Why Chess Is The Best Self Improvement Hobby (A Short Video Essay)

Get Your Chess.com Membership Via The Link Below To Support The Channel :)
https://www.chess.com/membership?ref_...

Join my Chess Discord Community Here:   / discord  

Today’s video is slightly different from normal. Today I will be discussing some of the ways in which I think playing chess and self improvement are incredibly complementary to each other and why, if you are on a journey of self improvement such as myself, then you need to start playing chess if you haven’t already or improve your chess ability if you are already familiar with the game. You can listen to this video as a podcast if you prefer since there are no important visuals but I will have some bullet games that I played with a subscriber I met in my chess Discord server playing in the background of the video if you’d like to watch those while you listen. With that said, I hope you enjoy the video.

Chess forces you to control your emotions because your feelings are irrelevant when the only thing that matters is making the best move on the board. This ties into common self improvement ideas of stoicism and discipline, meaning that chess is incredibly useful as a method to train your mind to remain objective when assessing any given situation, whether that be on the chess board or in real life.

Chess is a game that involves no aspect of luck or reliance on outside factors that many other games or sports include. There are no probability metrics where you or your opponent can be rewarded for being lucky, like the ball bouncing in a weird way when playing football. There is no reliance on teammates to assist you like in basically any team sport so you are completely self reliant and therefore if you lose, it is completely and utterly your fault, this is a fantastic way to learn self accountability which is useful in every aspect of life to learn from your failures rather than blame external factors. Finally, chess is completely objective, there is no referee making subjective calls that may give you an advantage or disadvantage that is out of your control, you simply make your move every turn and have to deal with the self inflicted consequences or benefits of that move.

Many self improvement influencers constantly preach that you can’t play video games if you want to improve yourself which I agree with to a certain extent but I believe that chess is an exception to this rule. Chess is an enjoyable game to play in person or online but it trains your mind to be patient, analytical and pragmatic rather than more mainstream, highly stimulating games which offer little benefit once you finish playing the game.

Chess can also connect you with other intelligent, like minded people through Chess Youtube channels such as my own, local chess clubs or online chess communities such as my Discord server which is linked below where we play games against each other, discuss opening theory and just generally bring together chess players who are serious about improving their game or simply enjoying themselves playing what is essentially a guilt free video game.

To improve at the game of chess, you often have to study opening theory, endgame techniques or middlegame strategies that are difficult to comprehend in many cases or require impressive levels of memorisation. This form of studying chess is very similar to how you learn in school or how you might study business strategies which are essential ways in which you might try to improve your financial situation or mental capacity for learning and education which are common parts of any self improvement journey.

There are certainly other ways in which I think chess is an incredible game to learn if you are also on a self improvement journey like I am which I would be more than happy to cover in a future video if you’d be interested in it, please let me know by dropping a comment and like down below so I can see if my audience resonates with this form of video, but I can certainly relate my improvements in chess over the past few years with my journey of working out and going to the gym, something that I’d love to talk about in the future. If this video has inspired you to take up the game of chess or to improve at chess then please check out any of the many videos on my channel where I play and analyse chess games to help you improve your thought process and in turn increase your chess rating. Thank you very much for watching.








































#chess #chesscom #chessgame #selfcare #selfimprovement #selfimprovementguide #selfimprovementpodcast #hamza #videogameaddict #improvement