Definitely needed a mind workout with all the confusion in the world, I like most have been effected by 2020+. Somehow I just never thought about learning to play Chess, I played fast tempo checkers very competitively back when Yahoo Games had the Java game center. Back then I thought of Chess as being too slow and difficult so just never even attempted it. Even now have no idea why at nearly 50 years old I decided to learn it, but have enjoyed it so much. It’s extremely fun some games are designed to be played fast, some slower, and some even for days something for everybody.
One day I was watching videos on Chess and decided to try something new by joining Chess.com. Immediately buying the diamond membership which has been totally worth it (go look at how many lessons I have done) with unlimited lessons and analysis. It wasn’t very hard to learn the very basic stuff like how to move, setup a board, points value of each piece and so on. After that I just played and lost 99% of the first games, its way more than just moving pieces but of course I knew ahead. So after a few months for every 1 step I made 10 more seem to appear, chess is not super hard and its not easy to actually play a competitive game and I like that.
So for cognitive benefits I’d say memory enhanced, predictive ability greatly improved, and structure to life enhanced. Sometimes it just takes something so simple to make big changes, thinking things out for hours each day is a very powerful exercise. With this lots of others things fall in place, the mind is prepared better each day.