If chess appeals to minds with a bent towards the abstract challenge, it can pose a considerable—sometimes fatal—tension on such a person as well. There is no question that those who concentrate most fully on chess are liable to subject their minds to a considerable strain. The history of chess is littered with stories of great players gone mad, from Morphy and Steinitz to lesser lights.

The writer G.K. Chesterton made this observation: "Imagination does not breed insanity: reason does. Poets do not go mad: chess players do."

"Great skill at chess," an editorial in The New York Clipper once noted, "is not a mark of greatness of intellect but of great intellect gone wrong."

Chess is a game that appeals to people who value it for its eternal mystery, its unyielding intricacy, its relentless fairness, its countless possibilities, and, most of all, for the abstract poetry of its mathematical logic. No one ultimately knows the answer to all of the secrets of chess: that is part of the charm of this game, which is so much more than a game.

Several books in chess literature quote the comment (Reinfeld attributes it to Tarrasch) that "chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy."

Women, for whatever reasons, have not truly attained an equal footing with the male players. Madame Chaud de Silans, one of the better female players, had this contemptuous remark on why her own sex didn't do better: "Women can't play chess because you have to keep quiet for five hours." But Soltis quotes Milunka Lazarevich, a top Yugoslav female player: "No one asks me why I play better than 19 million Yugoslavs but only why I play weaker than some 100 (male) Yugoslavs."

It is quite possible that sooner or later, a woman will play chess as well or better than any man. To date, this has not happened. But the world is changing in many respects, and it would not be the least surprising if such an emergence were to be among the changes.

What does not change is the lure of the game, which remains undiminished. Non-participants can sneer, mock or ridicule; those who understand the mesmerizing attraction of this noble game of the mind remain undisturbed by those who do not appreciate the infinite and intricate beauties of chess.