In article <473jk9$phu@condor.ic.net> rasor@mail.ic.net writes:
>An excerpt from Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan POE:

” Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers.“

Barry Wood wrote a piece on this, reprinted in _Reinfeld’s Treasury of Chess Lore_.

He suggests (I paraphrase), read Poe’s passage.

Now say to yourself:

“Poe has only just learned to play chess, and is still unsure of the moves of the pieces”.

Read it over again.

Does that fit? Chess is like driving a car, after a bit you don’t notice the gear changes and so on, you just enjoy the drive. Poe is still struggling with ‘which one’s the clutch again?’.

I don’t wonder where the pieces go, when I look at a board, the natural moves and sequences of moves just start flowing. It took me a while to get into chess, but it was worth the effort. I don’t think Poe ever was shown, or was not good enough to appreciate, what the complexity of chess can do for the beauty of the game (just think of the finish of Bernstein-Capablanca, the “Immortal”, the “Evergreen”, the Levitsky-Marshall finish – can you imagine a draughts equivalent?)

String quartets can be magnificent, but chess is an orchestra.