Here at Chess Kids, our beloved leader, the Chess Guru, likes nothing better than when we find a new article promoting the benefits of chess. “Chess Makes your Children Smarter” or “Chess Prevents Violence in Schools” are the sort of topics that send him into raptures. I have therefore been racking my brain for a new angle to promote chess and I have an idea! What do you think of this?
CHESS IMPROVES YOUR REFLEXES!
OK, now I realise that the traditional image of chess players is two old men sitting at a chess table looking really bored whilst they wait for their opponent to move. If you pop into the Melbourne Chess Club in Fitzroy you’ll see an old picture on the wall with a caption along the lines of “Major General So-and-so (aged 103) plays the Reverend Such-and-such (aged 97)” and you can practically see the cob-webs over the chess pieces. In the 19th century, before they started using chess clocks, this may well have been the case but my experience is a little different.
Let’s take a small sample (of one) and examine my theory.
I play a lot of tennis and if you were to look at me on the tennis court you would see a not very athletic looking old man who can’t hit the ball very hard and is clearly out of his depth playing your normal athletic, young tennis opponent. However, when you see me play, it soon becomes apparent that I have two strengths on the tennis court. If someone hammers a ball straight at me or at my feet I can just stick out my racquet and usually return the ball into play for a good shot because I have very quick reflexes. Secondly, I don’t just stand there exchanging groundstrokes with my opponent, I do drop shots, lobs and angled volleys to move my opponent out of position. In short, I am a strategist.
How did I acquire these skills? By playing chess! More specifically by playing lightning (5 minute) chess. When I was at school and then at University I played thousands of lightning chess games during lunchtimes and honed my ability to think and move quickly. This culminated in 1974 when I won the Australian Lightning Championship winning every game.
Some people (such as World Champion Botvinnik and World Correspondence Chess Champion Purdy) thought that lightning chess was bad for your game whereas others like Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Tal thought that it was good for your chess. My view is that it teaches you to think and act quickly and to strike a balance between the two factors contributing to success, namely what is happening on the board and what is happening on the clock.
If you’d like to test my new theory for yourself then come along on Saturday 16th May to the Chess Kids Lightning Tournament at Caulfield Grammar School in Wheeler’s Hill and try it out for yourself. I’ll be there so perhaps we can have a quick game?
