Probably the most interesting example of someone pursuing chess later in life is that of Marcel Duchamp, the famous Cubist artist. He grew up playing chess for fun, but at age 36 he basically stopped making art and started pursuing chess full-time.
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."
I just don't see the beauty in chess. It's got a lot of unjustifiable, inherent complexity. Different pieces with different rules under different conditions. You wouldn't expect multiple designers to converge, or discover, that game. It even has cultural elements embedded.
Whereas Go is nearly as simple as possible, yet much deeper. It's easy to imagine different designers coming to the same set of rules.
As someone who played a lot of competitive chess at a very high level in my youth (and poured hours and hours of my life into it), I can attest that it is a game that seems to attract eccentric minds. Whether they are eccentric before chess or whether chess introduces eccentricity, I don't know, but I met so many interesting people through chess, the likes of which I would never meet in my other usual social circles.
I can also agree that, at a high level, it can be an all-consuming game. It can be difficult to turn off. There are a lot of activities and pursuits that you can physically put away, but for a great chess player, the positions are always in your thoughts.
I always think it is interesting to observe which are movement is used to describe artists who did work in more than one (in this case Cubism and Dada).
Not at all a nit-pick or a correction; Duchamp's writing on Dada has influenced some of my own research/work and so I just find it interesting which labels we choose (of course one label is easier than some label fitting a monarch: Marcel Duchamp, Painter of Cubism, Assembler of Dada, Player of Chess).
It's fascinating that people say Duchamp stopped being a practicing artist when he turned his obsessions to chess. I would say he just changed his medium. He wasn't one for retinal works anyway.
“Much of an exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule,” wrote Edward Said. “It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists [and] chess players.”
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp#Transition_from...