Would being a good chess player be a good "hook"?

DwightEisenhower
Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:36:46 +0000

I’m not as serious in chess as I was last year anymore.

This game is hard as hell and it’s super time consuming. I can’t believe people don’t realize that this game carries a lot more weight on creativity and critical thinking skills and keeping composure, not flipping out when losing a tournament game, etc. etc.

Chess taught me more about life and who I am than anything else I’ve ever done. I used to play to win (and I DID win) until I realized that this game is impossibly hard to get to the top with and requires tremendous amount of talent and time to get to grandmaster level.

Too bad colleges don’t realize this game is really, really underrated. Winning at chess is not even easy, especially at tournament levels. Doesn’t matter if I got a bunch of trohpies in my room. Doesn’t matter if I trashed over half of them. This game is IMPOSSIBLE and incredibly underrated and HARD AS HELL TO GET BETTER AT!



No offense, but to me you sound like someone who devoted a lot of time to an activity but you’re starting to realize that it won’t automatically get you into college.

I know how hard playing “real chess” is. The problem is that a lot of people that play tournament-level chess are intelligent people with good grades. There are more qualified applicants who play tournament-level chess than room that colleges can “reserve” for them. As T26E4 said, colleges don’t “need” good chess players.