On Mon, 2007-01-15 at 10:19 +0000, Aidan Karley wrote: > For what it's worth, the Aberdeen University Go Club was set > up > in the early 1980s by ... a carpenter. Always a good memory for > deflating one's potential to self-aggrandisment.
I've always found it humorous that the non-chess playing layman has an image of chess players that is so much different from reality - a bunch of well educated intellectuals, men smoking pipes, talking politics and speaking very formally. In reality, if you attend any chess club, you will see your fair share of almost exactly the opposite, a mixture of different kinds of people to be sure but plenty of those who are a little retarded socially, and live unbalanced lives. And then there is this other point of view that you have to be a little off balance to be a great player or to be "incredibly intelligent" probably in part propagated by real life examples of those who were such as Bobby Fischer and others. But just based on my own casual observations I never saw a correlation, the "misfits" at my local chess club (I haven't been there in years) varied wildly in strength, from the weakest to the best. And some of the best players were quite "normal." - Don _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
