Why Chess Makes You Smart

  • Chess Makes You Smart!

    Playing chess has proven to help students enhance their creativity, improve their concentration, develop and expand critical thinking skills, boost memory and retention, and achieve superior academic performance. 

  • Additionally, chess has been shown to augment problem-solving capabilities, provide cultural enrichment, advance intellectual maturity, and enhance self-esteem.

    We know that these are qualities that school administrators, parents, and teachers desire for their students.

    • Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life – that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.

      Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
      Statesman, philosopher, inventor, scientist, musician, economist
  • Marcel Milat

    “…One of the essential goals of education is to teach children to think critically: students must learn to make reasoned judgments. Chess is an excellent tool to demonstrate the theme of critical thinking… formulate a plan of attack or defense.”



  • Phil Shapiro

    ”…Chess requires that individuals become actively involved in a mentally demanding competition; its effects are stimulating, wholesome, and healthy…Chess is a game of quiet intensity…the players live through the emotions of an exciting story.”


     

  • Robert C. Ferguson, PhD.

    “Chess instruction informs the mind and the emotions in such a way as to structure an emergent mental circuit where motivation and ability multiply to produce achievement in chess and school and life.’ “