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Ted Wieber plays on his high school baseball team, serves on the student council and is studying hard to make the grade for college. But all that’s easy compared to his real passion – playing chess.
“After a long day of chess, a chess tournament, I come home exhausted,” says Wieber, 17. “I just crash on the couch ‘cause I’ve totally just expended all my energy for that day.”
In fact, experts say when kids play chess, it is like a hard workout for their brain.
“They’re putting everything they can into it,” says David Woolf with the Emory Chess Association. “It’s enormously strenuous mental activity.”
And studies show, the mental exercise pays off. Researcher Stuart Margulies divided students into two groups – one group had a period for chess instruction and the other used that period for lessons in reading and math.
At the end of the school term, “the group of kids who had been playing chess and learning the game exceeded the other kids on reading and math and other standardized tests,” Woolf says.
In some studies, chess playing kids made twice the gain in math and reading scores.
Why? Experts say chess exercises mental skills that are used in all academics.
“There’s discipline, there’s concentration, there’s focus,” explains Woolf.
And unlike studying or schoolwork, which many kids find boring, in chess, the competition keeps them coming back.
“In a sense, kids don’t know that they’re taxing their minds while they’re doing this,” says Woolf. “They’re doing this ‘cause it’s fun.”
“You get the same sweating palms at tournaments and the same adrenaline coursing through your body that you get at a sporting event for me,” Wieber adds.
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