Note: This is an AI-generated translation from my original Italian article: Insegnare la sconfitta

What can a fifteen-hundred-year-old game teach a generation that has never had to wait?

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The handshake

I remember my first chessboard. I still keep it. It belonged to my uncle: a wooden box that opened to reveal a metal chessboard with magnetic pieces, gold for the black and silver for the white. Nothing fancy. But to me, it was a treasure. Then I had my parents buy me a bigger board, then a regulation-sized one (editor's note: a tournament chessboard). I didn't even know chess clubs existed. I had found a book, Opening, Middlegame, Endgame in the Modern Chess Game by Ludek Pachman, and I set about studying it on my own. Me, two chessboards (one I used for analysis), a notebook for my notes, and the book. For a long time, chess was something private, between me and the pieces.

Then I discovered there was a chess club in Pescara. I got my parents to drive me. I was a shy kid, and I remember the effort it took to walk into that room for the first time. The first thing I saw was a big, broad man explaining something to three boys in front of a demonstration board — the first I'd ever seen in my life. And then, in the next room, small tables where people of all ages were playing. The sound of pieces, clocks being pressed, someone commenting in a low voice. The shyness was real, but the desire to play with someone who actually knew how to play was stronger.

Eventually I signed up, and at least once a week I was at the club. I played with adults, with retirees, with kids my own age. You learned, you joked around, sometimes you played recklessly only to regret it two moves later, other times you'd stop and analyze games for hours. Those were the years when Kasparov had founded the PCA, the Professional Chess Association, in open break with FIDE, and for the first time in history there were two world champions. Following the games wasn't easy then, not like now with real-time streaming and engines giving you the evaluation move by move. There was the Chess Informant: a volume published every six months, with not a single word of text — just diagrams and moves in algebraic notation, with a system of universal symbols any player in the world could read, regardless of language. It was 1995, and I remember the evenings at the club analyzing the PCA Championship games between Kasparov and Anand. Young and old, together, in front of the demonstration board, trying to figure out why Kasparov had sacrificed that piece on move nine.

That's what chess has always been for me. Not a solitary game, not an abstract intellectual exercise, but a place where people meet.

The first thing you teach children in chess isn't how the knight moves. It's not the Italian Opening, not the Scholar's Mate, not even the value of the pieces. The first thing you teach is the handshake.

Before the game, you look your opponent in the eye, extend your hand, and shake it. After the game, whether you won or lost, you do the same thing. The hand you shake when you're euphoric is the same one you must offer when you've just lost. No video game has this moment. No app asks you to look into the eyes of the person who just beat you.

I'm a chess instructor, and I hold a specialization for teaching children on the autism spectrum. I haven't been actively teaching for a while, for various reasons, but when the chance arises I go visit old friends at the club to play in person. I consider chess one of the most powerful pedagogical tools in existence, and in this article I'll try to explain why.

It was watching my children play, and other children at tournaments, that I understood how much was happening in front of that chessboard. The lip that trembles after a loss, the eyes that fill up, the attempt to hold it all in, and then the desire to start again. It is one of the most important things that can happen in a human being's development. And it happens less and less, because the world in which these children grow up has done everything in its power to eliminate it.

The game that won't let you scroll

I wrote some time ago about how growing up with an oracle in your pocket is changing children's relationship with patience, curiosity, and frustration. About how instant access to answers risks eroding the ability to sit with things we don't understand. That piece posed a problem. This one tries to tell part of the answer.

The paradox is that the answer is fifteen hundred years old.

Chess has no autocomplete. No suggestions. No "did you mean...". No algorithm keeping you glued by delivering the next dopamine hit every three seconds. It is a game that demands your total presence, your silence, your time. Where nobody gives you the answer. Where you make a mistake, and the board does not console you.

And here's the paradox of paradoxes: right now, in the age of TikTok and fifteen-second content, chess is experiencing a renaissance. Chess.com reached 200 million users in 2025, doubling in three years. After the release of The Queen's Gambit on Netflix, chessboard sales increased by 87%, book sales by 603%. On Twitch, millions of people watch Hikaru Nakamura think for two minutes before moving a piece. In Italy, the Chess Federation surpassed 21,000 members, a historic record.

Something doesn't add up. Or maybe it adds up perfectly: in a world saturated with instant stimuli, watching someone think has become an exotic act. And wanting to think for yourself, in front of a chessboard, has become a small act of resistance. Why? What is it about chess that an app can't replicate?

The slow move

Kasparov, in his How Life Imitates Chess, writes that "sometimes the hardest thing to do under pressure is to allow the tension to persist. The temptation is to make a decision, any decision, even if it's an inferior choice."

Think about that. Allowing the tension to persist. In a world where every app, every service, every interface is designed to reduce friction, to give you the answer before you've finished formulating the question, Kasparov tells us that the real skill is not deciding. Not yet. Staying there, in the discomfort of the position, and thinking some more.

Someone who has never played chess in a tournament might think that waiting is dead time. Your opponent thinks, and you wait. But that's not how it works. Waiting in chess is active: while the other person thinks, you think. You analyze. You prepare variations. You try to figure out what they're seeing that you're not. It's a kind of waiting that barely exists anymore in children's daily lives, where every pause is filled with a screen, every silence with a notification. At the chessboard, silence is full, not empty.

And speaking of silence: the tournament hall is a sensory experience that should be tried at least once. Dozens of people sitting in a room, and the only sound is the ticking of clocks and the muffled noise of pieces touching wood. Nobody talks. Nobody looks at their phone. Nobody gets up unless it's to go to the bathroom or to think while standing, hands behind their back, walking between the tables. For a child accustomed to constant noise, entering a tournament hall is like entering another world. And after the initial disorientation, something unexpected happens: you get used to it. And that silence becomes concentration.

Ulisse Mariani, psychologist and psychotherapist, in his Terrible Students wrote something that struck me deeply: tolerance for frustration is not an innate gift. It is a skill. It can be taught. Those children we label as "difficult," "impossible," "terrible" — in most cases they don't have a discipline problem: they have a tools problem. Nobody taught them to sit inside frustration without exploding. Mariani and Schiralli developed the "Didactics of Emotions," a method validated in 2022 with studies that measured cortisol reduction in children in the experimental group.

"If we don't accustom children to waiting, to small frustrations, to being alone without feeling lonely, to managing idle time, to drawing out creativity and desire, we risk producing adolescents who can't bear even the slightest disturbing sensations — such as, for example, just two hours of... idleness.
And if they can't contain and fill such short stretches of time, imagine how they can experience life's goals, plans, and desires which, precisely because they are such, imply waiting, effort, deferral, the future.
The wanting-everything-right-now typical of so many adolescents has its roots precisely in this difficulty.
We adults, champions at naming complex phenomena, have called it consumerism."

• Ulisse Mariani, Terrible Students

Robert Bjork, cognitive psychologist at UCLA, calls this principle "desirable difficulties": conditions that slow down apparent learning often optimize long-term retention. You struggle more now, you learn better forever. It's counterintuitive, and it goes against everything modern design teaches us. But chess embodies exactly this: every game is a desirable difficulty. Every defeat is a learning opportunity that no tutorial can replace.

And the child who sits in front of the chessboard and has to wait for their opponent to think — that child is doing something that almost nothing else in their day asks them to do: sitting still, in silence, and waiting. It sounds like little. It isn't.

The chessboard doesn't lie

The heart of it all, for me, is here.

A child who loses a game of Fortnite has a thousand escape routes: lag, a cheater, the controller that wasn't working, the teammate who didn't cover them. A child who loses a game of chess has only themselves, the board, and their choices. No algorithm to blame. No teammate. No bad luck. It was you, your pieces, and your decisions.

Kasparov says it with the clarity of someone who devoted a lifetime to it: "Defeat and success are the inseparable consequences of every endeavor. If we want to succeed, we must accept the risk of not succeeding."

This is the hardest and most precious lesson chess can give a child: total responsibility for your own choices. There is no "it's not my fault" on the chessboard. Every move was yours. Every mistake was yours. And the next game is another chance to do better, carrying within you everything you learned from the previous defeat.

There's a verse in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs of Solomon, that anticipated all of this by nearly 3,000 years: "A patient man is better than a mighty one, and he who controls his temper than one who captures a city." Proverbs 16:32. That's exactly what happens on the chessboard: you don't win by conquering — you win by mastering yourself.

A patient man is better than a mighty one, and he who controls his temper than one who captures a city.

• Proverbs 16:32

But there's an aspect of defeat in chess that makes it different from any other defeat. When the game ends, when you've shaken hands and the pain is still fresh, something extraordinary happens: you sit with your opponent and analyze the game together. It's called the post-mortem, and the name is no accident. You go over the moves, you look for the moment the position slipped, you ask "what if I had played here?", and your opponent — the one who just beat you — explains where you went wrong. Helps you understand. In what other context does the winner sit beside the loser and teach them how to do better next time? Not in football, not at school, not in the corporate world. In chess, yes. Defeat is not the end of the conversation — it's the beginning of learning.

And then there's zugzwang. It's a German word meaning "compulsion to move," and it describes a position where any move you make worsens your situation. You can't stand still — the rules won't let you. You must move, and every move is a step toward defeat. It's one of the most frustrating experiences chess can offer, and also one of the most formative: sometimes in life there are no good moves, but you have to move anyway. You have to choose the lesser evil, accept the damage, and carry on. No tutorial teaches you this. You learn it on the chessboard, with a knot in your stomach.

"Experience is not what happens to a man, but what a man does with what happens to him."

• Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess

In my own small way, I've watched this process repeat itself many times. The child who after the first loss wants to quit, after the fifth wants to understand where they went wrong, after the twentieth wants to teach a younger kid. It's not a linear path. There are days when even the best player cries, and days when the one who never wanted to play again asks "can we play one more?" But the direction is clear: you learn to lose. And learning to lose is learning to grow.

The game without distances

Antonio Pipitone is 99 years old. In a photo from the 47th Festival Citta di Arco, you see him seated at the tournament table, just before his move. Ninety-nine years old, and he's playing chess in an official tournament. Not an exhibition, not a friendly game: a real tournament.

And then there's another photo, from 2022, that strikes me the same way every time I look at it. Mario is 10 years old. Manuel Alvarez Escudero is 100. Ninety years of difference, sitting across from each other, playing chess. What strikes you is that they're at the same height. Neither of them is "pretending" to play with the other. They're genuinely competing.

Try to think of another game, a sport, any activity where a centenarian and a ten-year-old can truly compete on equal footing — where the experience of one and the elasticity of the other meet on genuinely neutral ground. Not football, not tennis, not video games. Chess is one of the very few spaces where age is truly irrelevant.

In 2025, Gallipoli hosted the 33rd FIDE World Senior Championship: 467 players from 67 countries, with record participation. Eighty years old and over, and still competing. (Try that with Fortnite.)

But you don't need to go to world championships. Just go to any Italian piazza where there's a chess club. The old folks are there, and the children are there, and they play. A game that holds generations together, without digital intermediaries, without needing anything more than 32 pieces and two brains.

The chessboard is a leveler. You don't need expensive shoes, you don't need a field, you don't need technology. It's one of the few games where a child can beat an adult on merit, and where an adult can learn something from a child.

The chessboard as therapy

This is the most personal part, and perhaps the most important.

As I mentioned, I hold a FIDE certificate for teaching chess to children with autism spectrum disorder, as part of the FIDE Infinite Chess Project — a program active in 28 countries that has involved over 270 children. I don't bring it up to boast about a certificate, but because what I saw teaching chess to these children changed the way I think about teaching in general.

A child on the autism spectrum struggles with many things we take for granted: social interaction, eye contact, turn-taking, the frustration of the unexpected. The chessboard bypasses many of these obstacles, and it does so in a way that never stops surprising me. The rules are clear and immutable: the knight always moves in an L, the pawn always advances forward, turns always alternate. There are no exceptions, no ambiguities, no "it depends." For a child who struggles with the unpredictable world of human relationships, this predictability is a handhold.

But the part that moves me most is the handshake. That same handshake that opens and closes every game — for an ASD child, it becomes something different: it's an exercise in codified social contact. It's predictable, and therefore it's safe. You know exactly when it happens, you know exactly how it works, you know exactly what's expected of you. And little by little, game after game, that gesture becomes natural.

And then there's something even more profound. To play chess, you have to ask yourself: "What is the other person thinking? What will they do if I move here? What do they want?" It's a natural exercise in theory of mind, in perspective-taking — exactly what children on the spectrum struggle most to develop. The chessboard becomes a shared language where words don't always suffice, but the moves speak.

The ASD Scuola Popolare di Scacchi, in collaboration with the "Una Breccia nel Muro" Foundation, has been working in Italy since 2017 with autistic children, and the results are remarkable: all the children learned to play, to manage the frustration of losses, to develop self-criticism and learning from mistakes. It's not magic. It's structure, patience, and repetition: three things chess has in abundance.

What science says (and doesn't say)

I don't want to turn this article into an academic paper, and above all I don't want to make claims stronger than what the data allow. Those who know me know I'm wary of anyone who has definitive answers, and chess is no exception.

What the research tells us is encouraging but not miraculous. A meta-analysis by Sala and Gobet from 2016, covering 24 studies, shows that chess instruction improves mathematical performance with a moderate effect, and general cognitive abilities with a similar effect. An Italian study by Trinchero and Sala on 931 primary school pupils adds a fundamental nuance: transfer occurs when explicit heuristics are taught, not from playing alone. It's not enough to sit a child in front of a chessboard and wait for them to get better at math. You have to teach them to reason on the chessboard, and that reasoning transfers.

Regarding the elderly, the Verghese study from 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine — a prospective study of 469 adults over 75 — showed that board games reduce the risk of dementia, while physical activity alone does not. But be careful: the correlation might reflect a selection effect — people who play chess tend to already have a higher cognitive level.

For ADHD, the Blasco-Fontecilla study on 44 children showed a 41% reduction in inattention after 11 weeks of chess. For children with ASD, the FIDE Infinite Chess Project reports significant improvements in participants' social interaction skills.

And then there's the COGniChESs study, fresh from 2026, which is the most honest of all: no significant direct cognitive effect, but an improvement in mood, especially among women. The benefits, the study says, are above all social and psychological.

So: not "chess makes you a genius." But rather "chess teaches you to lose, to wait, to think, to be with others. And science suggests this has value." It's a less spectacular sentence, but it's an honest one. And in 2012, 415 European parliamentarians signed a declaration to introduce chess into the educational systems of the European Union. Then little to nothing happened, as is often the case. But they must have been thinking something, no?

It's not nostalgia, it's resistance

I don't pine for the old days (well, maybe a little). I'm not saying chess is the solution to all the educational problems of the twenty-first century. I'm not saying that 32 wooden pieces are enough to raise better human beings. I'm saying that in a world that has systematically eliminated waiting, frustration, and personal responsibility from children's daily experience, there exists a tool that contains all three of these things, demands them, teaches them. And that this tool is fifteen hundred years old, costs next to nothing, and works at any age.

Kasparov writes that "chess is a unique arena for expressing creativity, because it unites art and science in a way that few other activities can." He's right. But for me, chess is also something else: it's a place where a child learns that losing is not the end. Where an elderly person stays intellectually alive. Where an autistic child finds a language. Where generations meet without the need for filters.

Is it resistance? Perhaps. But not the resistance of someone clinging to the past. The resistance of someone who found something that works, and notices it works even better precisely because the world around has changed.

Not the openings, not the endgames, not the variations. Chess teaches you to do something with what happens to you. Even when the only thing you can do is shake hands and start again.