How long does it take ordinary people to get good at chess?
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Improvement in chess is not directly proportional to the number of games played - that is one factor. Amateur park players and hustlers rack up many hundreds of games per week, and thousands per year, but are usually beaten by masters who have played fewer games for shorter periods of time. Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.
Improvement is a function of directed study of chess : analysing one's games with the aim of eliminating weaknesses in one's play, becoming familiar with common patterns (and anti-patterns) of strategy and tactics, learning the fundamentals (and advanced aspects) of openings, middle games and endings, and conquering psychological barriers.
I say this because we need to take this into account as we study perfomance else we get skewed results.
This is true of so many things. Improvement is proportional to the amount of deliberate, conscious practice, which is more uncomfortable than “game time”.
When I used to play chess, I always found short time controls the most fun, but the least useful for long term improvement.
Commenting as I have heard of fellow musicians sometimes performing almost ritualistic steps or 'cargo cult' emulations of 'famous' musicians to try and replicate their success.
only... Deep sigh!
The closest we've done is just "more game time". The closest we've found is when learning a new tech doing a small project. But that is learning a tech and distinctly different from "practicing" the craft of programming.
But it still surprises me about the amount of effort to master the instrument.
I was wise enough at the early age of 12 or so to realize that whatever that "commitment" gene was, I didn't have it, so I kept piano a personal passion rather than try to go to school for it like my parents wanted.
Now that I'm finally playing again, I feel like I'm back to my previous levels, or even better, after just 3 months of playing 1x week.
Having said that, there's also the 10,000 hours thing.
My interpretation is even though I love those practices, I would still make myself tired from playing and concentrating for too long - after that my standard is downgrading. If I continue, I get used to those lower standards more than I could gain expertise.
Of course like with sports the fun thing is playing a game, not practicing for it, so that's what ends up happening.
The thing is with most computer games (I suppose games in general) is that you not only have to learn the rules of the game to get better, you must also study and practice the current best strategies to even stand a chance.
Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self? And what do we call gender neutral person if not?
A: They are after you!
B: Who, a single they or multiple theys?
No.
> And what do we call gender neutral person if not?
they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries. It spent a while with strong bias against it in formal contexts but that's weakening recently.
One/one/one’s is less controversial in formal settings, but requires a somewhat different writing style.
“Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.”
might become:
“Botvinnik famously recommended that, as a professional chess player, one should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave oneself time to think about chess.”
or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all:
“Botvinnik famously recommended a professional chess player only playing 80 tournament games a year and leaving time to think about chess.”
Everybody is different. Playing lots of games gives you the ability to experience playing different types of positions against different players, which can feed into your training in terms of figuring out which areas to focus on.
If you want to get better at chess you will have to study, but I don’t think playing is in itself negative. Only if you never study and only play.
There are also practical things like managing the clock and managing your attitude that you can only practice in games.
Botvinnik's quote refers to tournament games, that is, long, over the board, classical time control games that take hours to play. It says nothing about playing practice/friendly games, or playing other time controls.
Incidentally, I'm familiar with the recommendation (actually I thought it was a maximum of 50 games in a year) but I can't find any source for it online. Does anyone have a source?
That is not grammatical. One rendition in such a style might be:
> Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player only play 80 tournament games a year and leave time to think about chess.
Though I would prefer to substitute for 'year and leave time to think' one of: 'year, to leave time to think', 'year, leaving time to think', or even 'year, to live time for thinking'.
There is also an ambiguity in the original: 'a professional chess player' may be taken as definite; that is, it may seem as though the advice was directed at a specific chess player. To avoid the possibility of such an interpretation, I might prefer the rendition using 'one', or something like this:
> Botvinnik famously recommended that professional chess players only play 80 tournament games a year, to leave time for thinking about chess.
The one problem is that many people have difficulties with distinguishing usages. This is especially a problem for foreign learners, but even native speakers are not immune to naive generalizations.
This is something I wish I knew 20 years ago.
> You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.
Companies need to prioritize this is the point. It's not about low pay, high pay jobs. Or obtaining a role once you have the skills, it's that companies don't prioritize learning/development as part of the role, they focus on output - and they would get more value from their employees of they did.
You will study other people's code on the job and code reviews provide coaching.
Chess is much harder for me because I don't have the discipline to study like that.
With coding, I can read a quick blog post or follow a tutorial, then immediately start incorporating ideas into my work.
In chess, if I study something, I might not encounter a situation where I can use that knowledge in game for a while. I don't get that immediate reinforcement so I forget things much easier.
If it's mid game it's going to be strategy, you're not going to ever repeat it, so you can apply the strategy in general terms.
If it's endgame then surely you can setup scenarios and play against engines.
Maybe, if it doesn't exist, there's a need for a game engine that will try to do a particular opening to give you practice, will try, say, to fianchetto or castle early (I imagine such settings exist) to allow practicing against those moves?
But, unless you're seriously good can't you get the repetitive practice easily with engines?
That's a problem everyone has :)
Fun fact: Botvinik became world champion without being a `professional` chess player. He had a full-time job as an electrical engineer.
Just by playing, you gain too little data - you'd have to re-invent the world's expertise on your own.
One must study the vast amounts of data generated by other players, now embodied as knowledge.
Not unlike many other fields. Reading and coaching count a lot.
It was eye opening for me learning some basic strategies and tactics. Mostly controlling the center, a couple of openings, and techniques for checkmate.
Too much beyond that and most players are doing a lot of memorization and pattern recognition. Which I don't really want to do, but I am super happy I learned the basics because now chess is fun and I understand it.
I'd recommend taking lessons online if you want to learn chess. Skip many games.
This abstracts away a fundamental property of skill improvement that is true for any game, but intensively true at chess: any ELO you win during a gaming session will be lost soon by a new gaming session in which you play the game tired, or unfocused, or angry, or feeling under the weather. You still improve from one session to the next, so there is a little delta because your average ELO win is greater than you average ELO loss, but it makes the overall process extremely slow.
What I'm saying is that 100 ELO doesn't make that much of a difference in skill. You probably regularly play at +200 ELO of your actual ELO. However, maintaining a clean game hygiene and actually accumulating the ELO points to reach this level of "estate" is a whole other story.
I understand this used to be harder in the past, if you are to meet a guy at 5 to play a match then that's that, but in today's age there is really no reason to have a subpar performance in competitive matches.
There are so many things wrong with this from the perspective of "playing chess well". At my rating, it is ludicrous to resign when down a bishop, as there is too much variability, let alone the variability in bullet chess. I don't bring a fighting spirit because I don't want to expend the effort. If I did so, I'd certainly be rated higher. But I haven't attached any ego to my rating so I am free to play how I want.
"But while I have the data here, let's take a moment to answer the question everyone's asking: does playing more games make you a better chess player?
Intuitively, the answer seems like it should be yes. Seems like experience should be a huge factor in someone's chess strength. It also seems like the go-to answer many of the top players recommend for improving at chess."
That's actually not what I've seen top trainers recommend, at least for improvement at classical time controls. They recommend playing something like one or two games a day but carefully analyzing each game afterwards.
Almost every good chess player says to play less chess and do more tactics/study.
Unfortunately the article itself states that data on puzzles, lessons, etc are not available from the Lichess API, so all that they can really look at are games played... (Though agree this would be cool!)
I spent around 1000 hours practicing chess during that time, 3/4ths of which was spent on tactics training (writeup here: https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-ra...). I'm guessing that's a significant differentiating factor, and that the majority of players only spent time playing games.
Of course, you can't tell from the Lichess data in the post how much time was spent practicing via not playing. And I would argue that 250 hours per year, like I accomplished, is not actually that much.
Chess before Master level is all about "avoiding blunders" and "capitalizing on blunders". It's a function of the fact that a single mistake can at any point completely destroy your game.
A difference between 1300 FIDE level and 1800 FIDE level is partly tactics and avoiding blunders, sure. But there is also more positional play, which is a very good addition in your toolbox, if it is even a tool. There is thinking in fields, which can be about controlling one field that is deciding the game, or about controlling the white fields for example, or the seventh row. There is also intuition, which is much more than pattern recognition, but more letting the unconscious part of the brain work for you (inspired by the moon or by god :) ). (edit) Oh, and I forgot about tempo, which is especially important in the opening or during an attack. Gambits are loved for a reason, you give a pawn for a tempo and win the game :)
Also, I feel very much that improvement in chess is often sought in improving someones strong points, because they are the most fun to work on. There are also the weak points that you can work on, which are less comfortable and more confronting, but can be a bottleneck. In psychological sense this works as well.
How to Reassess Your Chess & The workbook
Complete Book to Chess Strategy
are both good. They might be a little heavy for a 7 year old but with some guidance I think they're doable. I think I read them when I was 9 or 10 and didn't have any trouble.
Chess.com lessons are really good too and might even be a better place to start.
chess master 10 had a great walkthrough tutorial on strategy by josh watzkin that i did around that age, if you can find a copy of it
It's sort of a mini game for me now where I try to climb as high as possible by only using memory and pawn structure. I've climbed to 1200 ELO using just this strategy, but it's probably going to stop working soon.
Lots of people consider blitz and bullet to be brain poison for playing chess well
It was an eye opening comment for me. I play a lot of 3|0 blitz and should really just be playing rapid as my elo isn’t 1200 there yet… :/
10 minute works out well though, I can look for tactics.
At some point you probably get faster as scanning for immediate threats and looking for tactics and 5 minute games start to make sense.
But you learn very fast common attacks and defenses since you experience a magnitude more games playing with some time limits.
You could make the argument a lot of those moves should happened in the players mind - and the timer should just accommodate that.
But this is a tradeoff and depends on the players preferences. For instance I'm having tons of fun meeting hundreds of players with different styles and quirks and it makes it a really fun fast paced game that's still essentially just chess.
Is it known what time the creators intended for rounds?
- Parallelization: this may be the most minor advantage in the list, but you don't need to set up thread pools to parallelize your work since the scheduler parallelizes tasks.
- Observability: you easily see which tasks failed and look at the logs.
-Reliability and task isolation: you can set up automatic retries for jobs that fail, and they won't affect the rest of the flow. You can easily relaunch the tasks that fail independently without restarting the whole load.
In canonical Airflow, the job would be one DAG, and each day would be a separate DAG run. Then you would backfill all the days that you would like the job to run. If there's some sort of max-concurrency requirement, that would be handled by setting the `max_active_runs` parameter or by using Airflow's pool concept.
If I had to venture a guess, the author is not an experienced Airflow user, and just wanted to give a new technology an honest try.
With that I found that it's about that range when playing chess reaches diminishing returns. Everything useful it can teach you about life at a reasonable cost you'll probably know by then. Going forward is more about, well, getting good at a board game. Plus, there's a risk of loss as chess can screw with your head.
I's much rather invest time into something like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which contains all components of chess, has real life application and keeps you fit, social and sane.
> For reference, the most improved player is (as of oct 2021) an 11 year old world chess champion from the Ukraine. His rate of improvement averaged out to 33 points per month over a period of 6 years.
My claim to fame... I drew a FIDE Master in the 2020 online Olympiad[1].[the most unlikely draw based off of ratings.]Also, had the 11th most unlikely win in that Olympiad. [2] Also, wrote tactics app that I am kind of embarrassed to share on HN. But, here it is:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chestergra...
Why would I need to write a tactics app? Well, I teach it. Not all tactics are created equal. Some tactics you will not see it again in your lifetime in a real game, so why practice it. My app focuses on the common patterns. Also, I wanted a reporting function to see how much my students are practicing their tactics in one view.
There is obviously some minimum number of games required. I haven't played chess for 6 months, should I expect to be 100 points higher next time I play? Probably not, but I have watched some streamers and thought about the game a bit, so maybe. I have a goal to improve to at least 1400 in chess, and I'd like more analysis of how many games I'll have to play.
Edit: These graphs are nice: https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA...
Total number of games played has more correlation with rank than games per month it seems.
Can you recommend some books/papers/videos on this ?
It's also really amplified if I'm up before my wife, I think because music is the first thing my brain actively focuses on. Without a conversation, my brain doesn't have anything else for me to think about yet and I've used none of it's energy.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_slee...
[2] https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in...
I’ve played club level chess in my teenage times between being 15 and 20 years old. I’ve even won a regional youth team title, but only at the 8th board (out of 8). But hey, still glorious times! :-) :-)
After learning the first rules, I became interested about chess. I think it took me half a year up to 1 year of studying by myself (reading a basic book about chess and re-playing multiple games) before I decided to enter a chess club. Then I pretty fast was playing tournament chess. And I believe this title I got finally maybe two years before learning my first chess rules. So that’s not too long.
My basic recommendation is: If you’re really interested in chess, you must buy a basic chess book asap or learn from similar resources. A basic book which covers all the basic topics will be enough. I’ve got a book of 200 pages only. That’s enough. With that knowledge along with studying other players’ games (those games will be in that book, too), you’re ready to be a club chess player.
There’s a huge difference between someone who has read that book and someone who has not I can tell you. Without learning about basic strategy and tactics and principles, it will take you years before you really get a certain playing strength. There's really a HUGE difference between someone who has read that book and someone who has not. Theoretically of course, you could learn all this by yourself. But it would take you ages. So you can really forget about that.
You must of course be willing to invest some time. I think in my first year after learning the first rules, I’ve read this book and re-played really a lot of games of other people. It became a dominant hobby at that time. But you also need not to do it the whole day or so. If you’re interested, you will do it anyhow regularly. Just like a normal hobby that you’re interested in.
Finally, just to mention, before entering that club, I actually had nobody to play with (that was in the 90s by the way, so no internet chess available). I bought a basic chess computer, but I didn’t play with it too often. Actually I was most of the time studying theory and re-playing games within that first half a year or year before I entered the chess club. But despite having not much own playing practice, I at once defeated a lot of (weaker) club players there. So basic knowledge and analyzing games seems to help a lot, even as a beginner.
I would think that it would be far more interesting to consider these people as a percentage of the number of players which started from zero and dedicated two years to playing chess. I would suspect that the percentage would be much higher.
I won't import and ETL the data myself just to answer to that but maybe the author can help.
That's pretty interesting. I guess some types of learning can't be rushed by grinding practice.
There must be a floor, a minimum frequency or total number of time practiced, but no specific ceiling or linearity between the time/frequency of practice and the progress in the art.
If we had two pictures, and asked to guess which photographer takes 80 pictures a day and which takes 200, it would be a tough question. I see the above point the same way, past a certain point the number of games shouldn’t make a difference.
So humans typically don't gain much from playing traiditional engines, since they play at levels beyond mortal comprehension and make too deep moves from outer-space, Maia would be more down-to-earth.
https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...
I'd love to learn though, I might write a blog post some day detailing how long it took for me to 'get good' (or I might suck at it).
If you are pro you can do this easily, even for games with a long game play.
A good chess player will not be able to do the same if the pieces is in random order, not connected to the rules of the game.
She is put on a terrace in the street, and she can see a van with a chessboard painted on the side, and has to recreate the position. With a real position she succeeds, since she remembers the pieces and pawns in chunks. With a position that doesn't make any sense in chess, she cannot recreate it.
Not sure how good of a selftest this is. But it can be good to remember pieces in chunks, like pawn structures. The same counts for tactic patterns, like knight with wood, or hook with ladder. Instead of 2 or 3 moves, you see a chunk of moves which take up the memory of 1 move.
One example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY
later when I found out "serious" chess was about memorization of classical moves and thinking in trees, I kinda lost all interest.
is it just a way to enjoy time well-spend or personal improvement? or does it help to evolve our gene somehow? I always feel smart people spending so much time and part of their life on chess, is like a waste of talent, that could be well put into other things that are more meaningful to the society, such as, inventing new system, improving existing design, fixing some real issues, or even teaching coding to the public etc.
looking at those kids obsessed at games these days, it's truly time wasted no matter how they enjoyed it.
- say level 0 is an average performance of a complete beginner with <1 hour experience on the subject (not just counting the experience from the hobby in question. count every experience from similar hobbies). if there are some players that mostly win against level 0 players(at least >80%), mark them as level 1 players. keep doing the same on level 1, 2, ..., n. you usually ended up with nmax of 10-30.
- obviously, not all players starts at level 0. some starts below 0 and some do better. it's possible for someone to have a starting position of level nmax * 0.8-0.9. for example, #1 CS GO player will be pretty good at any other fps games on their first play, probably better than the average people will ever be (no matter how hard the average people is trying). however, a true beginner starts anywhere near that. if nmax is 20, then i would say level 5-10 is the highest starting position for a complete beginner.
- first few level up occurs naturally from experience. you could somewhat boost this process up, but you don't need to as they happen pretty fast(it usually takes 100-1000 hours of experience on the subject, to completely exhaust those easy level up opportunities). as such, a complete beginner with an average performance (level 0), or somewhat above average performance (level 1-2) is no match to a beginner with some experience (who became level 3-6 after spending 100-1000 hours). but there are rare breed of beginner who just starts right up at level 5-10, even though they don't have any experience on the subject or anything related. these rare breed could beat a beginner with 100-1000 hours of experience, when they only got minimal experience (a few hours).
- after reaching the plateau of hobbyist (around level 5, who easily beat most beginners without much experience, but still nothing on the entire spectrum), you don't get much of auto level up by playing more games mindlessly, at least not as fast as you'd hope for. as such, if someone just mindless play more rounds without any study, it won't get them very far. even if they spend tremendous amount of time (like >10k hours), many of them won't even reach level 10.
- however, if you study about the game, you would level up significantly faster than mindless playing (though this is still a lot slower than the first few auto level ups). there are many approach, including a) watch a replay of a better player and try to mimic their play, b) study about the basic fundamentals that are not required to just play, etc. there is no single approach that can cover everything, so you're almost required to do all of them at least for some bits, if your aim is high (such as level 15+ on nmax 20 game).
- usually the main driver is analyzing the play of better players. if you don't exactly know why they make such move (this should happen a lot if you go into detail), then just memorize and and try to mimic their movement exactly. one day, you might understand (but not guaranteed), or at least try to play exactly the same on the same situation (also not guaranteed).
- but this doesn't get you to the nmax. people have their own ceilings. no matter how hard they tried, or what methods they've used, their ceilings stay the same. there is no way to break the ceiling, hence ceiling. also, it's extremely unlikely that you have a ceiling of nmax. usually, if you have a ceiling of 80% nmax, that's pretty high. average people often have 50% nmax ceiling
- usually, your ceiling is formed based on your nature + nurture. but there are some other elements, which is not directly related to your ability about the subject, but still act as a ceiling. for example, there are some hobbies that you need to spend $1k for one hour of experience, which translates to $100k spending for the basic 100 hours of experience (and this could be prohibitively expensive for many people). these type of hobbies usually have lower nmax (since much fewer people have ever stepped a foot into this type of hobby), as well as lower level requirement to become a professional player.