Smoking and Chess

    Just kinda reminiscing, forty plus years ago, it was popular to smoke and play chess. I used to smoke a pipe, I remember how I would fiddle around with it and lose time on my clock, and I was playing in USCF tournaments.  I also remeber that I was ususally sharper before I lit up my pipe, once I started smoking it put me in a more tranquil mood, and my nervousness went away. I now I feel that nervousness is a good thing when playing chess, keeps you on edge, and aleart!

      Anyways, where I live now, smoking is completely disalowed every where including bars like where trysts works, and casinos! 

I like smoking when I play chess. I'll have to see how I do when I intentionally don't smoke while playing.

    I like Scotch, very pricy though, so I usually buy a bottle for my birthday, and it last me a long time. I also call it my tornado bottle, just is case one his heading down on us, nothing like a shot before all hell breaks lose!

I'm actually happy that smoking is banned virtually everywhere. I'm asthmatic. :/ That aside, it makes everything stink like stale smoke and it gunks everything in the room up over time. It's just a disgusting habit and I'm glad to see it going away.

As for drinking and chess, sake works. So does Korean raspberry wine. Stolichnaya's always a favourite, as are the specialty martinis over at Saketini. It really depends on what everyone's in the mood for, where we are, and what the location has. Just so long as it's not Bud Light (I actually don't know anyone who drinks that swill, thank God) I'm good to go...

smoking and drinking are good partners also coffee  and smoking,in my younger years i have consumed more than enough of the above. mentioned. when i was brought to the hospital for  a general check up that was about 8 years ago. the doctor asked me how long have  i been smoking,drinking but not about coffee. i said that  is a period of 30 years not to be exact.. the doctor says i have plenty  of happy days. now its  payback time to love your brain and body.,if you want to live a little longer, iwas diagnose for having diabetes and diabetes  has no cure but it is just about maintaning good sugar level,diabetes can graduate to destroy  kidney, eyes heart, and nerves dysfunctions.if only i could be back to square one again  there are many good things  in life aside from smoking and drinkingprecious wine to get us  abeautiful brain and body. for optimum performances. i would have been more wiser and efficient not unlike today.

Smoking during a chess game can be really annoying to your opponent, specially if he has any lung problem or something like that. I guess it is too impolite to do this unless you know the oponent is ok with that.

About drinking... Perhaps some people feel, and play, better while drinking, but most of us would just play worse. It is not as impolite as smoking, anyway.

I used to smoke Marlboro Lights, 2 packs a day for about 6 years and was hooked for good, finally managed to quit 3 months ago after 2 years of trying. Quitting smoking can be very hard due to immediate lack of concentration, subsequent depression and weight gain... Tal could smoke up to 5 packs of Kent a night! He was crazy :-O 

Now THAT is my kind of topic. I have never been, and will never be, a smoker.

When I was 13 I went to my first chess club as a junior in 1988. People kept blowing think cigar smoke in my face. So I had to leave. They wouldn't chnage and I had a sore throat for days. I never really got into club chess after that.

I am seriously entitled to say that as a self taught person who plays to a 1800ish standard, had I had any support at all for playing I would now be 2400 ELO at least.

Sighhh.

The best !.....large cigar puffing huge clouds of smoke toward  my deep thinking opponent whose coughing and hands trying to fan the smoke.....

I was a heavy smoker for more than 20 years. I loved it from the first and chess and smoking seemed so romantic together. Such a totem of the  intellectual life that ribbon of blue smoke curling up from the ashtray beside the board. But smoking became an ever heavier monkey to carry around and by the time I quit ten years ago, well, god what a relief to get the gorilla off my back! In hindsight I can see now smoking was self-hypnotism buffed and intensified by chemical addiction. I paid daily to be inconvenienced and sickened all the while telling myself it was an indispensable pleasure and more than that -- a part of my very identity. Addictive thinking is such amazing bullshit! In hindsight I'm aware the only real pleasure in cigarettes is the momentary relief from the nicotine addiction but the mind games addiction trains you to play on yourself are extraordinary -- the gloss they put on the experience is astounding -- you become the subject of your own pavlovian mind-control experiment. So, as a profoundly addicted smoker I was terribly afraid of quitting -- I foresaw being uncomfortable all the time, that forever after I'd be constantly aware of denying myself the pleasure of smoking -- a constant state of wanting a cigarette, that no matter what there'd always be a little voice in my ear saying, "other things being equal, don't you wish you had a cigarette?" No way could I endure that little question nagging at me day and night. I couldn't take that. But, it turns out that fear was just part of addiction's illusion jiu-jitsu. Post-nicotine I was able to see that there's nothing there, no one behind the curtain. Cigarette smoking is ritualized nicotine dependence and once you break the nicotine dependence deprogramming yourself from the rituals of the cigarette mind-cult is painless and freeing. Do I miss smoking? As little as I miss pneumonia or any of the other potentially fatal illnesses I've managed to survive. 

Botvinnik got people to blow smoke in his face to prepare him for tournements. I promise that no preparation would have helped against the think cigar smoke that I put up with. It was as thick as the smoke described in the chess story "Slippery Elm". It should have been classed as a weapon of mass destruction.

JG27Pyth - As an ex-smoker myself, I can confirm that everything you wrote is true. At least, it echoes my own experience and revelations about addiction exactly. Great post.

                 I NEVER did well after a cigarette
it dullens my MIND.
           I am SHURE of that.          
           To all YOU non smokers
                  i TAKE off my hat.
    how about THAT.                     

never mind shure you take that
Bob Cat:

@JG27Pyth

Only been about 5 weeks since my last cigarette here. Maybe in another 6-8 months I come back to this thread and aagree with ya.

that is if the lungs are still A Ok. huh. lol

I gave a little speech at my Toastmaster club recently and said that on Sunday 17 June at 10 AM something very interesting happenend to me. Absolutely nothing !! I had run out of cigarettes and like every respectable smoker I had a jar filled with longer cigarette ends, I finished those as well. I was curious to see what happens now. Had been smoking for 35 years, over the last years it became a chain smoking addiction of around 50 a day, I had coughing fits in the morning which even my parrot imitated and I wanted to quit, but somehow lacked the guts as nature abhors a vacuum and I did not know what to expect. I had read that the more you smoke, the easier it is to quit, because you know that every time you look in the mirror, you see an idiot. It is hardest for smokers of 5-10 per day, because they like it, but not enough to chain smoke, and they dislike it, but not enough to quit. My sense of smell came back after 2 days and I thought how could I ever not notice the nicotine stench from my curtains and carpets ? Taste has come back too and everything tastes better. I have not smoked now for over 4 months and I don't miss it AT ALL. Would have smoked 6000 cigarettes (Camel Plain) in those 4 months. Funny, I now do not look at smokers with contempt or disgust, but with pity. If only they knew how easy it was to quit - you just do it.

Fantastic. You're way past the worst of the nicotine but perhaps mind games remain. 

NobbyCapeTown said many true things I recognized, including:  

 "It is hardest for smokers of 5-10 per day, because they like it, but not enough to chain smoke, and they dislike it, but not enough to quit."

Along the same lines, there seem to be at least two types of quitter-smokers. The super-heavy smokers like me and Nobby...  when we quit we know we've just climbed out of a tiger cage and there is no temptation whatsoever to jump back in! 

And then the seemingly less-addicted, lighter-smoking, less self-destructive smokers who I think struggle the most with relapses.  They quit, sometimes for months, only to take the habit up again. In my struggles I never managed to quit long enough (a week was the longest I held out before) to understand relapses.

I don't know what type of smoker you were but if you think you might relapse, I can only advize you to remind yourself of all the ways smoking sucked.  And/or talk to someone who has had experience with relapsing and who feels they've finally beat it. Ask them what made the difference.

For me, I remember after five weeks I knew I had cigarettes beat but I still couldn't quite believe it! Maybe that's how you're feeling... if so, hooray! You'll be fine. 

For some reason Bridge produces a lot of chain smokers.  I remember playing in a bridge tournament in Kansas City, where I wasn't feeling too well and took a small break.  As I looked across the hotel ball room where the tournament was being played, I saw this large cloud of smoke hovering over the players.  That was the last time I ever played in a bridge tournament.  I have sometimes encountered smokers in chess tournaments but nothing that compared to the second hand smoke bridge produced.

I can't quite believe it either. You feel like you are walking tall and have an immense sense of power and achievement, much like when I did my first and only parachute jump in 1989. You think, gee, if I can do this, what else can I do ??

This article on the subject is good

http://blog.chess.com/billwall/smoking-and-chess

I'll add something to the Botvinnik story (also referred to by an earlier poster). Botvinnik is subsequently said to have concluded that while his preparation had indeed helped him in the particular match, he believed his play had subsequently suffered whenever (as was usually the case) he did NOT have clouds of smoke puffed at him!