this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Chess is mostly a memorisation game for gambits / openers and subsequent sets of follow-on moves.
After that, it’s mentally simulating the board state a few moves ahead, varying pieces and guesstimating probability of what move the opponent will make. A lot of that you start to memorise, especially since other chess enthusiasts will often play well-known gambits / strategies.
Intelligence often correlates with memory but they’re not one and the same. I grew up knowing a competitive chess player and remember the time they referred to their “hambag” (handbag). English was their mother tongue…
"Ah ha! I see you've played the Frenchman's Cumsock. I will have checkmate in 4 moves!"
Wait, my hand is still on the piece.... I.... have ... not.... completed..... my..... move
"I understood that reference"
KOLANAKI
This is not at all what chess is. This reads to me like you don't really play chess?
Like sure, good chess players have studied opening theory for the openings they play (and top players know at least some theory about most competitive openings), but there's so much more to the game than simple memorization. Memorizing a bunch of lines and doing nothing else will get you nowhere with the game. Chess is about principles, concepts, ideas, strategies. It's about tactics and positional ideas and how the two intersect. It's about tempo and conducting the initiative. There's a reason it's the game with the most number of books written about it by a large margin. It's an incredibly deep game that rewards investment and fine-tuning your own learning process (and, in fact, a great deal of unlearning bad ideas you learned earlier).
It is decidedly not a game about memorization, even if there is some amount of it involved. At high level of play, memorization (or what we simply call "prep") is table stakes for playing the actual game. At lower levels, many players don't know a lot of opening theory and simply rely on some combination of positional ideas, tactics, and calculation.
Do you know what rating your friend was at? In my experience, the super strong players I've met (including a Senior Master that occasionally visits our chess club who's 2450 USCF or so) are incredibly intelligent and sharp. Anecdotally in my own chess career (only ~1134 USCF atm, though I think I'm a bit underrated due to my last tournament being in 2023), I've definitely noticed a difference in my own thinking since I started studying chess. Progressing in chess involves a lot of meta-cognitive thinking, and that kind of thing translates to all kinds of things in life.
Yeah I was sorta interested in pursuing Chess more at least as a hobby a few years ago. Learning about the 'meta' strategy was kind of intimidating and discouraging. The basic strategy is interesting to me but learning and memorizing different games just sounds awful to me. I guess it's like most things - the more you learn about it the more you realize there is a lot more to it than what you initially thought it was.
I’ll gladly eat shit for a controversial opinion, but I mentally put chess pros in the same basket as those guys that would queue solely for Office in counterstrike and reach global elite. Like sure, it’s still an impressive time commitment, I just feel like there were better things to put that into. I hate MOBAs and yet I’d respect a professional DOTA player more? But I’m more than familiar with the fanbase of Chess and how defensive they get.
The person who taught me chess was constantly perplexed by my bizarre tactics. He found it refreshing and interesting. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing, and I got nuked to oblivion on a regular basis. Maybe he was expecting to see some popular moves, but was only faced with whatever sketchy tactics I could come up with.
this is inaccurate. edit tbd