chess phenomenon" that was spreading quickly across the country. They wrote that chess was a trivial game that rotted the mind or something to that extent...
I’m not sure we’re at the point where chess is universally “good”. That might have been the case in Soviet Russia, where chess was hugely pushed by the state, or America in those Cold War years where ordinary society saw it as a noble way beat those Soviets.
Nowadays, however, chess is probably met more with indifference than anything else. One often hears complaints that it is a gimmick that merely shows that a person is capable of memorizing many, many thousands of positions, not that players are intelligent people in some other, more general respect (whatever “intelligent” might mean here).
Furthermore, it is also understood now that unless you invest in a very large library of chess books and dedicate all your waking hours to memorization, you’ll never be able to play chess at a high level regardless of your passion for the game. Yes, people still play e.g. football among their mates even if they know they aren’t ever going to be pros, but chess competition used to have an aura of being open to any clever player who just used his thinker, and that has now been generally shattered. Plus, computers beat people now.
As a recreational player that plays in tournaments from time to time and is active in my local chess community, this post really only exposes that you don't know what you're talking about. For context, I'm not amazing but I'm no slouch (~95th percentile in the US) and memorization accounts for so little of my defeats or victories that it's practically meaningless. In fact, studying the openings is usually considered to be the least value-adding way to improve unless you're a titled player (usually 2400+ US ELO)
It's a common misconception that chess requires memorization.
You don't learn to play chess by memorization. That's like saying that you have to memorize the C language specification to be a C programmer.
Back when I was playing chess I was around 2100 (uscf). I knew almost nothing about chess. However I did have the ability to analyse and a good eye for tactics. That was enough to be almost a Master.
The key to chess is to analyse better than your opponent, not to memorize better than your opponent.
On that note, I have been working on removing memorization from chess and at the same time make it more casual. My initial version is https://halfchess.com .
It does not offer the same level of challenge as international chess, but can be played much faster. It favors deep thinker to a strategic player.
The experiment still continues ~ so please share any interesting suggestions.
Chess is clearly a very poor game, as this review [0] attests! Sample: "In a definite nod to Tetris, Chess eschews any kind of personality and styling in order to emphasize its supposedly addictive gameplay. Unfortunately, that gameplay is severely lacking. For one thing, there are only six units in the game. Of those six, two are practically worthless while one is an overpowered "god" unit, the Queen."
..which gets sort of interesting when considering the former Kalmykian president who was an avid supporter of the above, but claims to have been taken for a ride to another planet in an alien spaceship[1]. I strongly doubt chess rots the mind, but considering the above, my own eccentricities and past infatuation with chess, it may do queer things to it. I hope to meet Go playing aliens myself, and perhaps have a few games on a pulsar, with a bit of ergot, green tea, and scopolamine as needed.
Specifically he does mention how Chess was considered in ideological terms (for example by the Church, and later by Soviet Communism) and how the public perception of the game changed with time.
150 years ago Scientific American bemoaned the "chess phenomenon" that was spreading quickly across the country. They wrote that chess was a trivial game that rotted the mind or something to that extent...