He learned to bet on stoopball, paddleball, and checkers, which he played with other local kids, and with adults who went by nicknames such as Bitter Irving, Bookie, and Nervous Phil.
If you take a chessboard and randomly place the pieces and ask a chess person to memorize it, they can't do it, because everything about chess positions is about the logic of how things developed.
While they spend a lot of their practice time playing games and studying the openings and endgames of players at higher ranks, they also dedicate a ton of time to analyzing their own past games – especially the ones they lost.
We would like schools to stay open after school, not just for chess and homework help and soccer and all these adult-run activities, but for actual mixed-age, no-devices free play.