Beginning of Essay
It seems almost like an oxymoron to combine the words mind and sport especially when the "sport" under consideration is chess. It is difficult to picture the game as a sport when the most physical activity it seems to require is moving the pieces across the board ....

Middle of Essay
.... requires at high levels of competition. It is not uncommon for a professional player to lose 10 to 15 pounds during the course of a match. Matches can last as long as a month, with one game every day, eight hours each. Over 120 countries officially consider chess a sport. The Unites States is not one of them. That may be because we seem to have a very narrow-minded view of what exactly a sport is. Ask any random person if chess should be considered a sport, and the most likely response will be hysterical laughter, yet more people play chess competitively than any other game in the world, and more books have been published on chess than any oth ....