Submitted by Bill Fernie
19th September 2026
There is something rather strange about chess.
You sit down in front of a board with 64 squares and a collection of oddly shaped pieces, and for the next hour or two you are essentially trying to work out what another human being is thinking.
It looks like a game, and of course it is. But after you have played for a while, you begin to realise that chess is really an exercise in making decisions.
You make a move.
The other person responds.
You have to decide what to do next.
And gradually you learn that the move which looks attractive at this moment may not be such a good idea when you look two or three moves further ahead.
That way of thinking can begin to creep into ordinary life.
Perhaps that is one reason The Queen's Gambit had such an extraordinary effect when it appeared on Netflix in 2020. It turned chess, something many people had regarded as a rather old-fashioned pastime, into compelling television. Sixty-two million households watched the series in its first 28 days, according to Netflix, while searches for chess doubled and new players joining Chess.com increased fivefold.
The programme was about a remarkable young chess player, Beth Harmon, but underneath the story was something much more universal. She was constantly looking at a position, working out what might happen next and trying to understand what her opponent was thinking.
That is what makes chess interesting beyond the chessboard.
Imagine, for example, planning a garden.
It is tempting to think of gardening as a collection of small jobs. Buy some seeds, plant them, water them and wait.
But anyone who has grown vegetables knows it does not quite work that way. Plant something in the wrong place and you may discover several months later that it is competing for light with something else. Sow too early and the weather can defeat you. Sow too late and the growing season may be too short.
The garden becomes a series of decisions whose consequences arrive later.
Chess is much the same.
The interesting question is not simply, "Is this a good move?"
It is, "Where does this move leave me?"
That is a very different way of looking at things.
It applies even more obviously to money.
Suppose there is £2,000 sitting in the bank. There are plenty of things that could be done with it. A new appliance, some work on the house, a holiday, a better car, paying off part of a loan or simply leaving the money alone.
None of those choices is automatically right or wrong.
But the chess player has an instinct to look beyond the first move.
If I spend the money, what happens if the boiler breaks?
If I pay off the loan, how much cash will I have left?
If I spend it improving the house, might that reduce future energy bills?
If I leave it in the bank, what am I giving up in return for having that safety net?
The answer is not necessarily to save every penny. Life would be pretty miserable if every decision were made solely on the basis of the next possible disaster.
It is about understanding the position you are creating for yourself.
That may be one of the most useful things chess can teach.
A good decision is not always the one that produces the biggest immediate benefit. Sometimes it is the decision that leaves you with the most options later.
That is why an emergency fund can be so valuable. Sitting in a bank account, it may look rather unproductive. But when the car breaks down or an unexpected bill arrives, that money suddenly gives you choices that somebody without it may not have.
The same thinking applies to much bigger questions.
When a Government announces a new policy, for example, it is easy to concentrate on the announcement itself. A tax is being cut. A benefit is being changed. A new road is being built. A council charge is being increased.
But chess encourages another question.
What happens next?
If the tax is reduced, how is the lost revenue replaced?
If a benefit is changed, what happens to the families affected?
If a council raises a charge, do people simply pay it or do some change their behaviour?
If a Government spends more money in one area, what happens to the other areas from which that money has to come?
These questions do not tell us what political answer to choose. They simply make us look beyond the first move.
And that is important because life is full of people making moves of their own.
This is probably one of the hardest things for a beginner to learn in chess.
You can have a wonderful plan.
Then your opponent ruins it.
The reason is obvious, once you think about it. The other person is playing too.
Yet outside chess we often behave as though our own plan is the only plan that matters.
A business makes a decision without properly considering how its customers will react. A family makes a decision without considering how another member will feel about it. A Government introduces a policy and discovers that people change their behaviour in a way nobody expected.
The chessboard teaches humility.
You are not playing against an empty board.
There is somebody else sitting across from you.
So you start asking, "If I were in their position, what would I do?"
That does not mean agreeing with them. It means understanding them.
And there is another lesson that becomes apparent as you play more games.
You will get things wrong.
Everybody does.
The temptation after losing a chess game is to blame the opponent, the opening, the clock or simply bad luck. But the really useful exercise is to go back through the game and find the point where the position started to deteriorate.
What did I fail to see?
Why did I make that move?
Was there another possibility?
That habit can be extraordinarily useful outside chess.
A household budget that has gone wrong can be examined in much the same way. Perhaps there was one large unexpected expense. Or perhaps several small expenses gradually became normal.
A garden that produced very little might have suffered from bad weather. But perhaps the planting was wrong too.
A business decision that failed may have been a bad decision. Or perhaps it was a reasonable decision made with the information available at the time.
Looking backwards is not necessarily about finding somebody to blame.
It is about learning where the position changed.
Chess also teaches something which modern life does not always encourage: patience.
We live in a world where almost everything happens immediately. We can buy something with a click, transfer money in seconds, send a message instantly and get an answer from a computer before we have finished asking the question.
Chess refuses to work like that.
The board sits there.
You have to look at it.
Sometimes you have no idea what to do.
And sometimes the best move is to do nothing dramatic at all.
That may be useful outside the game.
There are times when making a decision simply because you feel that you have to make one is worse than waiting for more information.
That does not mean endlessly postponing decisions. It means recognising that waiting is sometimes a decision too.
Perhaps this is why I think chess is worth learning even for somebody who has no ambition to become particularly good at it.
It does not need to make you a genius.
The evidence for broad claims that chess automatically improves intelligence or academic ability is mixed. Research has found associations between chess and some forms of planning and cognitive reflection, but that is different from proving that learning chess transforms people's general intelligence or decision-making ability.
The benefit may be much simpler.
Chess gives you somewhere to practise thinking before acting.
And once you have spent enough time sitting at a board asking yourself what happens after the next move, it becomes difficult not to carry that habit into other parts of life.
You start looking at the garden differently.
You start looking at the household budget differently.
You may even look at a political argument differently.
Not because chess tells you what answer to choose.
It doesn't.
It simply makes you more inclined to ask questions before accepting the first answer that comes along.
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
What happens if we do this?
What happens if we don't?
Who else is affected?
What might they do?
And perhaps the most important question of all:
What position will we be in afterwards?
That is not really a lesson about chess.
It is a lesson about thinking.
And perhaps that is why a game invented centuries ago still has something to say to people sitting around kitchen tables today.
If you want to learn a good place to start is
www.chess.com where you can play alone agsint computer generated players from beginners to masters and its free unless you want to pay small subscription to open up many more sections. It is good place to start. the search out many many videos on Youtube.
I am still learning - Bill Fernie.