Chess has over 100,000 books written on it, more than any other sport. Faisal Hasnain makes the case for why the game deserves a place in your home and your children's lives.
Over 100,000 books have been written on chess, more than any other sport by a long way. That single statistic tells you something about the depth of this game before you've even touched a piece.
Chess wasn't always a frontline sport in the public imagination. That changed in 1972, when Bobby Fischer of the USA faced Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in the World Chess Championship. It was a Cold War showdown dressed up as a board game, and newspaper reports made it feel like the entire world was holding its breath over 64 small squares.
It was a Cold War showdown disguised as a game of chess.
The debate has been running for years, but the case for chess as a sport is stronger than it might look. There's no luck involved: no dice, no randomly dealt cards. Chess has a world governing body, FIDE, and its own Olympics in which 188 countries compete. It's been broadcast on ESPN. And when you watch two players hunched over a board, it looks calm, almost boring. Inside their minds, though, there is a war. Strategy, tactics, deception, positioning, long-term planning, short-term traps. It's an intellectual battle royale.
Physical fitness matters too. Long games at elite level drain the body, and a tired body weakens the mind. A serious chess player has to be fit enough to last the distance of a top-rated tournament. Chess leans firmly toward being a sport — a mental sport — built on ideas, patience, preparation, and psychology.
It's often claimed that chess teaches concentration, memory, problem-solving, creativity, patience, discipline, and how to plan ahead. Some go further and suggest it prevents Alzheimer's, raises your IQ, and makes you smarter overall. Maybe. But other activities teach the same things. Waiting to receive a serve in tennis requires deep concentration. Driving in traffic requires anticipation. Life itself forces us every day to plan and adapt, because no two minutes are ever the same.
What chess genuinely demands, within the game, is clear enough: thinking ahead, anticipating your opponent's moves, dealing with surprises, staying calm under pressure, retreating when necessary, and exploiting your advantages when they appear.
To be good at chess does require you to think ahead, to anticipate your opponent's moves, to deal with surprises, to stay calm and patient.
That's all within the game, though, not outside it. Chess is a wonderful sport, deep and endlessly fascinating, but I'm not sure it teaches you as much about day-to-day life as some people claim.
The Soviet Union took chess seriously enough to make it compulsory in schools and to integrate it into Red Army training as an educational and strategic tool for developing tactical thinking and willpower. Armenia still teaches chess to every child between ages 7 and 9, alongside maths and science, because they believe it builds character, discipline, critical thinking, memory, and the ability to take responsibility for your own decisions.
A quiet game that costs just a few dollars and takes almost no space — and it builds character, discipline, and critical thinking.
For a quiet game that costs just a few dollars and takes almost no space, that's a pretty good return on investment.
Introduce chess to your children. Not because it will turn them into geniuses, but because it will introduce them to a natural world of thinking, patience, imagination, and perhaps quiet inner satisfaction.
If you want to relive the drama of that 1972 Fischer vs. Spassky match, watch Pawn Sacrifice, starring Tobey Maguire. It captures the tension, the politics, and the chess scene of that era very well. And The Queen's Gambit, the Netflix global hit series, sparked a chess revival and actually made chess look cool.
The board is always waiting.
