Becoming a Chess Grandmaster
nextlevelchess.blog
nextlevelchess.blog
I know that Hacker News likes the idea that if you work hard enough then anything is possible [especially when there's so many easily available resources], but when it comes to becoming a grandmaster it has to be said that it's painstakingly hard. If you actually intend to become a grandmaster you'll essentially have to make your full life be devoted to chess for years. We're talking about making it your full-time job for at least 10 years. Yes, that's how hard it is. Today there are countless of IMs (the title just below GM) that has played since they were small kids, won a bunch of tournaments when they were teenagers and yet they realize that becoming a GM is so much work that it's not worth it.
If you like chess, then play chess! It's a fun game with an amazing depth and a huge player base. But if you're just starting out: Please forget about having "becoming a grandmaster" as a goal.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Only with age I can appreciate how true that quote is. There was an article that came up not long ago about GMs selling games for others to earn their GM norms. And the sad truth is being GM in chess doesn't put a food on the table.
The very peak of the players can make a living some as coaches or streamers but not everyone can be a 'winner'.
> ..seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
I don’t know, their fans complain quite loudly.
That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.
When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.
You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.
Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.
Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”
but studying hard topics can teach you thinking tactics for analyzing problems and looking for thr big picture.
I mean... I am charitably trying to find interpretation/context in which this is meaningfully true, and failing. In which way is bitcoin more "computer money" than any other money these days?
I purchase things, pay my bills, obtain payment, invest, and do all my transactions at least 95% digitally, with "computer money".
Uncharitably, I could call Bitcoin "that, but less practical / more wasteful". Charitably, I could say "There are specific goals/circumstances where Bitcoin has benefits".
But I feel it's decades late to be "first iteration of computer money", unless there's some squinting and extremely specific ad-hoc defining that I haven't imagined. Even the "Money" part (as practical transactional currency) is these days increasingly less relevant,by proponents and pundits alike, as opposed to "investment vehicle" or "storage of value".
(as for chess, I don't know; I gave up when I realized how much memorization, as opposed to developing of understanding, was involved to get much better; it may indeed enable self-knowledge and mold character at some level beyond the ones I've achieved. Therefore, I cannot contribute to discussion on whether Chess is practical/efficient/meaningful way to grow those characteristics - i.e. hammering rocks for 5,000hrs probably grows character at some level but may not be sufficiently practical/efficient to matter. I respect it like a do Golf - it takes immense skill, dedication, and investment to develop it to a high level, and world-class players are incredibly good at it; but it's not a skill I desire to grow myself anymore).
Emphasis is on how minting, the creation of new money, is strictly enforced by the protocol (software), and decentralized. Further, it is hard-capped.
As such, it's money that is born digitally, natively. This extends to ownership, which is just a bunch of private keys.
But let's agree to disagree there. Even then, money has multiple roles: unit of account, store of value.
Currently, Bitcoin plays the role of storing value. Like a savings account, or "digital gold". Not for payments. It might play a payment role in the future on layer 2, or it might not. Too soon to tell.
The first iteration of computer money is called 'regular money'. Nobody uses cash anymore, we all use computer money.
Hmm… any way we can turn chess into a proof of work algorithm? xD
I guess it was always a thing even back then?
And in those jobs being good at chess is only part of the equation. You have to be personable, someone that people aspire to. Physical attractiveness is also never a bad thing in the world of streaming. I once chatted with concert violinist. She was not happy about trends in the soloist community. "The moment I saw an exposed midrift in a concert hall, I knew I would never be a soloist."
I used to work with an ex-military guy (extremely bright, hard working, excellent leader, etc. etc.).
He was about 64 inches (1.63 meters) tall, balding, and not the handsomest fella. He told me point blank: "I was never going to become a general or achieve any other extremely high rank simply because I didn't have 'the look' or physical stature of a general."
Compare Canada where, beyond not having photos, even gender-based pronouns have been removed from performance reports in order that reviewers not risk gender bias.
If there was one, there was at least a ton of exceptions to the rule, male and female.
EDIT: Though I didn't work with any generals. There are only several hundred U.S. generals, and that number is capped.
That would be gender-blind but also ignores the fact that absolute scale actually matters in war sometimes - running speed, ability to lift and load heavy tank shells for a few hours etc.
One might argue that actual physical strength doesn't matter much. One way to check this claim would be to look at recently granted medals for valor, and see how many of them are related to absolute (not relative) physical prowess.
Indeed, the higher up you go, the more your job becomes about leading and the less it becomes about individual feats of strength. I think you're thinking about the military a little bit wrong here -- this isn't the Roman era (when centurions led from the front and had to be legitimate physical badasses). Being higher up in the military nowadays is a lot more akin to being a paper pusher director at a company.
Medical and fitness are different things. Lots of people can pass the fitness tests but still flunk out for medical reasons. Diabetics. People who get cancer. Failing eyesight. Sever allergies. It is very possible to ace the fitness tests while still failing the medical.
Take Thatcher or Merkel. Both women for whom this arguably matters even more, not attractive, and not even coming from a background that lends itself naturally to climbing hierarchies. Kohl, Merkel's mentor used to often refer to her as his "Mädchen", ('girl', but diminutive, only used for children) and she basically back-stabbed him and took control of the entire party.
There's definitely ways for unattractive or more generally, people who nobody expects to rise to power to do exactly that.
This New Yorker profile from a few years ago is a long read but very much worth it if you want to get a overview. The beginning recapitulates a lot about her childhood so you might want to skip that part if you're only interested in her career.
That's life in general. Even at my company when choosing photos of people to profile to for recruitment posts on LinkedIn, it's pretty clear they lean towards attractive people.
I also notice that with Company Profile page, where who they show is not really indicative of who comprises the company.
There have been several studies on this. Apparently being an attractive woman is a net negative when it comes to being hired by other women (6% fewer callbacks than the same resume with less attractive photo attached in one particular study).
https://www.insider.com/how-chess-was-more-sexist-than-its-p...
Another good example is Xyla Foxlin, who walks a similar line with a YouTube engineering/maker channel and has been very explicit about her approach: "I refuse to “act more like a man” in order to achieve legitimate and respectable success in the professional world. I happen to be someone who embraces her femininity and feels powerful in cute shoes and sparkly makeup, and I don’t see how any of that makes me less of an engineer." [0]
[0]: https://medium.com/1517/beauty-and-the-invisible-beast-c2a8d...
Similarly, a Brigadier General is not the same rank as a General, despite some commonality in word choice between the two ranks.
"These titles are sometimes criticized and some female players elect not to take them, preferring to compete for open titles. For example, Grandmaster Judit Polgár, in keeping with her policy of playing only open competitions, never took a women's title."
You mean like this? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/715141
Frighteningly apropos
EDIT: After becoming the greatest chessmaster of his time, Morphy retired from chess at 22. He then had a rejected marriage proposal, failed legal practice, and died at age 47.
Put another way, after abandoning chess at 22, he lived another 25 years, fell in love, and was given wide latitude to live a life of comfort and pursuing his passions owing to his family's wealth. Unfortunately he developed something akin to paranoid schizophrenia before the world knew how to effectively treat it.
Really hard to sum up an entire lifetime in a couple sentences. Pointing out only a few bad things is just as misleading as only pointing out a few good ones.
In my family I had/have two people who plaid chess well (2000-2300 range) without wasting their lives in any way. They held full time jobs, had families and enjoyed the game at a pretty serious level. If anything chess helped them stay mentally active and engaged well into their 90's.
The reason it is hard work is because beyond a point the preparation is a lot about memorizing and remembering a lot of lines variations not improving on your understanding or theory. That's also why older you grow it is harder to be at the top, understanding is not diminished at 40+, however memorizing abilities are.
You will have to understand Paul morphy story to understand to why he said something like that.
He was the world best by a good distance and he quit playing at 22. He had struggles and was consumed by it. After spending most of your formative years and not finding the meaning in the life despite having won pretty much everything can be life altering. He is known as the pride and sorrow of chess with good reason.
From physics genius to dissapearing one day with no known fate.
I'd like to see some evidence of that.
However, what does decrease with age is physical stamina. And classical chess tournaments, oddly, take a lot more physical stamina than you might think.
Counterintuitively, the whole faster/blitz chess systems have been good for older chess players.
Also certain types of information is more easier learnt when you are younger like multiple languages. I believe there is research on learning pedagogies for senior citizens having different approaches than children factoring in the ability to learn quickly.
Most mathematicans and many other scientists achieve the peek before 40, while there are exceptions like Euler or gauss it is not common.
Even in tech you find a lot more younger workers than other more stable technical fields as the learning curve is recurring and steeper than in other fields
I wouldn't disagree there is more physical stamina required for tournaments, however I doubt it so difficult for players in their 40s/50s cannot manage it without loosing competitive advantage.
In context the quote has different connotations. However, having taken it at face value, I stand by my comment.
Nothing in the Morphy quote explicitly addresses the technicalities of becoming a world class chess player.
In general playing chess well means something else to the general public than to a GM level player. My comment was made having the former interpretation in mind - Morphy was obviously talking from his (very different) point of view.
In his defense I don't think morphy intended for people outside the chess world as a general statement.
And yet you still claim that your point is correct if quote is taken out of context.
Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
> Its shifting goalpost fallacy.
There's no fallacy here. I have my opinion, I stand by it regardless of the quote's context. I understand that Morphy didn't mean what I thought he meant. It's just that my opinion on the usefulness of chess is still the same.
The quote is from Paul Morphy, the best player of the 19th century. He practically invented playing chess well. And he hated it, he felt he should have become a lawyer and did something useful with his life.
When he was still actively playing, he seemed almost unbeatable, and nobody understood why. Somehow Morphy intuitively knew when to start an attack and when he did, it magically always worked out, while other top players at that time often saw their attacks turn into nothing and would soon lose afterwards. It took a decade until an a dedicated studier of his game, Wilhelm Steinitz, figured out the logic behind it. His theory of positional play changed the way people looked at chess and meant the start of the modern chess era.
Morphy himself didn't live to see this, after quitting chess he became increasingly schizophrenic and eventually died penniless and alone.
The point was taken, see my comment below. I didn't know the context behind the quote, I understand that Morphy didn't mean it the way I took it.
Nevertheless, I think that under the general interpretation of what it means to know chess well (which is surely different from Morphy's), I stand by my idea that knowing chess well can be a positive thing.
I think so. I'm getting a lot of flak over it though :-<
> If we raise the bar to 2500+ maybe you will agree?
I can't say. I do have an acquaintance who is at ~2600 level who is also a well adapted guy. He's not a full time player anymore, though.
I have no opinion on whether chess performance at a GM level is bad for you. All I wanted to say was that you can get pretty far with chess (I think a level of 2000-2300 qualifies as pretty far for the general population) without it affecting your life negatively.
2600 rating on sites like lichess or chess24 is much more plausible, it corresponds to roughly 2150-2300 fide rating.
Yes. He's a pretty well known Australian player, not sure how active he is anymore though. Now has a full time academic career.
Edit:
After verifying on the FIDE website, I see his ranking is around 2500 now. He is a GM though.
Although seemingly not so far away by sheer number, the 2000-2300 elo range is worlds apart from 2500+ (GM) levels, in terms of how much effort (and talent) is required.
The Wikipedia section about his abandonment of chess is tragic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy#Abandonment_of_che...).
I know that. My point was that a score of 2000-2300 can still qualify as knowing chess well. Didn't know Morphy was a top level player when I made the comment.
We always instead played checkers, for real - always encouraging and teaching, but no patronizing wins for me - it was a long time until I could actually take a few games. Great memories, and he was gone too soon.
I did play some in HS & college, very much enjoyed some intense games, and still think it was good advice.
The Paul Morphy quote is spot on, save maybe for great champions like Garry Kasparov, who also went to to greater things. I suppose the same could be said about many pursuits where only a few get to truly earn a living, such as acting, music, sports - it becomes what you make of it but perhaps chess is a bit more extremely consuming?
Mid/high level players to progress up are in large degree forced to study positions memorise lines etc. To large extend its a competitive memorisation game.
This is natural step in high level chess, its like a precopmutated hash table, the more upfront work you can precomputate the less time you need to spend over the board on that move.
I play chess for fun and as casual hobby, and i think its a great way to exercise your brain. Thinking about board and evaluation positions. It translates into real world too.
Its also one of the last few things i can do and not get distracted by anything else.
I'm really struggling to parse this. Can you reword it?
This is what the mentor in the movie means: some become good, some foolishly pursue nothing. The game can be addictive. But to be great is the rarest thing.
Wasted in what sense? Aren’t we all playing made up games and solving artificial problems at the end of the day? Most GMs probably aren’t doing it to make money, they get a similar thrill from it as, say, a mathematician gets from understanding and solving deep math problems.
Very apt analogy. Most math faculty members in my department stopped being productive in the last third of their career. After a while, it just gets old. Proving yet another theorem no longer excites them.
At least they collect a decent paycheck, though.
The reason the contributions usually drop for mathematicans is less to do with losing interest and more that they simple don't have the mental capacity they did in their 20's and 30s into the 50s .
Maths is very tough field to do research in.
There is more to life than being a chess player or a mathematican. His point is more to do focusing/obsessing on a single narrow subject, given morphy's own experience I would say he is more than qualified to make that comment.
A long time ago, someone characterised chess as a DOS on the mind.
Hikaru says becoming a GM to like getting two PhDs.
If studying and playing tons of chess very well brings you joy, by all means go for it. The wasted life part seems very harsh and judgy.
Two PhDs sounds like a lot. After all, most GMs get the title before their twenties. But such comparisons are very hard anyway. But it is also possible to get the title while pursuing another career path, you don't have to focus 100% on chess.
As you say, the wasted life part is way too harsh and based on only some madly crazy examples in chess history.
I believe his claim: if we tried, we could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius".
László Polgár raised his children focusing on chess. His two daughters became the best and second-best female chess players in the world.
Judith being the youngest had that kill instinct at an early age.
The sibling dynamic is something I did not appreciate until I had kids of my own.
I'm the oldest child, and my youngest sibling definitely doesn't have, "that kill instinct".
In comparison, Hou Yifan, the 2nd strongest female ever, women's world champion at the age of 16 (!), was #59 in the world at her peak rating in March 2015, and is now #81. (Although she's been busy with university studies the last few years)
Judit is still very involved in chess, and is an excellent online commentator. e.g.
Norway Chess 2020 with Kramnik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5h-lj6z8x0
2020/21 Candidates, Round 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVsAfGhoeWk
See "Women's Highest Ever" rating table on the right: https://2700chess.com/women
I don't. Intelligence is partially heritable, which is also the problem with his experiment. He was himself a leading intellectual, the probability that his daughters will inherit his high intelligence is pretty good. (it's not that much known about the mother, but I assume he married someone with above average intelligence as well).
There is likely tremendous potential that we as a society waste by not providing resources and opportunities for and and encouragement of better education at earlier stages of life.
Personally, I learned to read by 3 years old, but not because I was a prodigy -- but because my mom spent numerous hours encouraging me and building in me a love of it. I am confident more than 50% of children can learn to read by age 5 - meanwhile in the US we don't expect that kind of success until after a few years of schooling.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-man-vs-the-machine-...
Well that's bullshit.
The main reasons adults don't start chess and reach grandmaster levels at the same rate as those starting as children is the lack of free time and the lack of desire to put in the effort. Those two things eliminates the vast vast vast vast majority of adults, but it's not a factor in your hypothetical.
If some adult wants to spend 10 years of their life mastering chess, and didn't have to worry about work, life, dating, children, etc, they'd have about the same chance as a child of becoming a Grandmaster eventually. The chance is still extremely low for each, of course.
A friend of mine stopped playing chess competitively at the age of 50 because, as he said, he didn't have anymore the necessary physical stamina to learn and practice for hours and hours every day. Age /is/ a factor, even if the external conditions are identical.
That's logically not true. It's not like there's a huge pool to choose from. There are less than 1800 GMs right now in the entire world.
And it also depends on what we mean by all this. Learning the pieces? Most children learn the rules of the game at some point, I'd imagine. That takes a way too many people.
Actually starting to try? There are a few examples I can find of people being around ~1700 rating when aged 18+ and making it to GM (Jonathan Hawkins, Jacob Aagaard, John Shaw)
Ye Jiangchuan didn't learn the moves until they were 17. Still young, but not crazy young.
> There are tens of thousands of adults learning the rules of chess each and every day.
How many find they have a massive passion for chess, without having a job, a significant other (or pursuit of one), any worries about money/bills/etc, or have children or family to take care of? That, and they can't have found their passion for chess during their childhood.
Probably almost zero people fit that bill. You basically need a lottery winner or trust fund person who doesn't care about having an abnormal life of chess with minimal upside in the small chance they actually reach the GM level.
But those are all not related to the fact that they have an adult brain, which is my point.
You're going to have real trouble finding an adult that is sufficiently motivated to become a chess GM, has an enormous amount of free time, willing to dedicate the next 10 years of their life purely to chess, etc.
I'd wager that free time (and overall lack of responsibilities) is the vast vast vast vast majority of what factors into children excelling at chess.
Am I a bit off when I say "they'd have about the same chance as a child", all else the same? Maybe. But it's certainly closer to reality than the original post I responded to.
I don't agree, but I cannot prove my position. It's an interesting question that also applies to other fields (music etc.). My opinion is that when a child starts a certain activity at a young age, that activity "burns" its patterns into their brain like a language. I see that effect with one of my kids: although we started learning to play an instrument at the same time (and I can guarantee you with 100% certainty that he didn't practice more than I in terms of number of hours), his way how he handles the instrument and the music is completely different from mine: completely natural (like a mother tongue), recognizing patterns without needing to think about them,... I am certainly not the first who made this observation. The question is why chess should be different.
I'm one who has excelled in a handful of hobbies to pretty high levels while holding down a day job. Started golf at 23 and 4 years later I'm a low-single digit handicap. Started skiing around the same time and I'm working up do doing backflips off jumps, while already being able to do several tricks off jumps, slide rails, and drop moderate sized cliffs.
I'm not trying to brag, and I'm not saying that those are even extraordinary or comparable to anything professional. But I've had people legit tell me that the only chance I have of being a scratch golfer or do a backflip on skis was if I started as a kid. Which is obviously ridiculous to me, and I'll prove them wrong in the next few years.
MY POINT: Take a bunch of adults like me and give them the resources to practice golf or skiing all day every day? You'll eventually get someone who can go pro (which I'm saying is the equivalent of being a grandmaster for this conversation). At what rate would they go pro compared to kids? Who can say. I'd wager it's a lot closer than people in this thread are thinking.
We will see :)
But, as I mentioned in my other comment, don't underestimate the physical impact of age on your body. A young body can tolerate and recover from a lot of physical self-inflicted abuse and overtraining. Take a child: starts training skiing at the age of 10, wins a gold medal at the age of 20, body starts to degrade at age 25 (joints, testosterone level,...). Try the same as an adult at the age of 30 or 40 with a body that has been already degrading for one decade. It's good that you have learned several tricks as an adult, but will your body tolerate the literal mistreatment that is necessary to go from "several tricks" or even backflips to "professional level"? A pro is not somebody who can do a complicated trick on a good day. A pro has must be able to reliably perform the trick dozens of times in a competition. This last step from 90% good to 100% perfect is the hard one.
These are just a different species of human.
The "I'm intelligent and I know the rules" is rated 800.
The "I'm pretty good at chess" is rated 1200.
A 1600 player will beat a 1200 player 9/10 times.
A 2000 player will beat a 1600 player 9/10 times.
A 2400 player (grandmaster) will beat a 2000 player 9/10 times.
People like Eric Rosen and Levy Rozman base their entire career around studying, playing, and teaching chess on Twitch and Youtube. Hours and hours a day. They are really, really good and play in competitions.
But even they are not at the grandmaster level.
EDIT: To use an analogy, reaching grandmaster status is comparable to playing in the NBA.
I think Hikaru plays him at rook+knight odds or something.
A 3544 engine (Stockfish) will beat a 2882 player 10/10 times.
So 8 wins and 2 draws is winning 9/10.
---
A 660 point difference between Stockfish and Carlsen should be a 1 - 10^(-662/400) = 98% win rate for Stockfish.
More than likely, that's 96% win, 4% draw, 0% loss.
Or even Minefield: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EtKWLgOX60U (I don’t think Nakamura is playing optimally w.r.t. being in a guessing spot, but he’s fast)
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
When you're young, to some degree, anything is possible. But everything isn't. You gotta pick how you spend your time and once that choice is made, the time doesn't come back.
Then someone gave me the book Word Freak and I lost any interest in playing in a tournament. The people that win Scrabble tournaments memorize dictionaries as their full-time job hoping to make $20,000 in tournament prize money per year. I can't compete with that.
It's still amazing to me though that the winner of the 2015 French Scrabble Tournament didn't speak French.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378...
All of his strategy tools and anagram skills would've helped him but he still had to memorize 386,000 French words that he didn't know the meaning of.
Nowadays that I do it as my main job, it is nut as fun. Once you have to learn yet another framework or technology, it becomes "a chore" (that I am paid to do.)
I also play chess as a very light hobby. I am only ~1750 at Lichess and would be happy to be better, but apparently I am at the point that to improve I would have to dedicate a lot of time to read books and memorize openings/middle games etc. I decided not to do it because I would not enjoy it at that point.
I know the chances of me being on the PGA tour or being an Olympic level skier are basically 0%, but that doesn't stop me from improving myself and even competing in golf tournaments sometimes (I'm not a good enough freestyle skier yet to compete, but that doesn't mean I think it's impossible).
It's not about winning the tournaments, it's about constantly improving myself and testing myself at the highest level I can qualify for.
It's so confusing to me when I see people completely write themselves off. "Oh I'm 30, there's no way I'll be [a scratch golfer, able to do a backflip on skis, etc]". Maybe it won't happen, but why completely write yourself off before you even try?
But if improving oneself involves doing lots of practice that itself isn't fun, then that's exceeded the limit of what I'm willing to do recreationally. I'm only putting that level of effort in something I don't find fun into one thing in my life: work.
I was more talking about the attitude of the person I responded to. They saw someone world class perform and then "stopped trying for any of the harder tricks." I don't understand that attitude. It's basically "I don't think I'll ever be world class, so why try anything at all?"
Sometimes, you can try hard and just be not very good at something, and it was witnessing his performance which made me understand that "middling decent" might need to be a lifetime pre-occupation to attain, for me.
I played pretty high level scrabble and devoted 3 years of full-time effort to it (while holding down a menial job). I wasn’t particularly talented but I was willing to put the work in. Until one day I woke up and realized it was a total waste of time and moved on with my life.
During that time I heard it put even more pessimistically about chess. That 10 years of dedicated effort allowed you to maybe see most of the game.
There are people who devote their whole lives to Scrabble, poker, chess, backgammon, basketball etc. Many are horribly adjusted people and some of them end up incredibly skilled at a game. And a few of those people can end up making a living at it.
The average person just can’t comprehend the skill gap between the people who live their lives around a game and themselves.
There was an NBA benchwarmer named Brian Scalabrine who said about good YMCA basketball players, “I’m closer to LeBron James than you are to me.”
It’s nearly impossible to even fathom how good truly top-level game players are.
But from my position, it's easy to watch the pros play and think "wow, that looks doable in 10 years of hard work". Yet so many people have put in that much work and still are effectively as far away from those pros as I am.
It's the unknown unknown. I used to play a lot of ball and lucked into playing pick up with some good college players and even ex-pros who played over seas. Until I had that experience, I had no idea how much better they were.
There's also nuance in the sport that requires knowledge to see the difference between top players. For example, when I started training BJJ all black belts were the same - as in they easily kicked my ass. After a few years of training, they still easily kick my ass, but I can feel the difference and have some idea just from our rolling which ones are better than the others.
Scalabrine closer to LeBron James than the likes of me are to him? He's a lot closer. But I considered it an absolute privilege to be on the court with these guys. Fact is, they were actually really nice. I got a compliment on my rebounding. The second time I walked into the gym when this NBA player I'd played against was there, he came over and said hi. He came over to say hi.
A rating difference of 400 points means that the better player will score 0.9 on average (where 0=loss, 0.5=draw, 1=win).
A typical hobby player might have a rating of 1600. A good player at a chess club will have a rating of around 2000, meaning that they beat the hobby player around 90% of the time. A low-level grandmaster will have a rating around 2400, meaning that they beat the strong club player 90% of the time. The top few chess players in the world have ratings around 2800, meaning that they beat low-level grandmasters 90% of the time.
You might think the top human players are nearly perfect, but the top chess engines running on an average desktop computer are probably >800 Elo points above the top humans, and they're getting about 100 Elo points stronger every year, based purely on algorithmic improvements (not computing power).
You would think that a low-level GM would be able to achieve more draws against the super GMs, but somehow the ratings indicate they don't. It may be that the super GMs deliberately avoid drawish lines against much weaker players and try to keep the game complicated.
edit: I would say some (not a lot) great people. I really do think it is an exception, but they are out there.
So with these hand waving assumptions, Brian's comment holds true if the ymca players are <= 84th percentile of basket ball players. Sounds reasonable to me.
There's fewer than 500 players in the NBA. There are hundreds of millions of people in the US (being US-centric initially to try to do the YMCA comparison), so probably a few million that play frequently as amateurs? One in a hundred? Let's call it 3 million out of 300,000,000, to work with relatively round numbers.
So being in the best 1 out of 100 - top 99% - is a z score of 2.3. Being in the best 500 is then much smaller even than THAT! 99.983%, z score of 3.481. The single best one? 99.99997%, z score of 4.991.
So if you define closer by z score, they "good amateur" YMCAer is closer to the worst in the NBA than that person is to Lebron, but I think it's more meaningful to define closer by "how many people stand in between you and them" - and the answer is millions for the amateur.
And I think that shows that work alone only gets you so far compared to talent. If you and a million other amateurs all start putting in ten hour days, the vast majority of you aren't getting to the NBA - it's just not big enough.
But in the absence of a reliable way to measure absolute skill, the z score one does seem about as good as we can get, though it can't truly answer something like "Lebron vs Jordan" - and you also would get different numbers depending on which population you picked. Population of the world, population of the US, population of the basketball-playing world, population of people who play basketball at least once a month? That's gonna change the denominator for the percentiles for the Scalabrines and Lebrons both.
NB: I'm a huge LeBron fan and a huge Magnus fan.
I cannot stress enough how impossible it is for anyone as a late teen or older to decide to become a GM. It has never happened. You might as well be 22 and decide you're going to start training for the olympic ice skating team. It's just not going to happen.
I have been a serious chess amateur for the past 20 years. I am now stronger than I ever have been (mainly because access to training materials has improved greatly in that time), I have no doubt that I could improve more if I devoted time and effort into more focused training like I have done during competitions. I know one or two people like me. I think the thing stopping me and the other people I mention from climbing the Elo ladder is lack of interest and motivation, not ability. You develop different vistas concerns and interests at 35 to 40 than you did at 12 to 20
My point is that with time, it is possible to improve and stating categorically that because no late teenager has ever become a grandmaster, none will sounds wrong. At one time we believed that ladies couldn't become grandmasters, the chinese could not beat westerners, grandmasters could not be minted before the age of 15 etc.
People will think this sounds insane, but it's so true. Honestly top 5% even sounds a bit low.
Everything gets exponentially harder the higher up you get. If you're not dominating immediately you're quite literally never going to reach the very top (Like >0.1% kind of top).
The caveat to this is that it's a year of dedicating yourself to the thing, not doing it on and off casually for a year.
Isn't it possible that superior players simply have "better nerves" and self-confidence that let them stay calm in stressful situations, and avoid mistakes that other players make sooner or later?
This is an absolute mistake and is a bigger reason that he won't become a GM than his age.
Most chess players should NEVER resign. Ever. I mean it.
1) Chess below grandmaster is a game of mistakes.
It's actually one of the things I hate about chess and why I don't regard it as so much of an intellectual pursuit as people think. You can be playing an amazing game and then suddenly one thing you missed will kill you.
GM Ben Feingold has a great quote (paraphrased): "The reason why you are rated 1900 is that you will play a bunch of moves, finally hang a piece and I will beat you. The reason why I am rated 2400 is that Magnus will play 80 moves that are all slightly better than mine and I will lose."
2) Your opponent has to be able to capitalize on the mistake
If you hang a piece, the opponent cannot disregard the fact that it is a trap. At 1400, it's probably a hung piece. At 1900 it has a 40/60 chance of being a trap. At 2100, it has a 60/40 chance of being a trap.
Your opponent doesn't know you made a mistake so don't tell them. Pull out your poker face and play on. I have won countless games that I should have lost because of this.
3) Playing down a piece actually makes you a stronger player
Okay, you're down a piece. Are you just going to sit there and lose? You might as well try something first. Maybe there's a positional upside, maybe the defense got weakened, etc. Sure, you're normally going to lose. However, being down a piece has a way of knocking you out of your normal play style.
4) Being unable to convert an advantage makes the opponent frustrated
The number of people who get complacent after taking a piece is quite large. Lots of people lose after being up a piece because they let down their guard. And then they lose.
And there is nothing more frustrating than being up a piece and playing someone who is mounting an excellent defense. Your instincts are screaming that you shouldn't be having to put in this much effort and you have to resist them.
5) People play computers so often that they forget that playing a human is a completely different game
People get tired. People get frustrated. People get inattentive. People want to go home already.
All of these things can lead to mistake.
Below Grandmaster, chess victories generally go the person who makes the second to last mistake. You're always the last mistake if you resign.
Never resign.
It's not zero-sum though, because as more Chess players enter the ranks the pie itself grows larger, meaning there will be more total players who can attain an Elo of 2,500+ and thus become a Grandmaster.
Zero-sum typically means that the entire pool is of fixed size, but that's not the case here. I'd say that Chess is win-lose but not zero-sum.
I honestly don't understand the "If you work hard enough you can do anything" mindset.
To me it's clearly, obviously, objectively wrong - because otherwise you'd be able to take take absolutely any random child and turn them into a chess prodigy, a musical prodigy, an art prodigy, a literary prodigy, a sports prodigy or a STEM prodigy just by hot housing them.
There's no doubt a lot of talent is wasted by circumstance. But does anyone really believe that at the top levels, hard work will compensate for lack of aptitude?
Edit: Polgar experiment. Inconclusive without a bigger sample and a control group, surely.
I would say something like "get to the 80th percentile at anything" (or even 95th) would be much more accurate, though, that doesn't sound as catchy. Heck, in many areas you don't even need to work _that_ much or hard to get to the top 20% or so, it's just a matter of a reasonably informed and structured approach, exercised over time.
In many areas (sport, art etc.) being in the 80th or even 95th percentile means failure.
They all descibre chess as been what they were introduced and chose to pursue [1], but they were educated in many areas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
I've encountered these people and it's always a case of being insulated from the reality of what the "anything" in question is.
Very true
An uncle of mine is a state chess champion in India, has often reached national level, but finds it hard to compete for this reason.
He says most people who play and win at national level have sponsorships--so they practice chess full time.
So its hard to even become a national level player without doing this either full time, for for many many decades (decades, not years)
Hikaru made a really enlightening video about the economics of pro chess playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hWlbsAVRN0
I could not agree more. You can waste your entire life becoming excellent at chess and that's all you will gain, being excellent at chess. It is a myth that chess makes one smarter or more intelligent at other things in life. The skills are not transferable.
That said, sure, there's a lot to chess that does transfer, such as: learning to concentrate for an extended period of time, accepting losing, learning to consider multiple possible solutions and uncertainty, etc. However, I feel that if one just plays chess and nobody makes some of these connections to real life some of these skills simply don't translate.
My kids and I play almost every day. They love the game, try to win but I taught them not to care about winning or losing at all. It's much healthier that way. There have been cases when one of my kids might lose eight or more games in a day and not win a single one. Someone who is invested in this game could easily crumble and have a bad week because of something like that. In his case, he could not care less, he knows that sometimes you win and other times you do not. The following day he might have ten wins in a row, and that's fun enough.
The other problem is that, in order to ascend through the ranks you have no option but to become a human database. This is what can consume a lifetime of study. Just learning a few openings, counterattacks and end-game strategies can elevate someone in ranking. That isn't super hard and I still consider it fun "sport" chess learning.
To get much beyond that you are going to go up against people who devote every living minute to shoving a database of games and strategies into their brains. Which means you have to do the same. To what end?
I often say that if you are going to study that hard for nothing you might as well study something like medicine and actually get something of value in exchange.
what do you have to say about this article? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200507/the-grand...
Hard work will get you there, and in their case, hard work meant they were literally born and raised as human chess-playing experiments.
I'm very glad (AFAIK) he didn't have to abuse his body etc to get to that point. That doesn't seem worth it.
Chess also has a very decent rating system (either the official FIDE rating or the ratings on online chess servers) so another way of setting yourself an achievable goal is to pick a rating (i.e. 1700 on Lichess) and then work towards that. Rinse and repeat!
Source: Local (non-US) player got one of these.
If you'd be a #100 chess player, you might support yourself with chess somehow (e.g. coaching), but you have to really be at the top and win tournaments to get any meaningful money just by playing; and if you're top 10% then you're likely spending money to play chess and need a different profession to afford that.
So unlike software engineers, you have to be among the few very best in order to make it your profession, that's a big difference.
Anyway, if you want to make chess your profession (you don't need to be a GM to make a living), keep your mind healthy!
I can't recommend enough lichess.
It's been featured on HN numerous times [0]. Will always be free and has an extremely interesting tech stack.
Note: lichess isn't just about playing chess with other people online. They have great "training" section (e.g. how to mate in X moves, pick the best move available, etc). I almost enjoy the training section more than playing against someone else.
Puzzles are good for when you're still learning how to look at basic things: forks, pins, etc. etc. But you need lots of experience in-games (especially with the "lack of knowledge" about whether or not a pin is possible in any position).
Puzzles are much easier than playing a game. Focusing for just 1 to 2 minutes on a particular board state is much less tiring than focusing for an hour over a "Rapid" game.
Many like me enjoy puzzles because it a problem to solve like any other type of pzzule not because it helps in the learning the game.
Knowing that a puzzle(chess or regular) has a solution does not take away the joy of solving it.
Code probably isn't ideal as this is my first time messing with React, but I'm hoping some people find it useful. I need to automate keeping the db updated as well, it's a couple months behind latest lichess open db.
Chess playing ability is not a good measure of intelligence.
In the same way, most of us would never be able to compete at any given physical sport no matter how much time we put in.
Chess playing ability is probably a good correlation with higher intelligence (if intelligence is measured by strong working memory)
I'm happy to read that. So many guys have hard thoughts about women on this topic. I'm nevertheless sad that women are not more present in "guy's stuff". They might reverse this way of thinking and put themselves forward. But the education even in developed countries is still deepening a gap gender. E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
But that's hard to separate from the fact that there are just so many more males in the pool of chess players.
Girls get the message early on that their abilities are unwanted in areas that have traditionally been the province of boys. A bit later many get the message that they are appreciated for the sexual opportunity they represent and their abilities are minimized.
I've read too many stories of women who faced this in STEM subjects, and it is apparently even worse in the gaming community.
This means that you’ll find more males at the tails of the distribution, and guess where the chess champions are.
Speaking of scientific evidence, it is also well documented that men and women have different preferences in activities they like, since the very first few weeks of life. This might also play a role!
Another side of it would also be boys in girls hobbies I think. There is no reason boys can't dance, except cultural. It is perfectly fine sport/art.
I think that one can't exist without another.
I don't know why everyone is so afraid of men and women being different biologically. Men are physically stronger, that's a fact. Why can't other differences exist?
pop gm gm per 1e7
US 333091348 101 3.0
RU 146001137 256 17.5
DE 84070834 96 11.4Hikaru is making inroads with streaming culture, so honestly the group that might know him best are younger people, not even necessarily chess players. He's known for... well, being exactly himself, and it fits perfectly with the rest of streaming culture, so honestly it's a great match.
While we're talking about money, Hikaru has 4.4k subscribers [0] on his twitch channel, of which he makes $2.49 per (so $11,115.36 per month), in case you were curious about what kind of monetization he's able to create out of this.
[0] - https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaruIf you're a novice (or even club) player and you've never seen a video of him solving puzzles, do yourself a favor and watch one [0]. The goal is to make the best move (usually winning a piece or forcing mate) as fast as possible. Chances are he can find the best move before you can even locate both kings on the board, unless you have some practice solving puzzles.
It really seems impossible. The puzzles I'm proud to have solved in a minute or two he will literally solve in 2-3 seconds.
Really drives home the difference between a GM (though Hikaru is fast even for a GM) and the average player.
[0] - https://youtu.be/sPE_ve1CrHo?t=20https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess...
* You have to win a bunch of games against grandmasters, earning 'GM Norms', in order to become a grandmaster yourself.
* It is normal, at some contests, for lower-ranked players to pay to attend, while GMs are paid for attending.
* It is widely rumoured some contests are "norm factories" where fee-paying players get matched up with washed-up GMs who essentially throw the game.
* There are even rumours of contests where an aspiring grandmaster's parents offered cash to their opponents. There are even rumours of contests that took place only on paper.
I submit that you're wrong there: https://maiachess.com/
However, even as a weak player, Maia is exploitable in a way that even novice humans are not. For example, it loves to give up obvious back-rank mates and almost never protects against it (e.g. with h3). It is easy for humans to spot if they are in danger of back-rank mate (especially if you’ve been burned before) and defend against it, so it does not happen much even at low levels. But Maia, game after game, gifts you an obvious mate in 1.
Without knowing much about chess, I'd be inclined to say this can't possibly be true. Predicting human chess moves given an ELO rating sounds like a much easier task than training it to be good at the game. It is a different task alltogether, but until you reach relatively high elo scores, I'd expect a fake human ai would have a much easier time simply because it only needs to plan a few moves ahead to mimic the mindset of a lower level player.
There are many chess AIs on chess.com specifically designed to play "like" a specific grandmaster or well known chess streamer. I don't think any titled player would not be able to guess they're playing a computer if they played a few games against the AI without being told. It's very well known that computer moves are very different from human moves, even the ones specifically designed to represent a human.
As a modest 1400 blitz player, I definitely evaluate future states. That's not all I do, but it's certainly one thing I do. AlphaZero can also run just intuiting the next move without evaluating any additional states also fwiw. Though it is much better when it is allowed to do so.
> Consider the task of picking apples from a tree. You could easily make a machine to do that. But what if you had to make a machine that to an onlooker (who couldn't see the robot's "face", let's say) would appear to be a human picking apples from a tree? That would be much harder.
This is a very deep and nuanced task, made doubly difficult by obscure robotic hardware requirements. Not a great parallel.
> There are many chess AIs on chess.com, specifically designed to play "like" a specific grandmaster or well known chess streamer. I don't think any titled player would not be able to guess they're playing a computer if they played a few games against the AI without being told. It's very well known that computer moves are very different from human moves.
Maybe? A quick google suggested Maia is a close match to what I was suggesting. People are suggesting it does feel like a human in the thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/k4o6z1/introducing_m...
Humans see fewer candidate moves. They regularly miss quiet moves that are the strongest. They often calculate to a certain depth (even a very shallow one) and stop based on gut instinct. But it’s still just trees of moves with some eval function.
I don’t think it’s fundamentally that hard to mimic, and it would actually be genuinely interesting for didactic purposes. But for fairly obvious reasons it’s not a priority outside of a couple of projects.
Is that not a viable strategy on the new engines?
On the other hand traditional algorithms might not be very good at positional chess when on a budget, wheras even weak human players can understand basic concepts like putting your rook on an open file. Then it gets even more complicated with the NNUE position evaluation models - maybe even with a one-move budget the neural net is still implicitly strong at understanding several moves ahead, and could still beat a strong human player.
Here is a game I just played that illustrates this phenomenon:
https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black
The engine plays well before making a series of random blunders no human would make. You can try this yourself by playing the different Stockfish levels on lichess.org. You will be unable to find a level that makes for an enjoyable game. There are some new engines that use neural networks to try and play similarly to how humans do [1]. I can't comment on their success, but their lack of wide adoption by the chess community signals to me that it is still incomparable to humans.
> Internally, MultiPV is enabled, and with a certain probability depending on the Skill Level a weaker move will be played.
Within the constraints of the depth and calculation times it determines the best move, but depending on MultiPV it will deliberately not play that move and play an inferior one instead.
But even relative to the total number of female players, much smaller % reaches GM.
There is a variety of possible reasons this is happening, and the same effects can be seen in business (smaller ratio of female CEOs than employees) and other competitive sports historically dominated by men.
Less women also have access to top-tier coaches and the training available to their male counter-parts.
It's not just that fewer women play - it's that there are less females in the community, in the form of role models, coaches, competition, etc.
Note that the top female in chess history (and her sisters, who are both highly accomplished chess players) were heavily coached by a decent player himself from the age of 4-onward. But how many women get that similar type of opportunity?
However, in order for that to have happened, we needed to have our brains manipulated a very specific way as children, when plasticity was at its highest, into learning how to think the way that best fits with being a chess GM. Since that didn't happen, our minds have settled into patterns of thinking that are very hard to now undo or rebuild, and likely not as well suited for chess.
Could we tear down how we think about problems at a fundamental level and rebuild ourselves to think like GMs? Yeah, probably. Could we do this while maintaining any amount of day job, social life, or literally any other aspect of a natural human life? No, probably not. Changing not just your opinion on a topic, but literally how you think, seems pretty insanely hard to do after childhood/adolescence.
I don't love the phrase "mental capacity", maybe "mental configuration" is more accurate.
Is it really true everyone has the same mental potential?
For the specific case of a chess GM, it could be many people have the potential. Or maybe not.
There are some easy tests to quickly observe and compare mental traits between people.
For example, some people can juggle many distinct numbers in their head at once. Their brain is like a computer memory. Personally I start to fall off around 4 variables when doing mental math and don't believe I can increase that significantly. Do I have (or ever had) the same potential as someone who can juggle 50 variables in their head?
There are some apps to simulate these clocks. See also adding systems if you want more variety.
As if access to opportunities has nothing to do with race.
His point was that simply existing with a darker shade of skin does not preclude you from being a GM due to any innate (in)ability. It's generally considered in bad-faith to presume an author is making a political statement that they very clearly aren't making.