The link between chess and poverty

 I come from homelessness myself. In fact, the man who taught me how to play chess for the first time, when I was ten years old, was a homeless Vietnam veteran and a friend of my father's. He taught me the basics, and then I was on my own. The thing that worried me about playing chess was that most of the people that I knew of who were really good a chess were also really poor, often homeless. Even to this day, I've never heard of a global chess champion who was also a billionaire or a successful CEO. Most of the most successful chess players in history have been of modest means financially. There have been many movies, documentaries and news reports recounting the tales of local parks and courts absolutely filled with poor people playing chess all day. It was a career in itself for many.

 Near my high school, Kenwood Academy, on the south side of Chicago, there was a court near 52nd street and Harper Ct which previously held a large-scale chess operation. People would come from all over the neighborhood to play at the court. I looked it up just now. It was called Harper Court. What happened? The local business owners shut it down. Why? The area was rapidly gentrifying and the white customers didn't want to be surrounded by poor black men while going shopping. At least, that was the official story. They would harass any black man that walked by and call the cops if they saw someone playing chess.

I remember watching a video of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, playing chess against the best chess player in the world at the time. The chess champion beat Gates, one of the top 10 richest people in the world for over thirty years, in around 20 seconds. Prior to that, Bill Gates had been the richest person on Earth - yes, on the entire Earth, for twenty years total, fifteen of those years having been consecutive years. If the former magnate and all-around rich guy didn't value chess as an intellectual pursuit, I was taking notice. I've never even seen a video of Bezos, Musk, or Arnault playing chess.

Was I consigning myself to poverty by playing chess? Was there something embedded in the game of chess that promoted a lack of finances? I did a Google search on the subject and I came across a comment that was very enlightening. To paraphrase, the comment said that chess is "the game of the poor." According to this quote, chess is a game that is attractive to poor people (because it doesn't require an expensive court like tennis or an expensive horse like polo or horse riding). But, as the quote said, it doesn't create poor people. It's just that more poor people want to play it, because it's easy to learn, requires nothing but your brain and your fingers, and doesn't take up much space, or time. I remember once when I was a kid I was bored with class, so I drew a chess board on notebook paper and cut out little chess men from another slip of paper. Aha. You can't play polo, tennis, biathlon or hockey that way. So, that is a possibility. Maybe chess is about empowerment for the poor, not damnation.