>>512878869
Chess is like videogames - great as an occasional toy but very foolish to spend a really long time at it or take it too seriously or judge people by their rating.

I like Siegbert Tarrasch - he was a medical doctor so he can't have spent that much time on chess, yet he was one of the top chess masters in the world. He wrote a great book about how to play chess, and had brilliance without devoting his life to it.

There are male and female tournaments because males and females have different brains and men are better at this particular thing. Same reason why you can count the amount of black grandmasters on one hand.

While fine as a toy it can be a dangerous, dangerous thing to take too seriously. You may laugh this off "lol it's just chess", but you don't see the danger. A famous chessplayer called Blackbourne said he knew of many an abled man who had ruined his life over playing chess (they were probably good players but never quite made it to the elite and tried to make it there).