How Long Does It Take Ordinary People to “Get Good” at Chess?

Interesting data.

Rating rises sharply when you spend time studying the game and then remains mostly flat after reaching the next stage of mastery. If you play tricks, which catapults your ratings, you will eventually stabilize at a level where those tricks are less effective.

It helps to play many games to fully understand theory and make it part of your own playstyle. What can be truly fascinating, and that's what I am thinking of datamining thanks to this code, is which openings the person who improved gravitated towards and what they gave up. I have a hypothesis those with 100+ Elo gains eventually settled on a few openings and studied their theory.

This code can be adapted for better tournament prep. For example, it should be possible to determine which tactics are most effective against that player. :)

> TL;DR: According to 5.5 years of data from 2.3 million players and 450 million games, most beginners will improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points in 3-6 months. Most "experienced" chess players in the 1400-1800 rating range will take 3-4 years to improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points. There's no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker.

If you get good at chess, what exactly are you good at? Winning a board game? Is that worth 3-4 years of your life?