CHESS AND ACADEMICS by Demola Sorungbe

These two distinct terms are quite related. As we all know, chess requires you to think, at times to great depths and the resultant positive effect of such thought is quite considerable. Attaining academic excellence also requires a great deal of brain tasking. The game of chess therefore is often related to academia and people of "high intelligence' . Statistics and science have shown that most chess players are at least above average as regards intellect.

However, the fact remains that not all chess players do well in school. In fact, most of them are either on the average or below average. “Academic failure” should not ordinarily be attributed to chess, but it is quite possible that a lot of chess players in, Nigeria, would have done better in school if it they weren't that involved in the game although it is also true that some of them could and would have found something else to take their time if they weren’t chess players.

Where there is enough evidence to prove that chess contributes to academic success, it’s quite difficult to link it with “academic failure”. The truth is chess, like any other thing you can't control, can be quite addictive and can result in a lot of negative consequences. The quest to win may cause a player to spend so much physical and mental time trying to improve his/her level of play, thereby loosing sight of academic success.

Truth be told, it is very important in our present day Nigeria to excel academically, particularly because one cannot make a living solely from chess. A person that invests so much time in chess at the expense of his/her academic work starts to under-perform academically and could become less bothered with academics and related issues. There is then the tendency for such a person to seek solace in chess . All these tend to happen unconsciously, and except a player realizes what is happening he/she may be lost, for a very long time.

I will describe the point at which a chess player, or anybody for that matter, draws a very distinct line between chess and other important aspects of life as the “point of maturity”. It takes quite a while for a chess player to get “matured”. For this reason, chess players have to be conscious, and should be able to evaluate their life at every point in time.

This may explain why most academically successful chess players are those that learnt the game quite sometime before being admitted into the higher institution and vice versa. In other words, academic success can be said to be directly proportional to the time proximity between the point of learning the game and the point of being admitted into the higher institution.