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Chess Goes to SchoolHow, and why, the game caught on among young Americans.

By Ann HulbertPosted Wednesday, May 2, 2007, at 7:32 AM ET

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As it happens, this kind of no-nonsense approach to chess, an endeavor usually steeped in the mystique of genius, seems to be scientifically correct. Chess has been called the "Drosophila of cognitive science": Thanks not least to its precise rating system for levels of expertise, it lends itself to testing theories of thinking and memory (much as the fruit fly's gestational speed makes it ideal for genetics experiments). The latest research findings argue against elevating aptitude over effort, or expecting a fierce focus on the game to translate readily into mastery or a sense of purpose beyond the board. Chess expertise, recent studies suggest, is based on laboriously amassing a bigger "store of structured knowledge," rather than on intrinsically powerful analytic capacities. The more patterns a player internalizes, the more intricate a system of combinations that player can access. At lower levels, that allows a stronger player to run through more possibilities than a weaker one would; at the top, there's a quantitative to qualitative shift, with grandmasters zeroing in on the best possibilities, rather than reviewing more possibilities faster than an expert would. But if you ask a top player to remember random positions of pieces on a chessboard, rather than situations that might actually arise in master-level play, his powers of recall don't correlate nearly as well with his skill. In other words, a studiously honed memory for chess combinations doesn't necessarily transfer to better retention of other material.

The fact that the stars of the Murrow team and the I.S. 318 program aren't standout students doesn't keep some coaches from hailing their brilliance at the board—or from prodding them to be more conscientious about their schoolwork, or about visiting the college counselor. But the main goal is to let the game—with its blend of rigid rules and absolutist rankings on the one hand, and its infinite possibilities and competitive allure on the other—do what it is ideally designed to do. It has an allure that motivates kids to do the hard work of honing basic skills and then discovering their own styles, goaded ever onward by a rating system that can show them every increment of improvement. Ruthless standards and dizzying freedom, all in one package: That is a rarity. And it is a recipe for what experts call "effortful study," or the process of indefatigably tackling ever harder challenges, which many believe is the secret to successfully pursuing excellence in anything. Except, that is, when the fervent focus itself becomes too all-consuming a distraction.

Here chess holds a lesson that can get overlooked in educational rhetoric and on the corporate lecture circuit: The passion that spurs the endless practice required for outstanding performance (Bobby the "natural" in fact pored over books) is not always so different from the snares of obsession. The ordeal of chess mastery can indeed propel a youthful player onward to tireless commitment to honing talent elsewhere in life: Dip into The Art of Learning, a memoir-cum-how-to book by the now 30-year-old Josh Waitzkin, whose arduous journey from chess prodigy to the pursuit of champion-level tai chi prowess sounds at once miraculous and bordering on masochistic. But chess, precisely because the abstract challenges on the board can be so absorbing, can also derail a kid. Listen to Shawn, who's ranked third on the Murrow team and constantly skips school to play blitz games in the park. In an interview with the New York Times before the high-school championships, the foundering student lashed out at his mentors. "I became addicted to chess. They think they did something for me, but they didn't. Chess didn't save my life. They want to make it like I'm a kid from the ghetto and I can play chess and that's special. Why does it have to be like that? It's embarrassing." Though Shawn would doubtless bridle at the suggestion, just such caustic clear-headedness about the limits of his beloved chess may be the best proof of how much he has learned.