Since When is Chess Cool?

Has youth chess become a really big deal? The need for a classic Slate contrarian-style rebuttal would seem to suggest so. Back in my day, high school chess had most certainly not acquired any kind of prestige or institutional support. Our club had about seven members (out of a population of 2000 or so), and while elements of the dance team (believe it or not) did in fact show up for one match, getting any attention even for what was a remarkably successful team (two consecutive league championships) was like pulling teeth.

I suppose it is odd to think that mastery of chess would have a meaningful effect on academic performance. The intellectual tasks are quite different, and the entire relationship may be built on a sterotype and some fairly mushy statistics. Frankly, I would imagine that participating in a complex role-playing game would do more to develop various academic skills than analyzing a chess position. As the article suggests, the chess team did not overlap significantly with Oregon City High School’s academic all-stars, but rather contained mostly marginal academic figures. On the other hand, it certainly wouldn’t be correct to say that chess was a cause of poor academic performance; the one simply seemed to have little to do with the other.

On the other hand, the Oregon City school district had no youth chess infrastructure. Even in my day, certain Portland high schools had coaches who had taken the time to establish chess programs at feeder elementary and junior high schools. This resulted in those teams becoming extremely competitive, and it might also, I suppose, have left some residual analytical skills in the population as a whole. I’m not convinced, though; I need some plausible causal logic…