People, particularly chess players themselves, say the darnedest things about chess and about chess players. Here are some of our favorite myths about the royal game. A few of these sayings are unquestionably off-target, some of them are uneducated impressions, and some of them are arguments that may or may not be valid.

1) Chess is difficult to grasp.

Chess may not be the easiest game to pick up, but it is far from the most prohibitive. You have to know the movements of the six pieces, where the piece with the least value, the Pawn, has the most complex moves. Then you have to learn the rules about attacking and defending the King, including castling. Then there are a few about games where neither player wins. One aspect of this myth is true – it is hard, very hard, to learn to play chess well. One player in a hundred achieves mastery.

2) You have to be brainy to play chess.

There is some connection between chess talent and general intelligence. Minimum smarts are required. Cats and dogs will never comprehend the rudiments; no one has tried teaching blackfishes and chimps. Chess does involve, after all, using numerous sophisticated sections of the mind as efficiently as possible. People from all walks of life enjoy playing chess, several achieving mastery. Some very clever people delight in playing but never progress beyond novice rank.

3) Chess is for nerds.

As a matter of fact, this isn’t a myth, since chess is for everyone. It is for dweebs, oddballs, eggheads, and boffins, as usually as it is for anyone else. People who need to call other people offensive names should better say, ’chess is only for nerds’, but this is plainly untrue. Even if it were true, so what? Intelligent, clumsy, offbeat people have established more contributions to the advancement of humanity than have the rest. If they want to play chess, that’s their business

4) Computers play chess better than people.

In 2006, the best computers play chess better than 99.99% of people, but are evenly pitted in contests against the top humans. If, as some experts think, computers are gaining 20 - 30 rating points per year, the moment will shortly arrive when humans have no prospects of winning against the best machines. It should not be omitted that computers are always checked by squads of human specialists who encode programs in them in psychological areas like opening repertoire. Removing this help would eliminate their excellence.

5) Chess is a sport.

Here we run the risk of upsetting the many outstanding chess organizers who have exhausted years trying to prevail upon the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that chess should be admitted as an Olympic sport. Hoisting light pieces of lumber or clicking quickly on a computer screen is not physically challenging work. As any quantity of photos from foregone high level chess events will demonstrate, chess players don’t always portray a lean, shipshape, muscular profile.

6) Chess isn’t a sport.

Here we attempt to make reparation with those very same organizers who almost convinced the IOC that chess is a sport. Chess has been admitted as a medal sport for the 2006 Asian Games. A match between two top chess masters is full of tension, where superior nerves can establish the difference between a victor and a loser. Grandmasters have been known to lose a lot of weight during the action of a month-long contest.

7) Women can’t play chess as well as men.

To date it is unquestionable that women have not played and achieved as much as men in chess events. There are many possible reasons for this. One may be that male players are often expert at making female players feel uncomfortable at chess events. The Polgar sisters have gone a long way to convince the chess world that women can play very well. Perhaps one day we will discover that women can even play better than men. No one really knows.