Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
nautil.us
nautil.us
In my late 20s I moved to California and also started playing again after a few years of drought. My strength was about 1950 USCF. In the Bay Area 80% of the players I play in tournaments at that strength are kids -- the median age is perhaps 11.
At first I thought it was shocking that they could be 1950 at 11 years old, and I was like 1200, or whatever. That's a pretty huge gap in what you might think is "talent". But then I started looking at the tournament history of my opponents. I was astonished to find that the majority of them had played substantially more total chess at age 11 than I had managed to play by my late 20s.
For example, here is someone I have played several times:
http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?15250088
He's 10 years old and 2055 USCF. He has played in 175 tournaments in the past 5 and a half years. That's almost three per month, every month! If you don't regularly play in chess tournaments, they are frequently a serious commitment -- the better part of a day, or for big ones, multiple full days. Perhaps his average tournament might involve 10 hours of serious chess. How many adults work so hard on their hobby? Is that degree of return on investment even surprising? I've only played in 129 tournaments since 1992 and I am the same strength.
The player above is not at all an outlier in this regard. I never yet observed a kid who achieved an impressive degree of skill in chess without spending this kind of time. So while I continue to be impressed by the dedication and ability of young kids who are really strong, I stopped thinking that they are magic learning machines whose age makes them unreachably capable. The author's daughter at least has regular coaching, which I suppose the author doesn't have. Does he even spend more time on the game than her? I bet he doesn't.
As an example, one of the girls on my daughter's volleyball team is on 3 separate volleyball clubs simultaneously. She plays 5 days a week at least an hour a day.
For most areas of human expertise we don’t have the kind of knowledge about what to do and why, or the coaching infrastructure for youth prodigy breeding grounds like sports or playing a musical instrument. The number of doctors who started preparing for their career in any real fashion before they were twelve might be numbered in the hundreds, ditto financiers. Most things you can start at as an adult.
He's now indisputably the best competitive programmer in the world. But it's comforting to know that he too had to slowly grow over many years starting from a mere mortal 1200 rating.
I moved to Dubai recently, and started attending local meetups here. I even started my own mini-club. I quickly realised that the guys I was playing with were almost all much better than me. That they put more time in, and they had more history with the game. From this I saw that, just in order to get good enough to have any fun at these meetings, I would have to put in more time and effort than I even had available to me. I found myself having less and less fun. Winning felt okay, and losing felt like dying.
I have since moved on to other board games. Competitively: Magic the Gathering. And many other Euro-style board games that are not based on such zero-sum 1:1 competition (e.g. Caverna). MTG especially has been a god-send for me, as anyone can win a magic game, due in a large part to the randomness that is an essential part of the game. On top of the randomness there is the theme that is built into every card, and every magic colour in the game. This balances out the pure calculation of deck building and sequencing play with a healthy dose of imagination.
I grew up eschewing randomness at all costs, being fiercely competetive and hating the idea of winnin/losing as a result of something as seemingly arbitraty as a die roll, or card draw (heck I even refused to play 30 seconds with a die). But I've come to love randomness. When I sit down to play a game of magic my skill level is highly important in the outcome of the game, but so are the cards which I draw. That means that people of all skill levels can sit down and compete with each other. In chess a 300-500 ratings difference basically means that one player has close to 20% chance of winning. For a game that I would want to pursue as an after work activity those odds really just aren't good enough for me.
1. So I guess I've learnt that I need to keep in mind that I pursue any hobby purely for enjoyment.
2. That it's easy to lose sight of that. That, for me, enjoyment must come from more than just winning.
3. That I can't get this from chess in the long run. That I am not willing to put the time and effort into any game where it is 100% skill vs skill, as this is too competetive.
4. The games I play need some element of randomness to bridge those skill gaps, and add flavour to encounters.
5. Theme is so important, to keep my imagination involved in the game, not just calculation. Why should I just move abstracts around a board when I can play against other people, while imagining a small family of dwarfs, collecting goods, tending their farm in the forest, growing their little family, and building their home in the caves they dig out of the mountain.
I still play the odd game of chess on lichess.com, but every time I do all of the above comes back to me, and I remember why I stopped playing chess.
What got me from 900-1100 was playing carefully and evaluating my move before I played it(can this piece be taken/is there a mating strategy for my opponent), to prevent blunders
What got me from 1100-1400 was learning two solid openings (Ruy lopez for both sides/ Grunfeld against 1.d4)
1400-1600 was doing hella tactic puzzles, and putting myself in my opponent's position and looking for his tactics
1600-1800 i have no idea, just practice i guess
John Bartholomew's strategy videos and Saint Louis Chess Club opening videos were probably the best resources for me to learn
But then I lose because I've made an obvious mistake during the opening...
I've played a lot of people that go down 12 moves of an opening they remembered only to falter as soon as their memory runs out. It's very common, and you will always run out.
One thing I've found it quite good for is _learning to lose_. I _hate_ losing at games, even now, but, the nice thing about being a beginner chess player is that there are bazillions of people better than you to play against, and lose to!.
On the topic of improving, as others have said, the training puzzles on lichess are great. I've also got quite a lot of value out of [0] chessable.com . Nice little site, teaches you some basic openings which are really fun when people fall into the traps!
I’m not an amazing player at all, just sheltered.
I think just losing regularly helps to make it easier? Maybe. I still don't like it very much! Good luck :)
I am not sure how this fact lines up well with a 40yo lifestyle. This is usually the time of life where you are raising kids or making career moves, so I am not sure just how many available hours one has for study.
I came to this conclusion in college. It was hard enough learning math, thermo, physics, etc., and seemed a complete waste of time to get better at chess. The former consumed my mental energies.
(Obligatory "I didn't downvote you")
I have found it interesting to write software to play chess for me. The last few times I tried to play chess, my mind would just drift off designing a program to do it so I wouldn't have to bother.
I don't play video games, either. It takes about 3 minutes for one to bore me to tears. Part of that is I had a job in college testing video games - that sure ruined it for me.
The universe is full of puzzles that mean something to solve. Why not work on those instead? Why would those be less interesting than a contrived set of rules?
Because those rules are designed (often iteratively) to be interesting. They have exactly the right rate of progress/reward to be engaging. In some research areas today it takes two years of postgrad work just to get to the point where you're capable of doing original research - and there's no guarantee that you'll produce anything useful even then.
Acquiring mastery of a skill is a fun experience, and drives a lot of human activity. Certainly most e.g. programming language designers seem to enjoy the skill and craft of doing it; I'm not at all convinced that that's not the real motivation for that activity, however much people claim to be driven by practical value or monetary reward.
Ultimately meaning is what we make it. People tend to enjoy games because they feel that they reflect something meaningful; a game is a "toy model" of reality, but toy models can be useful. There's a reason we consider these games to be interesting challenges and measures of progress for the same AIs that we also want to be able to e.g. drive cars.
Because "contrived rules" are a kind of work of art. This is especially evident in modern board games as the concept of "contrived rules" is refined more and more and in ever branching variations.
Can you give some examples? Most things I'm aware of that could be classified as puzzles require, at the very least, enormous time investment, if not specialization, and there's often lots of drudgery along the way.
Sure.
How can I get the D programming language to generate even faster code?
How can I take this piece of existing, working, kludgy code, and make it simple and elegant?
How do I distill the advantages of D into an elevator pitch?
What is the right combination of aftermarket parts that will make the engine in my Dodge deliver the characteristics I want?
How do I salvage a relationship with a valued colleague that has gone awry?
How do I optimize my investments to maximize returns?
I could go on forever.
It's just like doing hard physical work. Ya need a rest afterwards.
Chess isn't mindless entertainment. I don't see it as rest.
Solutions to difficult problems often come to me while I'm jogging. Something something about increased blood flow to brain? Yesterday I went out for a long walk, and thought of a much simpler solution than one I was going to implement. A very worthwhile walk!
>> last few times I tried to play chess, my mind would just drift off designing a program to do it so I wouldn't have to bother.
I do find a good game of chess to be enjoyable, though.
Chess is an utterly unforgiving game: I have played many more hours of things like Magic: the Gathering in my life, the creator of which quite rightly understood that adding variance to a game means lower skilled players actually have a chance (and some actual fun) against higher skilled ones. Navigating a child's demands that you "play your hardest" against them can be quite difficult. The thing I hate most about chess is that you can play well, perhaps for _weeks_ in a correspondence game, and then one mistake undoes it all, with no hope of coming back (but then again, never resign).
The lessons you need to learn are all very valuable: the pure skill of calculation is extremely difficult but if you can teach yourself to concentrate, visualise positions and juggle the variations, I think these are actually brain powers you can take into other aspects of your life.
The rote learning aspects aren't that fun, but again, being able to memorise literally hundreds of branching openings not only buys you free wins, but teaches you a lot of patience and general schemes for memorization (or so I imagine, I am terrible at this, especially on shorter time controls).
Learning to lose is very difficult, but the one kindness chess does is that there is (at lower levels of play) almost always a reason your lose.
The interplay of tactics and strategy is very satisfying, knowing when to use your instinct or general heuristics, instead of when to brute force calculate a move, is again the type of skill you find yourself more aware of in other pursuits.
The best thing about learning chess in 2019 though is there is so much great content. Thousands of hours of stuff from the St Louis and Atlanta Chess Clubs, coverage of every major tournament on Chess24 and myriad Twitch channels, and games of every possible skill level, variation and time control at your fingertips. ChessKid is also an excellent app + educational environment for kids.
Yes, rate the training puzzles!
(sorry, couldn't resist).
in the early 2000s internet poker starting getting more and more popular and more and more knowledge was made available because of the internet. more and more players trained on the internet began showing up to live tournaments.
a lot of the "live" pros hated the way "internet kids" were playing poker but at the same time those internet kids had probably played more hands than most of the live pros did.
in a live setting you're lucky to get 30 hands an hour. probably more average would be 10-15. meanwhile players online were getting anywhere from 75-90 hands an hour.... per table. okay players probably could get to 4 tables with no trouble while at the extreme end there were people 24-tabling. 24*75 = 1800. that's about 60 hours at best for a live player.
I know the rules, I can methodically scan every position, but I feel that I can never really think more than one step ahead. I just start feeling restless, get overwhelmed at the board and my processing slows to a crawl.
I might look calm and focused on the outside, but inside I'm fidgety and thinking "what the fuck am I looking at? how can I ever think of a larger strategy when I can barely think of a move that doesn't get my pieces killed?" It feels like I become a very slow triply-nested for-loop.
I work at a FANG and am very good at my job, so don't need the validation. Still a bummer. Wish I was better.
Also, a game of chess is long and can get boring: in the beginning of a game people usually play "by the book", trying to adhere to some basic principles (control the center of the table, pull out your pieces into play, protect your king by castling, etc).
In the middle of the game, as long as you managed to avoid losing any piece so far, is where the actual play takes place, when you try to gain material advantage and this is where I spend most of my thinking fuel.
The end of the game, again, depends very much on training and experience, because there are known strategies how one should play with pawn and king against king for example. Of course, some of the strategies are obvious, like promoting your pawn to a queen and mate your opponent, but others are not, like gaining the opposition to be able to promote/block the pawn.
I don't have too much patience playing whole games myself, but I like training my mind by making chess puzzles/tactics daily, which I'd recommend you try yourself: your offered a position where you know that after a few moves you have to end up in advantage.
You whole post is about seeking validation.
Personally, I love being a novice. I intentionally seek it since mid 20 (being ~40 years old now), by learning a new game, mastering a microcontroller or programming language, etc.
I still don't notice a "slow-down" in my learning process... but maybe because learning is a process that I train continuously?
What I do notice is a mechanical-learning slow-down, for example, if I pick a new videogame, it takes a while until I "catch-up" with aiming, or button sequences, etc.
Though I have read that learning to play a musical instrument helps as well.
Flying as a Challenge
If you go to the local general aviation airport, you'll find lots of guys in their 60s and 70s who are tackling challenges that are way beyond your own capabilities. Certainly these guys are much sharper and in better mental and physical shape than the average person of their age. Flying requires mental acuity and real-time decision-making that seems to keep pilots young. A lot of older folks seem to be preoccupied with trivial matters, such as organizing their junk mail or minutia within their childrens' lives. Old pilots don't seem to be subject to these preoccupations and the topics of their conversations have more in common with young pilots than with other old people.
The very process of training to be a pilot is challenging and inherently motivational. The FAA sets up milestones and checkpoints: Private Pilot, Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot, Multi-Engine Rating, Helicopter Rating, Seaplane Rating, Airline Transport Pilot. A desire to excel was probably a factor in your ability to retire young. If you have that desire, the FAA rating system gives you a lot of opportunities to improve and prove yourself.
One of the tragedies of getting older is the narrowing of one's activities. An elementary school kid will write poetry, paint, play music, do math, write prose, etc. An adult will do three or four things that he or she can do at a professional level of competence. These are the things for which an adult draws a paycheck or these are the things that the adult finds rewarding because they can be done so well.
Learning to fly is an opportunity to go back to elementary school. No human is a natural aviator. Everything has to be learned, which by itself is stimulating.
Not only can it sometimes be a very task-saturating environment (especially single-pilot IFR flying), but the added "nerves" of flying make it a perfect combo for you to become hyper-aware of yourself in a way that I hadn't yet experienced. The most interesting part of the whole ordeal for me has been to see my progression in terms of how my brain could handle the tasks at hand. At first, I remember intently listening to the weather report on the radio only to IMMEDIATELY forget the information I had just heard, such was my cognitive overload. Now, I can be in the middle of clouds, seeing nothing, punching information into the flight computer while hand flying the plane listening to ATC in one ear and talking to my passenger on the other. To have been acutely aware how slowly my brain adapted to the new demands I was placing on it was incredibly interesting.
Under Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) Part 61, a student pilot is required to have a minimum of 40 flight hours to take the practical exam ("checkride") but also an endorsement from your Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI) that you are ready. I have heard that the U.S. average is 70-something hours. An alternative is FAR Part 141, which has a highly structured curriculum that the FAA approves. Part 141 programs have lower required minimums for flight hours. Part 61 flight schools have more of a mom & pop feel.
Elsewhere I wrote a detailed breakdown of the possibilities for Part 61 training that may be useful to you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HuntsvilleAlabama/comments/6u1ytj/w...
A decent approximation of your cost function under Part 61 is
cost = dual_hours * (ac_rate + cfi_rate) +
solo_hours * ac_rate +
medical_exam_fee +
written_exam_fee +
checkride_fee +
gear
Your next great influence is over total flight hours that you will require, solo and dual (i.e., with a CFI). Flying frequently will minimize forgetting and retraining. Be diligent about required reading and study that your instructor will assign. Rehearse maneuvers, checklists, procedures, etc. ("chair flying") at home before and after lessons, on bad-weather days, and whenever you can.
Being a member of AOPA can get you a discount on your knowledge test ("written") fee. Gear may include a headset, view-limiting device (hood or foggles), E6B, plotter, flight bag, and Electronic Flight Bag software such as DroidEFB or ForeFlight. If you're concerned about cost, borrow or buy used. You can get a decent headset new for under $200. Foggles, E6B (a circular slide rule), and plotter each go for less than $30 new.
The checkride fee you're probably stuck with ($400 to $800) because an FAA contractor known as a Designated Pilot Examine (DPE) will have to conduct your checkride and judge whether you performed the required tasks and maneuvers according to the Airman Certification Standards (ACS), and there are only so many DPEs per geographic area. You may be able to shop around for the medical exam fee ($100 to $200), but similarly you have to visit a physician with the Aviation Medical Examiner (AME) designation to get your medical certificate ("medical").
Good luck! Pilots always love talking about flying, so come back with more questions.
I believe I picked up on this site from HN years ago and I found it to be a great resource. Easy to digest a lot of the basic concepts to improve your play.
Edit: I never played online which might be a problem. Not having a physical board and another human present really throws me off, or else I wonder if I would still play
So far, it seems, not that good... Chess is a lot tougher to learn than I initially thought.
Back in the day I was pretty good at Warcraft 2 - solo and missions. I have a friend that never lost to me - not even once, although later I found I was close on two occasions to beat him. In the end I lost interest to play with him because in a way I would know the outcome.