Think Outside the Box

Ive started playing chess alot recently as seen by my link to challenge me at chess. Ive always loved the game but was never that good at it. I understood where the little knight and castle move etc, (I actually know there names) but never understood even basic strategy.

So I started playing at a little site online for free and grew to enjoy it. I also noticed that some professional poker players either played chess for fun and were quite good or actually used to hustle the game for cash. Imagine if "Color of Money" was based on a chess hustler rather a pool shark.Picture Tom Cruise and Paul Newman playing a mean spirited game of rooks and pawns in the park of New York. Actually might not be a bad plot.

My point is that I began to notice a similarity between poker and chess. Both involve out thinking your opponent. And perhaps more importantly thinking a few steps ahead. When playing a poker hand, we generally like to have  a plan on how we play every street. As with both games circumstances can changed based on many factors. This makes us change our plan and react accordingly.

I feel that playing chess has helped in my decision making process. I normally dont play a full match. what I mean is that the games are timed and i almost always play with a 5 minute time limit. I do this to practice my quick decision making. with only 5 minutes to complete a whole game, we need to formulate a strategy and then adapt very quickly to how our opponents react to our moves. Sometimes i will go cracked out and play 1 or 2 minute games but I feel this is just pointless as each player is usually only playing to not time out.

We can see that both games are very similar as far as the mental side goes. Even the game actions themselves are quite the same. When trying to improve our own game we often just go over our losing hands for the day and see what we did wrong. Sometimes we look at our stats in HEM, but even this isnt enough. We constantly need to adapt and react. On the felt and off. Look for other ways to improve and think outside the box.