I did something very similar with an old strategy game called Age of empires II. Over the course of two years I went from a 1300 rating to 1850. I don't play chess, so it's hard for me to compare the scales, but I will say the highest players were rated around 2600. I think being 1850 put me around 90-95th percentile for active players-- there were less than 50 players over 2300, and only a few hundred over 2000.
My only real commentary is that trying to follow a progression like this can be profoundly, profoundly frustrating. You need to really make sure you're enjoying this hobby before you try to dedicate yourself to a trajectory like this. It can really make you feel like shit a lot of the time, as you find yourself continually repeating mistakes that other people breeze past without issue. It takes true love of the game and a great deal of patience and persistence to push through all the downspells.
Eventually I decided that I no longer wished to prioritize the game over other things. The enormous time investment was no longer a worthwhile trade-off for me, and I stopped playing almost all together. I haven't regretted it since. There's just so many things to do in life. I gave it thousands of hours of my time, and now the door is closed on that. Now I'm learning Ruby on rails!
Cool, to hear from some decent player. What time did you play? Around 2002?
Since I was a 2k player at the time, let me assure you, that the top dudes at the time (Koven, Sheriff for example) were already so called pro gamers who got payed/sponsored and they were exceptionally good.
The true story is, that many folks above 2k+ did what was called "points trading" back then. Koven once stated, that they got payed according to their rank in the official ladder.
So he also had to defend against cheaters, un-sync games etc. He was always top notch, but he had to adjust his rating accordingly, due to cheaters.
Almost all at the top did points trading. Smurf accounts, the system, some refusing to play against weaker players, or some playing DM to get points faster. Also some game "hacks", like the farming bug etc. that gave you the edge in early FLUSHing games.
So take this: 1850 is extremely good in RM 1vs1. 2k+ players are exceptionally good at micro-management. A skill to be learned.
I was part of CN, you might remember this clan from our most famous player, Lightning_CN. Greets to Force, Gwenny etc. where ever you are! :)
PS: There is a book from L_Clan_Chris at Amazon. Some knowledge bites to digest.
Played and followed the AoE scene many times: 2002-2004, 2013-2014, and now playing again on AOE 2: DE. The new training scenarios in DE are quite helpful and I'd recommend them to new or returning players.
DE has led to a massive resurgence of interest and a 3rd generation of players. First gen was AoE2 (CD), 2nd gen was the forgotten empires continuing things, 3rd is DE. Some players have spanned all 3. My current favorite streamers are Viper and Hera.
Oh yeah the twitch scene has really made a massive difference to this generation and to the modern-day level of interest. Viper's stream was what got me into competitive play.
As someone who could never break 1750 on Zone, hat off to both of you. Even though I no longer play, I did follow the scene closely for a while until a few years ago. To my surprise DauT is still a top player, although one of his teammate is clearly the indisputable No. 1 by a distance compare to anyone else.
Yes, the Viper is truly the Hamilton amongst his fellow peers. Impressive! And he is now showing his tricks to his already AoE II infected girl friend Debbie! This is so cool! Way too few women play this game.
1750: This is also a great ranking. Competition there is pretty tough. Congrats! I remember playing lots of 1700er dudes whenever I started out with my smurf accounts, and I had plenty off em.
To me, DauT is the Mikhail Tal of AOE while Viper is Bobby Fischer.
I've watched endless videos of DauT and Viper playing AoE. ZeroEmpires has done a lot to popularize AoE streaming. Here's his YouTube channel if anyone is interested - https://www.youtube.com/user/ZeroEmpires
He also started as a pretty mediocre player and now deserves his rank among the best players! He shares a lot of his secrets and is also #1 commentator now for AoE II:DE related games: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZUT79WUUpZlZ-XMF7l4CFg
T90 to me is such a confusing phenomenon. I've never understood why a low-rated player who (to me) did not have a particularly entertaining personality was the most-subscribed AoE2 player on twitch. Is he actually good now? How high-rated is he compared to Daut and Viper and so on?
Ah, yeah, I kind of meant in a serious match though. In that match viper made 3 docks on a land map and no feudal army.
As T90 himself said, "The trouble with playing viper is that if viper memes me, and I win, people just say oh T90 isn't good, viper wasn't trying. And if I lose, well, T90 can't even beat viper when he's not trying. So it's a lose-lose situation." Too true.
I see he is #96 on rankings right now though, that's terrific. Being able to beat #1 isn't the only measure of success and I don't mean to imply otherwise.
? Teachers don't have to be the best at the _thing_, they should be really good at explaining concepts. Maybe T90 is the people watch when then want to go from zero to average?
I don't want to be coached by the best tennis player in the world, it would be a waste and I couldn't do any of the things they could teach me.
A solid above average player that knows my limits and can explain how to correct flaws would be much better (for me).
Much more recently, actually-- I peaked last year, in 2019. The game is alive and well in the Definitive Edition on steam, and players are still pushing the skill envelope. The meta has changed a lot with all the new civs they've added (they've doubled the number of civs overall).
Hey - this is pretty amazing. I have learned a lot about AOE from watching L_clan (mostly L_Clan_Chris but others as well!) replays back in 2004-2008 when I was playing a lot of Age. Never had Zone access, so we lived in a little bubble in our university of LAN AoE players with outside ideas, build orders etc. coming from watching pro replays.
No twitch obviously and very few blogs going around for strategy as well. It's amazing to see how far gaming has come in 15 years.
> Eventually I decided that I no longer wished to prioritize the game over other things
This is what I unfortunately found as well. I reached Legend in Hearthstone (The top rank, no clue what percentile it was) a while back and top 3-5% in StarCraft II a couple of years ago.
In both games I stopped playing shortly after reaching that level because the time investment just didn't seem worth it to me. I love games, but playing at a very high level requires a lot of practice and focus.
I don't really think it's possible to play competitively and do much else because of the time investment required just to stay at your current level, let alone improve. I love games, but it's hard to justify when I could be doing something more productive with my time.
I think there's something to be argued that reaching a high level in any competitive game or sport has merit.
I've learned more valuable lessons from competing in Starcraft than I can count. Without knowing the exact opportunity cost, I think trading my highschool grades for the competitive experience was worth it.
The biggest mistake I think I made was not cutting games out completely after having learned those lessons.
I play Starcraft for the story only, and I loved it. Still play the campaign from time to time. I feel like a savage amongst civilized men on this thread.
This was how I played AoE and StarCraft as a kid! I think the vast majority of players play them this way, actually. If you're in the competitive multiplayer scene, it's easy to forget there are millions or tens of millions of single player / campaign-only players.
Campaigns seem to have a bad rep among most gamers online, but honestly they are the most satisfying aspect of strategy games. One of my favourite games growing up was Rise of Nations and its Conquer the World maps - remove that and you get a worthless husk.
I sacrificed around 1 year during university to Age of Empires. Wasn't my most productive year at uni.
Anyone remembers DBD_Jinx? For very long the only western dude to compete with the Koreans in 1vs1. However he also confessed, that he had partly sacrificed his private life for it.
I trained a lot. I trained hours a day on 2X speed hunting, build order. I played under many smurf accounts, to then foster my primary account(s). MrFixIt forums as well.
I played 1vs1, team games, I played DM as well.
After intense 2 years (time zone shifts as well, many sleepless nights) I decided to never ever play online in a community again in order to prevent my lazy/fun loving side to be sucked in again in clans, games etc.
No Warcraft nothing. To this day I keep the vow. Only game I play still from time to time is AoE II: DE.
In 2000, I came out of my first retirement to play a couple tournaments. The first time I heard of DBD_Jinx was when he beat me in the second round of the BattleTop NYC Challenge. He went on to win the tournament and became widely recognized as a top player.
It's the nature of competition and it's the same with physical sports. Lots of effort to gain minor benefits over the others.
Browser games tend to respect your time more by making you login every day but limit how much you can do. You won't see players who play the game 24/7 because the game tells you to stop after you ran out of action points or scheduled your base, etc.
Actually no, most physical sports are not like that because the human body has limits and exceeding them is counter-productive because it leads to injuries.
Most professional soccer players spend about 1-2 hours per day on training. Off-season they will spend slightly more but that's only for about 3-4 weeks.
1-2 hours of training per day is incredibly low for a professional athlete. Professional cyclists are on the bike for over half the day, and there is even more work to be done on active recovery and strength training. Even runners, who are more limited by their body than nearly any other sport, spend 15+ hours a week just on running. It's a full time job.
I agree, there's no way professional soccer players only practice 1-2 hours a day. I'd guess 1-2 in the gym plus another few hours at least actually practicing soccer. Even something that's fairly brutal like American football involves an hour or two per day in the gym, plus practice. Professional athletes figure out how to practice as much as possible in a way that doesn't lead to long-term injury and "as much as possible" is almost always way more than a couple hours per day.
I also agree. There's a common tendency to overtrain to injury in sports, and it's mostly self-driven, even at amateur level. You look at people training something strenuous every single day, and you'll see a bunch of people who are constantly working around minor injuries, looking for a way to keep getting in the practice. The proliferation of PEDs in sports is not just about enhancing the on-field outcomes but also a quest to recover from this intense, high-volume training faster.
Also a Hearthstone player here- I used to regularly hit top 200 legend on ladder. I think one of the biggest lessons that I got out of starting to get more into the competitive scene is that there's more to games than trying to be the absolute best and that I need to set my limits and figure out where I can have fun without letting something take over my life.
I've since cut back significantly on my Hearthstone playing and been able to apply similar thinking to other games I've picked up (for example Magic The Gathering: Arena). Games are for having fun not for endlessly trying to get better. That was probably a mentality that I picked up from years of MMORPG (Runescape) addiction.
I stopped playing RTS entirely some years ago because of that.
I used to love RTS but...
1. Rushing is stupid, all RTS seemly suffer from allowing it even when devs attempt to curb that down, I remember in AOE for example people training on how to build towers on the enemy base in 2 minutes or how to win with villager rush. (also knew a guy that relentlessy tested ways to rise to the second age faster)
2. Singleplayer often the AI is super cheaty, after a while I got bored with that, because I couldn't use actual strategy to win, for example the match that made me realize that was when the last AI was on an island, I conquered the rest of the map, was careful in my usage of the market to stockpile all resources for myself and deny the AI... then whenever I attacked with the 200 unit limit, the AI defended itself successfully, after I got bored of hours stuck on this stalemate, I used cheats and found out the AI stripped the whole island bare but was still pumping units non-stop AND knew where I was going to attack, so they always had perfect defense.
3. Multiplayer is a matter of how fast you click and how good you are with pattern matching and some other training-related things, intelligence for example isn't that important, rote learning, time to practice, etc... that is.
So I concluded that basically multiplayer RTS is a huge timesink, and to me, unfun. And singleplayer RTS after the campaign is done is or too easy (because the AI is utterly dumb) or too hard (because the AI cheats), I never found out a difficulty I enjoyed playing against the AI.
> 1. Rushing is stupid, all RTS seemly suffer from allowing it even when devs attempt to curb that down, I remember in AOE for example people training on how to build towers on the enemy base in 2 minutes or how to win with villager rush. (also knew a guy that relentlessly tested ways to rise to the second age faster)
I have to politely refute this. "Rushing" is the word inexperienced players use for "playing in a more optimal way that prepares you to attack sooner." If you call it "rushing," what you're really saying is that you need other players to deliberately play worse to give you extra time to prepare. All of these strategies have counterplay and usually lead into long games. Using a vil rush or tower rush is not a way to end the game, it's a way to begin it.
> 3. Multiplayer is a matter of how fast you click and how good you are with pattern matching and some other training-related things, intelligence for example isn't that important, rote learning, time to practice, etc... that is.
Again, you could only say this if you had not made it to a competitive level. Intelligence is pattern-matching. And of course playing anything at a competitive level involves "training-related things," that's a kind of meaningless statement if I'm being honest. And I can't speak for StarCraft, but in AoE2 APM is not essential. To prove the point, the top-rated player has beaten other top 200 players without using his keyboard. It's about decision-making. Even at my level, I can beat other players rated a couple hundred points beneath me without using keyboard shortcuts just because my decision-making is better.
> I have to politely refute this. "Rushing" is the word inexperienced players use for "playing in a more optimal way that prepares you to attack sooner." If you call it "rushing," what you're really saying is that you need other players to deliberately play worse to give you extra time to prepare. All of these strategies have counterplay and usually lead into long games. Using a vil rush or tower rush is not a way to end the game, it's a way to begin it.
For less experienced players, rushes like these tend to end the game early rather than begin it in an interesting way. Either the defender knows how to hold the strategy and shuts it down, or hasn't seen it before and gets destroyed. While these strategies are certainly part of the game and make high level competitive games far more interesting, it is often a frustrating experience for low/mid level players. Many of those players are looking for an experience where they build their army for a while and attack once they're satisfied with what they've built. Certainly not strategically optimal, but that's often what they find fun.
I totally understand that. It's how I played from 1999-2015.
I'm just saying that rushing isn't a flaw or a problem, rather it's a matter of perspective. Players who want to build up for a while nearly always want to do that because they haven't learned any other way to play. And they're not under any obligation to do so, either-- but it's not fair to say the game is flawed on that basis.
If you're ever stuck on Rails stuff or want suggestions about where to go next, feel free to ping me, email in my profile. I've enjoyed tutoring/mentoring a lot over the last few years, would be a privilege to do more. That goes for any anonymous readers, as well. Anything from a one liner email all the way up to screensharing, helping people to learn is a gift.
As a chess player I could never get into RTS games though my friends were playing them alot, especially Warcraft 3, but even then they switched to mods like Dota). Instead, I'm pretty good at turn-based games like Civilization V and VI. It feels very cumbersome to control all these units in real time. I could never get used to it and I played many games in that RTS genre: Rise of Nations, C&C: Generals, AOE 2 and 3.
Nowadays, I'm not a PC gamer anymore, I have Chess.com, Hearthstone and Civilization on my iPad, it is amazing how a tablet can be a very good medium for turn-based gaming.
Try Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (HD version with Horn of the Abbys). This turn-based strategy game is excellent. It's 20 years old, and yet it has a larger average Twitch viewership than AoE, because of its awesome competitive scene.
I got into AOE soon after it was released in 1997. Especially early on, when we didn’t know much, it provided a rich universe of interesting economic, tactical, and strategic problems to solve. I spent countless hours studying the game, practicing, competing, and hanging out on the MrFixit forum. I once played one AOE game after another nonstop for 33 hours. Like you and many others, I eventually concluded it was too much of a distraction and uninstalled it permanently in order to focus on other endeavors. That was about 18 years ago. It’s nice to see there are still plenty of people enjoying the game.
I don't know if you've ever played runescape but it has a very similar experience to the one you are describing.
It's interesting you compare your time spent in a game to time spent productively outside the game. One of the things driving the 'investments' in those style of games(MMO's) is that you get this feeling of progress and can compare your progress to your friends 'skills'. I've been writing alot in my personal journal on how to turn runescape skills into real life skills with achievements.
Ruby on rails would be a 'skill' and based on time spent doing pomodoros to earn xp for a 'Ruby on Rails' Skill, combined with certain projects awarding XP and achievements would turn real life into a game. Think like a self defined 'Khan Academy meets Facebook'.
You could see your friends skills and see what they are working on. Maybe a bulletin board/ social media style GUI that would say ' x just completed a pomodoro in Piano'. You could post to your linkedin account all the 'skills' you've obtained to show your various interests.
I agree with this assessment: MMOs are very good at getting a person into a skill-acquisition mindset. I've been off-and-on with Planetside 2 for a few years now(it's been getting good updates lately, and I've been seeing new players popping up - good time to get in) and while not every part of it is as deep as it could be, it's got an absolutely huge surface area to study - MMO, FPS, vehicle gameplay, construction, leadership, strategy, and all the edges where these things meet - which means you can feel you've hit your limit in one area and simply shift over to another instead of quitting the game entirely.
Unlike many MMOs the grind is not heavily stat-focused either: while you can get unlocks and upgrades, most of them constitute "sidegrades" into a specialty role. On the field, your effectiveness still comes down to knowing the ins and outs of the gameplay. And there are leaderboards to motivate competitive players, but it's widely acknowledged that playstyles are not represented equally on these boards: it is straightforward to get a very high K/D by learning one of the various kill-farming techniques, and to get a lot of experience points with a support role around a meatgrinder battle. But those things don't necessarily contribute the most to your faction.
It's things like that that suggest where the model breaks down on application to real world skills. Generally, once a person is aware of the things they need to focus on, through good feedback, they can stay on the task. But if you look at a thing like programming, it's like, "where's the feedback?" It's not the butt-in-chair hours that are doing the lifting here. And it isn't reducable to lines compiled or issues cleared or other single-number metrics either. "Speedcoding" is only good in rare circumstances. It's more like a finished project is a series of quests that build on each other, with each quest having some checklist pass/fail requirements. But each one is bespoke, and hard to compare to others even if it's applying the same skills.
Indeed I actually do write down pass/fails conditions as a checklist in the comments to start with a complex implementation, and to create a kernel of documentation. Having tools helps, but it's that early conceptual/goal-setting where I put down boundaries that seems to make the biggest difference.
That's amazing. I love that game dearly and have been playing on/off for more than 15 years, so I get routinely obsessed with it, play a lot a few weeks, get good against the AI (usually using cheese like huskarl spam or massed mangudai), then get my ass handed to me online & ends up quitting. Then I don't play for a year or so.
At which point were you able to reliably not fail the boar lure ?
While I disagree with the other comment gatekeeping RTS's, which can be played however you want (my father pauses the game in between every action in order to keep up with the gamestate), I do agree that ~15-25 games of dedicated boar lure practice, just restarting the game after each attempt, should be enough to get it right in tandem with watching some videos on how to do it.
If you’re dying to the boars you should just be playing the first 9 min of the game on repeat against the AI. If you can’t master that after 15-30 games, then RTS are not for you :)
I can relate to this. I was briefly around 1800 in HD and DE, but found that if I didn't play for a while that I'd come back and find myself outclassed.
I uninstalled and reinstalled the game about five times over a couple of years because I found myself putting too much time into it to try to maintain a competitive skill level.
I actually tried to get into chess after quitting AoE2, to fill that strategic urge, but found the same thing - if I wasn't dedicating time and thought to it regularly I couldn't retain the advances I'd made in skill without going through a "warm up" period all over again (usually of losses).
I play AOE2 as well (the Definitive Edition is really great), but I never got that serious about it. I play with relatives and friends mostly. I've watched some videos about how to increase my efficiency and some basic strategies (killing the boar, fast castle, etc.) but never really dedicated myself to it. Really brilliant game. It just gets everything right and the graphics are timeless. I can't think of another game that still gets regular updates and has a big online following 21 years after it was released.
Hey, OP here - thanks for this wonderful comment. I'd like to hijack this thread to say that I respond to this comment and several other questions here - https://jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com/2020/11/17/the-touching-r.... Thank you all for such a warm reception.
Never got into aoe2 but used to play a good bit of aoe3 (and have started again since the DE released). I used to hang around people who played ot semi competitively though I was never on that level.
I understood the game for the most part, but my execution was never good enough. Too much semi precise timings required and I could never get my APM high enough.
AoE2 is alive and well with the recently-released definitive edition! I’m also excited for AoE4, which will be set in the same time period, but otherwise different.
I think the similarity being raised isn't really in the game or mechanics of the game, but the mechanics of being top tier. Aside from some very surface level similarities, you're right that RTS and Chess have pretty low overlap. But I think that the grind required to be top-tier in both is similar. They require you to play A LOT, and to do one of the hardest things a human can do, which is to try to be as objective as possible while analyzing when and why you lost.
Thanks, that is interesting. I used to be 2000+ rated for AOE1 on zone.com and 1400+ chess on Yahoo! games back in late 90s, and to me it is a point of contention that I often bring up because chess is not motivated by capital greed whereas microsoft and their game studios are. And the dissimilarity between two games is pretty obvious to anyone who plays above 700 ranks.
What does MS market position have to do with the design of the game, it's not like it has any sort of monetization within the game mechanics at all.
You are conflating so much BS that it shows a profound lack of understand of both game mechanics and dare i say market economics.
It appears that you've rapped yourself up in some anti market bubble of cognitive disonance and can not longer think straight, I'm sorry for your pain.
You should use lichess.org instead. You would have unlimited tactics per day which come from real games played on the website, endless number of studies made by other players on opening theories, free analysis of your games, and all these statistics about your progress and more! Like "do I win more often or not when Queens are traded?".
A quick second endorsement for this absolute gem of a website: lichess.org. I've gone from a player who can't beat the computer on level 1 (estimated ELO 800 LOL) to winning 50% of matches on level 3 (est. ELO 1400). Still pretty poor, but so is my study effort. And I'm OK with it.
My colleague from another time zone struggled to recommend a book for my level and kinda laughed (albeit politely). But now we can play a quick game in our work breaks online. Thank You Lichess! canned applause
I would strongly recommend to play against real humans, not the computer. The computer with a handicap just plays in very weird ways, and that is not really helpful for learning. I also played the computer at first, and level 3 is the first level where it actually puts up a fight. But it plays very weird combinations of strong moves and then completely blunders at times. The problem is that it blunders in a very non-human way, so it doesn't help you that much to learn how to take advantage of the kind of errors a human tends to make.
The rating of the computer on Lichess is also kinda weird, you can't really rely on those. I'm a pretty weak player (I have only played a bit online recently), I did beat the level 3 computer on Lichess when I concentrated well enough on a game, but I'm certainly not 1400 against real humans.
That has also been exactly my experience. Beating level 3 is just about capitalizing on the obvious blunders it makes. It feels completely unrewarding.
Playing against humans, even significantly stronger ones, is so much more fun and rewarding. It's just way more exciting when both sides can capitalize on smaller mistakes, so the game becomes about building and maintaining an advantage. Or setting up a tactic that feels great to pull off.
The computers will usually not yield any incremental advances at all (and they won't fall for tactics) until they make a dumb move that invalidates all the advantage they built up. Whether you win or lose depends mainly on how often the latter happens, and learning how to make that happen is both opaque/unfun and useless for playing against humans.
The computer will be able to find optimal plays that require looking ahead several turns ahead while blundering obvious moves (e.g. capturing a piece that's clearly hanging after you used that same piece to capture their piece). Or they'll constantly move the same piece over and over again.
I only very recently picked up chess and spend most of my time playing against the computer. lichess's computer plays really, really weird at low levels, not human-like at all. Chess.com's computer plays a bit more human-like, at least up to 1100, which is the computer level I'm currently playing against, but still not like a real human.
I would compare it as:
lichess - best move, best move, best move, completely random move that does absolutely nothing
chess.com - best move, good move, best move, blunder that seems patronizing given previous moves
I've only played a handful of games against real people online, but those games weren't anything like either lichess or chess.com's computer players.
I would like to recommend Willy Hendriks - Move First, Think Later, if it is okay with you to recommend something. It was my first real chess book and it was a very fun read. I am often intimidated by too many diagrams and endless variations in books, and he has a great way to tell a story about the psychology at the board. You do need an interest in psychology in chess to be able to enjoy the book, if it is just about the moves for you it might not be that great (there are diagrams ofcourse).
Some subjects in the 20 or 25 chapters are: Time management, the more time you spend at a move, the less merit there is, while that time might be important in the endgame. There is a chapter about chess as a game of chance, like, you play a tournament and make 5 out of 9. Next year at the same tournament, you make 4 out of 9. Did you play worse? You might think so and rationalize that thought to become some truth to you, but really, it is just one game that might have been decided by one move. The same for winning or losing rating points, which can be a plus or a minus based on just 1 game difference, that doesn't make your last 3 months bad or good.
Late reply to say thank you for this recommendation. I'm already 2 chapters in, though if it gets harder I will slow my pace.
Book recommendations are always welcome. I'll usually check out anything that's 200 or so pages. My days of reading 1000 page books of small print on cheap paper however are over.
I asked which Chess service to set my dad up with on his iPad a few years ago on here and someone recommended lichess. He's put hundreds and hundreds of hours in since and absolutely loves it. Amazing service.
Lichess is something that strikes pure joy to me as a service. Full of features, free and open source, privacy friendly, zero ads or 'freemium' tiers, blazing fast, yet catering the 'non-tech-savvy' regular user (compare the last point with GNU/Linux vs Windows).
I’m a huge fan of lichess for playing and analysis but I think for tactics, it’s the one place it’s lacking, it’s always too easy for me for some reason and I go to chesstempo instead. Does anyone else experience this? By the way, when I say easy it’s for me that I’m an average player.
The puzzles on chesstempo are much better but the interface is much worse, particularly on mobile.
Honestly the puzzles on chess.com are better than lichess. The lichess ones just seem to have limited scope, I'm not sure why.
That said the interface is good and if you're finding them too easy then your puzzle rating should be rising to the point where it's offering you puzzles you'll find more challenging.
I feel like most of the chess.com puzzles have a point: fork the rook and king with the knight, or exploit a pin. That makes them easier (or maybe my level isn't high enough there, yet). The lichess.org ones I often have no idea what to even try, and when I'm given the solution I still don't know why it's the best move (though looking at the "Spectator room" of the game can help). Sometimes the better move is only marginally better; like the computer assesses black as -3.4 instead of -3.6.
Also a big fan of lichess (using it daily). That said, I agree on the tactics comment. I've found this website to be a nice supplementary resource (https://www.chesstactics.org/).
I'm also not a fan of lichess's puzzles, especially on mobile.
Over the years I've been bitten for weeks at a time by a bug that fetches a batch of puzzles at a time on mobile, and then loops through those 50 puzzles repeatedly instead of fetching more.
Even when not bugged, this behavior of 'fetch N puzzles at once' heavily encourages rating ping pong, you get a batch of easy puzzles, get them all right so your rating jumps more than it should, then a batch of hard puzzles and get crushed. I found I only ever progressed on lichess after grinding meaningful improvement slowly on chess.com, then coming back to lichess to 'catch up my rating'.
For me it tend to be more of difficult, but doable. I am beginner.
Mostly it was not helping to improve at my level at all, they were sort of pointless exercises in my level. What helped were chess king exercises apps where you solve simple situations that are not even puzzles.
But they are common in game and made you start noticing opportunities and own mistakes in game. E.g. at super beginner level, you improve a lot.
For me (1700) the problem is that they often aren't real tactics. One can get a puzzle where there's really no obvious tactical move, only strategic ones. It's mostly okay, but there's a big difference between puzzles extracted by an algorithm from games, and from hand-picket/crafted tactic puzzles.
Seconding this! Lichess is also free/libre and open-source[0], and has a really nice API[1] allowing you to do pretty much anything you could think of wanting to do when it comes to online chess.
Lichess is a god-tier piece of software. Nearly every time I use it I'm surprised by some new, incredibly well-implemented feature. For example, I recently discovered that if you hover over someone's username, and they're playing a public match, a little box (an iFrame? I haven't inspected yet) appears next to your pointer with their game, updating in realtime.
I really need to take a look at the source code, I'm sure I would learn a lot.
I have found that lichess has a more intuitive interface but the lessons and puzzles on chess.com are far superior. The explanations are clearer in the lessons, and I think the puzzles are less confusing on chess.com.
Anyone know something similar for Scrabble, with ranked online play?
It is good once in a while to get the feeling of getting better at a game by putting in some time and effort. Scrabble looks like just the thing for someone who finds chess too abstract and deterministic.
I would recommend chess for kids/teens, because it's an interesting way to teach certain self-control and tactical/strategy concepts which can be applied in real life.
As an adult, chess is a time sink with very little upside if you want to be at least decent, especially at longer time controls. I've been playing chess for more than a couple of decades, but recently decided to stop partly because of the pandemic, but mainly because it just takes too much time.
Chess at its core is a battle of intellects. It's not a relaxing thing like watching a movie, or cooking or even kicking a ball. It's a competition and at the end of each match there will be a winner and a loser. Unlike other sports it only requires mental effort without the benefit of working out the body.
I advocate the same (teaching kids) Poker for the same reasons you mentioned (certain self-control and tactical/strategy concepts) but this is often greeted with controversy anytime I voice it.
Learning to weigh the odds, exercising patience, taking calculated risks in the face of incomplete information, making allowance for the vagaries/emotions of your opponent all seem like great skills that would help one in life.
However, people often voice indignation at teaching kids the "vice" of gambling.
I agree that poker teaches many useful lessons about probability and weighing your decisions, but it's not just a moral panic to say that's it's maybe not the most appropriate game for kids. Poker is genuinely very harmful for a non-trivial number of it's players, and it can be a destructive force in a way that (say) chess is not. I've had more than one friend lose tremendous sums of money and had to go cold turkey on the game, lest it completely ruins their life.
Started looking at backgammon after reading your comment. I find it fascinating. I'm probably going to go ahead and invest some time learning it. Thanks.
I found this section on the Backgammon Wikipedia page relevant to this discussion:
Yeah, Backgammon is rad, I really enjoy playing it. It's also an incredible tool to teach both probability (given that you use two dice, and understanding the probabilities of dice events is crucial) and risk/reward judgment calls. It teaches many of the same lessons of poker, but without the gambling aspects.
As for the section on that page, you could make the same arguments about monopoly, or any game that uses dice. Backgammon can be played for money like any game, but it's not the usual way to play it, and it's not integral to how it functions. Indeed, the conclusion of the judge in that case was that it was NOT gambling, but a game of skill.
There's gambling on backgammon in the same way there's gambling on chess (or any game): sure, you can play for money, but that's not really the usual way to do it. Nothing in the game requires it. Backgammon clubs work essentially like chess clubs.
And no, the doubling cube does not make it similar to poker. The doubling cube is just a way to add another element of risk/reward to the game. In poker, you literally have (fake or real) money in front of you and the entire point of the game is moving that money into the pot and trying to win the pot to gain more money. There's nothing comparable in backgammon.
Poker is great. The other big thing it teaches is that luck is real. A hand can be played perfectly, and the player can still lose. Long term, the better player will win, but any player can get sucked out on any given hand. Losing in this way is tough, but a great lesson.
Winning 50NL poker player (US) here. That's basically as good as you're gonna get without spending a ton of time. I've probably played somewhere around 3k hours of poker, with about 1k hours live and 2k online.
You will be a top 20% poker player if you can do two things right. 1) Play the hands you should preflop. This is the poker equivalent of learning blackjack strategy. "Starting hand ranges poker" will start you down that rabbit hole. 2) Figure out pot odds. If you have a straight draw, how often will it hit and is that worth calling a bet? That takes a bit of math that seems hard at first, but gets a lot easier as you start to cache common scenarios. Google "Pot odds poker" to go down that rabbit hole. Review interesting hands and share them online. twoplustwo is the "main" poker forum. Good luck!
I had the good fortune of being introduced to it by someone who was steeped in Poker theory (a colleague at work).
Following that I picked up some more formalism from the book by David Sklansky that features prominently in the other comment in response to your question.
However, the person I mentioned before had already given me a head start on most of the practical aspects mentioned in the book. I also benefited from having him to practice against and learn from.
Chess is good for kids, but I fortunately fell out of the "chess makes kids smarter" trap a few years before I had my own kids. Besides teaching self-control, focus, how to think more strategically, etc, getting very good at chess will mean that you are just that: very good at chess. So I taught my kids and they play when they want, but they seem to get the same benefits from other boardgames of varying complexity, and many times that's what they enjoy more.
IME, which is limited, low level chess competitions might be a good social outlet. Also chance to show a relatively gifted child that 'they might not be all that' which can encourage effort in intellectual pursuits, I feel.
This is my take as well. I had a few periods when I was spending time trying to get good at chess, but after the initial enthusiasm evaporated, I realized that it's just a waste of time and energy. You only have a limited amount of peak mental performance per day, why use it for something that has questionable benefits over playing video games or watching Netflix? It's better to use my mental resource to learn and make stuff that has long-term value.
Ultimately when it comes to craft, one has to find some value in the work, not just the product which ultimately doesn't matter much. Making trinkets, music or software no one needs is no more valuable than a game. I like the general trend of a push toward creation vs consumption, but a sport/game can have a higher level of engagement and challenge, which is a nice mental workout and also offers social outlets.
Add to the fact it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. You can make shit and play games too.
There have been similar threads actually about reading, e.g. "don't waste so much time on literature, it's overrated, do other rewarding things". You can extend the argument to anything you want.
Before the pandemic, I played 1 season of chess in my local chess league, and I loved it.
It's a great excuse to spend a couple of evenings a month going out, meeting new people, and considering interesting positions in interesting games. We normally played 80+20 time control (each player has 80 minutes for the game, with an additional 20 seconds added to their clock after each move), which gives way more time for in-depth analysis of the positions that you can get with the default time controls on lichess.
Chess becomes a negative experience if you put too much importance on winning, which I have done a couple of times. If you can make winning important enough that you try hard, but not so important that losing is crushing, then I think it's a great hobby.
I like that kids (or adults) playing it have to learn to handle the ego check. There is no blaming randomness, teammates, or that the other kid is bigger/faster.
One other nice thing about chess versus other board or computer games is that whatever you put into it will still be useful twenty years from now. The game isn't going to change between now and then.
I came to the comments wondering about this. I have always wanted to learn chess, beyond the basic rules, but never dedicated to it. I think I had some version of Chessmaster, but didn't really do much with it. I just don't know if it makes sense to really spend time on. I have, spent so much time on video games such as Starcraft 2, and other RTS games even. They sucked me in way more than chess.
But, with a new daughter, I wonder if it makes sense as maybe something I can teach her in the future. As a way of teaching those concepts. Especially slowing down, and being on a screen less (something I am already a horrible influence on). I would like to teach her 'right' vs just some random horrible ideas I have (but also not crush her and discourage her)
I think learning basic chess is a good idea. It teaches a valuable idea very cleanly: The duality of offense and defense. This is a very valuable idea and not just applicable in violent war, but can also be applied to business and some competitive social relationships, including things like organized sports. I see a lot of people who lack this basic concept trying to operate in environments where it is crucial to understanding what is going on around you.
In my opinion, going deep into it like this into chess specifically has rapidly diminishing returns once you understand that concept.
However, there is also arguably some value in just putting in the effort to learn anything to that skill level, and childhood/teenage years are a good time to do it because you have the time (witness those in this very conversation talking about trying to combine it with the university time of their life... many people have learned how bad an idea that is the hard way....); chess is merely one of a panoply of possible options. It's probably not my personal first choice, I'd tend to suggest musical instrument mastery or language mastery or something else a bit more generally applicable, but if it floats you or your child's boat, that's fine. It's a lot easier if you have some buy-in.
I would just make sure to include an out; it's really easy for parents to encourage something and neglect to inform their child that it is a valid option to put a reasonable amount of effort into something and then move on when they're ready. My parents, 100% accidentally, did this to me with community youth baseball. In hindsight, they basically did nothing wrong, they were trying to be encouraging and supportive and everything else, and it just never crossed my mind to say that I didn't really want to do it, and I mean no criticism of them. But it was a blinding revelation one day when I realized that I could just not do that anymore.
I feel exactly the same way, chess and other complex strategy games are more work than they are fun for me. As someone spends a portion of the day thinking and solving problems as part of my job, I prefer to unwind with other hobbies.
I've found Blitz to be an effective way to unwind. It's sort of like playing GTA Vice City or Counter Strike and unleashing some mayhem on the board. There's not much time to think too long and get exhausted but enough time to feel deserving of the victory or defeat
Cool that the author does this, and has found a method that works for them! However, to be able to spend 2 hours a day on this seems like an indescribable luxury to me. And the quote about netting about 1.5 ELO per day sounds like a linear growth is assumed, which I can assure will not be the case past the initial massive improvements one gets from "not knowing the rules" to "actually starting to get it".
I love solving the odd chess problem here and there, and I whole-heatedly recommend lichess.org for that. The website and app are both great and the problem database is huge and varied. All free, too.
> Cool that the author does this, and has found a method that works for them! However, to be able to spend 2 hours a day on this seems like an indescribable luxury to me.
Studying chess isn't leisure in the same way that watching TV or reading a book or playing a sport are leisure. If you are studying chess with the intention of actually improving your game it requires a lot of mental energy. For a lot of people, it not most people, it would be closer to more work than leisure time.
I also play chess but I don't think of chess as time to unwind. It's definitely fun, but requires a lot of focus and I have to stop playing a few hours before bed so I can actually unwind.
Anything you put "work" in to (like serious hobbies, sports etc.) can still be considered a hobby / leisure. Lots of competitive low end golfers, tennis players, basketball players etc.
I've found it one of the best outlets from work quite frankly, to have another committed side interest that requires dedication and commitment. You should try it :-)
When I studied I worked at a grocery store part time, and found it a very good fit as it was mostly mechanical work requiring very little mental capacity.
After I graduated and got a programming job, I found that my hobbies took a big hit, as they all mostly required similar mental focus as work. So these days I generally do a lot less mentally taxing things. Sure I'll have bursts of creativity, but most days my brain is spent when I'm done at work and I'll go for a bike ride or watch a movie.
Yea I don't think the response above you actually understood my comment. I do play chess somewhat seriously and it's similar mental labor as programming. And I can only do so much more serious mental work after a day at work coding. And I definitely could not commit to two hours of serious chess study every day. Maybe 30-60 minutes of games & puzzles.
Playing a sport is completely different from playing chess, the physicality of a sport is at least different type of challenge.
My experience with such outlets is that I then put less effort into work and people around. And my observation of people who have super intellectually involved hobbies is that they do too. I can use prime mental effort for work and thinking about world around me. Or into difficult hobby (chess, electronics was for me a little). But if I do spend time with difficult hobby I am tired for work which requires focus. If I fully focus on work so I do my maximum, then I am too tired for chess. If I was not, I could be coding faster.
So for me, intellectual hobbies correlate with when project in work are boring or unmotivating (there are such periods).
I would not be able, or rather willing, to spend two hours per day playing chess at this point. However, it is all about priorities. If playing chess and improving is valuable to you, everyone can make the time.
If you have heard of K. Anders Ericsson or deliberate practice you’ll know this has limits. The fastest way to get great at anything when you’re already good is not play. It’s deliberate practice. You work at the edge of your ability, doing something you are just barely capable of doing, trying to get to competent. Once you’re competent you move on to the next frustrating thing that you can’t quite do reliably. It’s closer to mentally exhausting than fun.
That's the fastest way to grow, but to retain that growth it's also worthwhile to have some 'fun' with each new skill shortly after becoming competent at it and periodically (say, monthly at a minimum) thereafter. At least, that's how it is in my experience with shred guitar techniques. The higher level stuff gets rusty faster than the fundamentals
If you have a full-time job, family, friends, exercise, and have a hobby or two already - I'm not sure where you come up with two hours of free time per day after that.
Are you literally scheduling everything you do? Are you sleeping less than 6 hours? Obviously, there's probably 2 hours per day in small intervals where I'm not maximizing my day.
Because of this, I recently picked up guitar, and this is nice for the random periods I'm free, because I feel like picking it up 4 or 5 times a day for 5-10 minutes still allows me to make a lot of progress, be creative, and learn a lot about (and appreciate) music.
Chess is also something you could do this with, but I feel like at that time scale it would be harder and less rewarding, and this is still about 1/4th of the two hours mentioned.
Edit:
I probably spend 30 minutes on HN per day, which is mostly a waste. But this is also in small intervals.
OP here. Yeah, the best advice I know for making anything a daily habit is to make it an emergency. It comes first. So, you get some negotiable time, the first thing you do is (chess) and then you figure out the other things later.
The downside is of course that sometimes the other important things are hard to maintain. But this is how you do it.
Of course you can’t just tack on another hobby that’s 2 hrs/day when you’ve already got others. There are sacrifices with everything. If you want to take up chess as a hobby you’ll need to make room by doing less of another hobby or something else.
Similarly I've wanted to allocate some amount of time to a creative outlet, which I've neglected for some time. Huge time sink to get something out of it, I feel. I also enjoy variety when it comes to games. That can be chess at times, but not in a dedicated, obsessive sense, just a means to flex my mind a bit with puzzles.
Admittedly, level of challenge in games can vary tremendously. I always like to have one on rotation that is difficult.
While agreeing with your general principle, I think you're being unfair.
Two hours a day, every day, is a lot of time. I barely watch television and still, if you asked me to find two more hours every day I'd tell you that you were crazy.
I already have hobbies. I relax. I spend time with my partner. I sleep, I cook, I work, I walk.
I do not find myself with two hours that I don't know what to do with, and I'd challenge you to find someone that does.
Wait, do you think the OP has somehow discovered a 26 hour day? Everyone gets 24 hours. Take off about 8 hours for sleeping. That's what you have to play with. How you choose to divide that up is up to you but it's always used in full, no matter how you choose to use it. In this day and age the amount of time you need to dedicate to just surviving is close to zero. It's your choice to work more and not have enough time to play chess.
Reminds me of Nietzche: "Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”.
To be fair, pre-lockdown I use to have an hour long commute and that would allow me to study Japanese close to two hours a day and still let me a lot of time to look after my baby once home.
Congratulations that's a great achievement. I think that almost everyone should be able to achieve a solid 2000 elo rating, with enough dedication over the years. Doing tactics puzzles is one of the most important factors for fast improvements.
> Some day, I want to become a titled player. A candidate master needs an ELO of 2200
2000 and 2200 are completely different skill levels. I have some friends who play chess for more than 10 years in a chess club, starting as a kid, but haven't reached titled skill level yet and probably never will.
My personal advice is: focus on the fun part of chess, there will always be a stronger player, but that doesn't matter.
It's relative to the pool of individuals, and there are tons of caveats (as other posters mentioned).
Despite this, due to the size of the pools of individuals and relative seriousness of players who belong to official tournament organisations, the ratings have been fairly stable. Yes, there's been some inflation, but I'd say it's somewhat been in line with the increase in knowledge and training methods. While the system has all kinds of minor issues, it's still "quite good", especially when we compare it to other sports or activities with a more variable pool and quality.
In this sense, most people know what 1600, 1800, 2000, etc, mean to fairly precise degree.
Lots of new players that join up, drop their ELO points into the "bag" and then leave (or if online, sign up new accounts). ELO "points" aren't a finite resource.
That would quickly lead to hyperinflation of ratings. The rating lost by a new player is not won by an old player. If you join and is assigned a rating of 1900, but loose your 5 first games, you probably loose a 100 rating points each game. However, the player beating you at 1000 rating doesn't get 100 points, just a few points.
It is said that if a child (teenager) follows the step course, which is a Dutch youth training method, you should be able to start from then on at a 1600 ELO rating. I would assume following the course is self-selecting, you only make it if it is fun and you are good at it, so take that for what it is worth.
> I think that almost everyone should be able to achieve a solid 2000 elo rating, with enough dedication over the years
I think you are massively underestimating the natural range of human intelligence.
I don't think the average IQ 100 individual could ever reach an ELO of 2000 regardless of how much they practice, and half the population has IQs of less than 100.
> GM Hikaru Nakamura famously took the Mensa online IQ test and scored a very average 102
His elo peak rating is 2816. Just one example for an extraordinary strong player with average IQ (there are many other examples). I don't think that a high IQ is required to become a decent chess player (like 2000). It may help though.
While I think people underestimate how much hard work can overcome low cognitive talent, such that probably a lot of people with average iq can hit a chess rating of 2,000 if that was their primary goal in life, I also think Hikaru's IQ probably isn't actually only 102. Online tests aren't so rigorous. Just from hearing him talk he seems to have the usual nuanced understanding of the universe on a variety of domains that would not be typical of an average iq. he also took the chest while streaming and talking to chat
I think that the value of IQ is overestimated. IQ tests don't capture "nuanced understanding of the universe on a variety of domains". They measure something much more narrow, i.e., how good you are at the particular type of IQ tests.
> GM Hikaru Nakamura famously took the Mensa online IQ test and scored a very average 102
Nice clickbait. It you watched him take it on stream, you'd know that he was goofing around with his chat and ran out of time b/c he didn't know it was timed.
> The most comprehensive and recent publication I've found related to this question is The relationship between cognitive ability and chess skill: A comprehensive meta-analysis.
> The bottom line is that according to a meta-analysis of numerous studies, there is clearly a correlation between chess skill and cognitive ability, but cognitive ability explains only about 6% of the variance in chess skill (12% if you only consider numerical ability only). There must be other factors as well (e.g., training), some of which could be more important than cognitive ability.
From my personal observations I very much agree with 6%.
IQ tests are universally accepted in psychology as the most robust psychometric ever developed. The idea that IQ tests are "bullshit" is nonsense pop psychology. Some people might try to over-interpret IQ tests as meaning more than what they do, but they are very good at measuring what they measure, and they predict a lot of things.
That said, I agree if you brag about your IQ you're a moron.
a test in isolation cannot be bullshit. when people talk about iq test many people imagine the person believes an iq test is a rigorous measure of all intellectual talent. or course it is not that. but it is also wrong to suggest it has no meaning at all. it does have some predictive power.
imperfect measures are not always useless, which is goof since all measures have some error.
A test trying to measure something we can't even properly define is kinda flawed in it's whole premise.
As such the best an IQ test can do is measure how well somebody prepared for a test like that, but it will struggle to properly catch any knowledge or skill domains not covered by the test, of which there are a lot.
IQ tests correlate with things. Thus it captures more than just how good someone is at the IQ test.
You can say "There is this test, and people's scores on this test correlate with various things like, income, marital fidelity, religiosity, incarceration rates, job performance". We call this test the IQ test.
If anything, top level chess players are likely to have missed some non-chess education when they were young due to being a chess prodigy, which would contribute to a lower IQ in adulthood.
1) They are a measure of a very specific kind of intelligence: the kind of intelligence required to score high on IQ tests. I score pretty high on IQ tests but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that my intelligence in other areas is, at least as it appears to me, below average.
2) intelligence does have some elasticity. When you think of intelligence has a culmination of pathways/heuristics/low-level-techniques, it’s easy to see how many pathways are self-reinforcing and not easily taught or measured. You can be predisposed to a particular kind of intelligence, and not everything is attainable by everyone, but what we call intelligence is close to what we call talent: seems like an innate quality, but actually reflects long-term hard practice with countless hours dedicated.
Intelligence is a complex interplay of nature and nurture. There is no way to test only the "nature" component, it's akin to unmixing a pot of purple paint to extract the red and blue.
A lot of IQ test questions get easier the more mathematics you have studied.
that is the goal but at the extremes i imagine it fails. imagine you are a chess prodigy that was homeschooled and never had a sit down exam before. don’t know if hikaru fits the description.
Chess is mainly about memory and recognizing patterns and implementing those patterns at that exact moment at the chessboard.
So I would definitely think there is correlation between chess and memory. There was a really good documentary about memory called How Does Your Memory Work. Highly recommended, you get to see a glimpse of the workings of Susan Polgar's brain. I might also confuse it with My Brilliant Brain from National Geographic :)
I remember seeing a live post-mortem analysis by Anish Giri. It was just astonishing how fast he can see combinations, yet also how deep those combinations are. And then on top of that throw in a sentence like "Oh, it is not new, it was played in 2006 as well, in that game between him and him". So really, fast thinking, slow thinking, and picking deep into your memory, all at once, seemingly without any effort. That is 2760 ELO for you :)
That's because physics and maths ability is included in the IQ test. If you included lots of chess or chess-like problems than Kasparov would magically rank a lot higher.
Sure. I see it almost every time I visit HN. I've encountered many people with a slightly warped sense of reality but none more so that on this website.
There are two broad patterns I often see:
The first is where they think everyone on the planet is somewhat like them. You'll see comments like "everyone should be able to program" or even "everyone should program". I've even seen people claim that ability to program should be considered a fundamental life skill. In general it's hugely overestimating not only the IQ but the interests and mindset of the general public. The comment I replied to here is an example of this type.
The other one is where their perception of a baseline standard of living is far higher than that of average people even within their own country. It's usually that they think some luxury item is absolutely essential despite people around the world living healthy and happy lives without it. They seem to be completely unaware that these other people exist.
My theory is that these people have been fed through schools in affluent areas, through university and straight into ridiculously high paying jobs and have simply never had (and probably never will have) any contact with people from other walks of life.
On the flip side you have people like me, I grew up working class poor in the north of England in the 1980's - worked minimum wage jobs in my late teens/early twenties and managed through hard work and luck to escape that life into a successful career as a software engineer.
While I'm sure a decent subset of users would fit your description, that's certainly not the case for every user.
I agree with what you're saying but it seems like you might have replied to the wrong comment.
The parent comment is making the same point as you about IQ: "I don't think the average IQ 100 individual could ever reach an ELO of 2000 regardless of how much they practice, and half the population has IQs of less than 100."
I've been watching a lot of GM Daniel Naroditsky's "Speedrun" series, where he plays games and teaches you why he's making the moves he's making vs alternatives, starting at a very low rating, to get back to a 3000 rating. He's a great teacher, and I've gotten a lot out of watching that series.
He streams them live, and then edited videos of the games on stream are uploaded on his YouTube channel. Here's the YT playlist for the series:
I am on YouTube a lot more than Twitch, but if he's streaming live on Twitch, I'll watch him. I have just been watching all of his back catalog of YouTube videos.
No idea. Daniel's channel is solely devoted to chess. My best guess is his editor made a mistake in making the playlist, maybe thinking he was logged into his own personal account? I didn't realize it was there in the playlist, as I just watch the new videos when they get posted.
Two small notes, this seems not to be an official rating. The 1750 is reached at chess.com it seems. I play at lichess, where I am around 1700. My official rating is currently 1437, my highest rating ever was 1583 two years ago. So there is definitely inflation at lichess, and I would assume there is inflation at chess.com. So claiming 1750 ELO when it is not an official rating seems somewhat risky.
Another note, he seems to be 21. I do understand you are an adult by then, but really, there is so much youth in you when you are 21. I see other players at the club get so much better at that age. I started at 31 at maybe 1100, and got to a max of 1583 only 12 years later. My brain is not so spongy anymore :)
Glicko is just ELO with an uncertainty factor that speeds up down how quickly your rating changes if you've played fewer games. Actually, FIDE's implementation of ELO also has an approximate version of this, increasing its "k" value for new players and decreasing it for some thresholds of games played, ratings, and player age. Both these adjustments just affect how quickly your rating would change if your win rate changes. They do not your equilibrium rating at a particular skill level.
Lichess ratings are inflated not because of Glicko but because of the player pool. New players start at 1500 ELO in both Lichess and FIDE, but Lichess's pool of "new players" is a lot wider and has a lot more amateurs than FIDE's new players. The amateurs' points ultimately get spread around the player pool while they descend from 1500 to a more realistic rating, inflating the ratings of other players on the way.
> New players start at 1500 ELO in both Lichess and FIDE
I've never played otb, but on the FIDE website, they have a initial rating calculator (https://ratings.fide.com/calc.phtml?page=initial) which seems to depend on your opponents' ratings and your performance, but not on the number 1500
chess.com ratings are much less inflated than lichess ratings (partially because its new users start at 1200 ELO, not 1500). Not sure if there's a more exact conversion to FIDE ratings, especially because it looks like he's playing exclusively 3+0 blitz games, which play out much differently online than they do over the board.
Good point. I reached a similar outcome at about 31 but the obsession was getting so much in my way of life that I stopped. I was basically opening the now instant defunct instantchess.com at any idle moment I had. At this point was more like an addiction
I also found with lichess that blitz players are a lot stronger than rapid - I'm 200 points higher on rapid than blitz and it seems that's pretty common, which has always confused me (and not hugely different time controls - 5+3 vs. 10+0)
I had a similar progression also in two years, from only knowing the rules to 1658 last week (my peak rating so far).
But this is rapid rating, not Blitz or bullet, and I only play 45 minutes matches with 45 seconds increment on chess.com (which I think is not actually classical and not rapid, but marked as rapid on chess.com).
I don't do puzzles, study cards or anything, I simply took a couple of opening video courses from Simon Williams on both white and black, and played those exclusively.
Initially I played 15 minutes/10 seconds increment games, several a day, until I felt that I was losing a lot of winning positions only due to time.
Then I increased to 30 minutes, and now 45/45 which is almost a classical format.
I don't think playing short time formats is ideal for learning, I like playing longer ones and really think the games through.
Then analyze each game thoroughly with chess.com post-game analysis.
I only play one game a day, almost every day. Most games end in well less than an hour, but some take close to almost two hours (due to the increment and long end games).
I think like in any game, if you continuously play with opponents of just about your skill level, and you analyze your games to make sure that you are not making the same mistakes again and again, you will improve over time just like with anything.
To minimize rating fluctuations and tilting, playing only one long and well thought out game a day works great and keeps it fun.
I think to keep it fun, it's important not to forget that rating fluctuations are normal and don't mean much. As long as you keep playing and analysing each game, improvement is possible.
I thought about learning chess and what it actually involes when i watched the new netflix show.
i came to the relisation that it actually involes becoming good in a very very big search space by having a lot of experience and being fast in calculating and remembering chess moves.
Especially when i see how many people read up on grand masters, i came up with the theory:
The normal person is running behind or trying to 'just' learn the fast pre found and pre tested moves from a handfull of people who actually played/thought those moves through.
Like being a musician and only doing covers for 30 years while never playing/creating something themselfs.
AI became a tool by 1. no longer needing Grand Masters to find the next level and 2. being accessable to everyone which could create new pockets discovered by AI/through AI (compute power) and being learned individual.
How much real strategy is there for two really good players? Or is it more of an 'he is going for this move, i know this kind of moves and i need to intervine through moves so the opponent gets forced to play my moves'?
> The normal person is running behind or trying to 'just' learn the fast pre found and pre tested moves from a handfull of people who actually played/thought those moves through.
Quite the opposite, amateur players play a few moves from a standard opening, and then deviate hugely from the book variations and go into uncharted territory really fast.
And while pro's certainly spend an insane amount of time memorizing openings, chess is far more than rote memorization which you kinda seem to apply.
Here's a video of Magnus Carlsen being shown various board positions from another player, and then recalling which games they are from and the moves taken. [0]
I don’t think this take is quite right. In the early/late game, sure it can end up being memorization. But the game has so many states that the mid game tends to be quite complex and there is a lot of skill (calculation/tactics ect.) which is really not memorization
There is way more than a human can hold in their head, so games are interesting and not predetermined even at expert level. Try watching a game with commentary, such as a world championship tournament, and you'll see the kinds of thought processes that experts go through.
> I thought about learning chess and what it actually involes when i watched the new netflix show.
>i came to the relisation that it actually involes becoming good in a very very big search space by having a lot of experience and being fast in calculating and remembering chess moves.
I wish I was this confident. Remembering chess moves, why didn't I think of that?
It feels like a golden age to be learning chess right now. There's just infinite good content on YouTube (St Louis Chess Club, Atlanta Chess Club, Chess24 etc) and various apps (lichess, Chessable, Chess Tempo etc). Plus you can get a decent sized database (e.g. http://caissabase.co.uk/) and cutting edge engine for your own study for absolutely free. Really hoping when the pandemic is over this leads to a boost for actual chess clubs and isn't just an online phenomenon.
Aye, Saturday - now that my life has settled down I'm going to aim for once a quarter (I always announce them on twitter @caissabase ) but there will be another before Xmas because someone sent me a bunch of TWICS I was missing so once I've cleaned/de-duped those probably.
For the most beginner of beginners - I would say that the best advice is to control the center of the board, play aggressively / make an attacking move whenever possible, and DON'T be afraid to trade pieces.
If you don't have a move that attacks your opponent and forces them to play defense, develop your least active piece.
Also, learn the King's Indian opening. You can use it as black or white, and it's one of the easiest openings. I also think it's a good opening against beginners, because they make a lot of mistakes against this. So, 1) you'll be able to beat beginners - and winning is always more fun than losing; and 2) you'll learn to watch for your opponents to make mistakes - and that will help you learn to avoid making common mistakes.
These two videos got me from ~700 to ~1000 in about a week. And they got me to the point where Chess was actually fun instead of a being a frustrating minefield I tried to navigate until I inevitably made a blunder and self-imploded.
> That's funny because I found the opposite to be true if it's a single bishop / knight endgame.
No matter what you found, it has been statistically proved that a Bishop (against a Knight), and especially a Bishop pair is stronger than a Knight/Knight or Knight/Bishop .
Bishop pair is clear, of course, but I literally would look for a single knight/bishop ending (where I would have the knight), thinking it gave me the advantage. Maybe it was a placebo effect. Ha! Thanks again!
Not _just_ placebo. If you tend to favor very closed positions, or end up placing pawns in ways that make your bishops useless, then the knight might be better sometimes, even though the general idea of bishop > knight is correct.
It's not very realistic when it comes to the chess, except the actual games. I also found it frustrating that they obviously were inspired by Bobby Fischer whose real life would have made a great story, but decided he wasn't hollywood friendly.
The show is actually based on a book by the same name published in 1983 [0], never read it myself. The chess moves in it are apparently taken from Fischer and others, but it doesn't credit Fischer in any other way.
Which is kind of weird considering the show did even the comparing the protagonist to Paul Morphy thing that also applied to Fischer.
The book also tackles themes like drug addiction and feminism, but I found the show's take on these mostly pointless and superficial. Her drug addiction is never depicted as a struggle, she performs well drugged as well as sober, more of a comedic air to it than serious affliction.
It's also slightly historically revisionist when claiming there were no female chess clubs in the US back then, when there actually were whole female national championships since the late 1930s. The show also claimed how in the USSR women would never play against men, completely ignoring the history of Nina Alexandrovna Bluket [1], who's life would probably have made for a way more interesting and authentic story than a gender-swapped Bobby Fischer.
There are parallels to Fischer but if you want that movie "Pawn Sacrifice" is a decent movie.
As for realism when it comes to chess, as a (former - covid bleh) competitive league player they absolutely nailed the "feel" of the Chess world for me, better than anything else I've seen - yes they compressed the games and showed players moving far too quickly but that was a necessary compromise - hard to show a 7 hour game in real time as a TV show.
The camaraderie and eccentricities of the Chess world where displayed really well.
To be fair, Bobby Fischer life, while not totally uneventful wouldn't really be dramatic enough for a serie. At least, not without focusing on the geopolitical aspect of when he played spassky, which the serie apparently didn't go with.
Also, using a woman character was a good idea in my opinion, since chess is such a man world.
Not very realistic? I thought the depiction of tournament play was spot on, with the obvious exception of a few 'dramatic moments'. Have you played OTB tournaments?
Have you seen the top 100 chessplayer list? Now, 10 years ago?, 50 years ago? Have you see the women top 100 list? The few American women there are Asian-Americans or FSU. Only in Hollywood a cute WASPY girl is the GOAT of chess, and yes I know this is based on a 1980s novel.That does not make it realistic.
It's like making a movie where the best 100m sprinter in the world is a Guatemalan woman. Nice story, 0 credibility.
I understand your point, I guess I'm not one to feel that 'realistic' in the sense you described is a very important metric when critiquing media. For example, would anyone say that the musical Hamilton is 'realistic'? Probably not, but that hasn't decreased its massive popularity.
As a tournament player myself (of course, a rather shoddy amateur) I felt the series got the details of tournament play right. The fact that the prodigy was a teenage girl was besides the point.
I've always found the Polgar story a bit weird, despite the way their father obviously characterised it. Was their chess education really that different from any other resulting chess pro?
Well,his method is not that different of what I have seen other parents have done with their talented kids. Tiger Woods, Ichiro Suzuki, Son Heung-min, Andre Agassi, the Williams sisters, among others, were coached relentlessly since they were almost babies. You can discuss how healthy it is, but the results are there. Judit is by a ridiculous margin the strongest female player in the history.
I suppose my point is, it just feels slightly patronising that the story is presented as this weird brain experiment when I don't think we bat an eyelid at the same upbringing for male players. This is (for better or worse) what it takes to reach 2700.
Also, do you categorise the gulf between Polgar and Hou Yifan as a ridiculous margin (about 50 Elo)? Obviously Polgar was better at her peak, stayed there longer, and clearly had a dedication to the game than Hou never seemed interested in, but I think on the level of natural talent they'd actually be close.
ELO inflation is a real thing in chess.Caruana ELO is 60+ points over Fischer. Polgar reached top 10, Yifan will never be a top 50 player. A top 10 player is in the rounds for the candidates tournament, a top 60 player is lucky if she or he is invited to a 19+ category tournament.
And a bunch of oil drillers wouldn't be the best people to send to an astroid headed for earth. Since when does Hollywood have to be realistic to be entertaining or good? In fact, making it unrealistic often makes it more entertaining.
You are adding nothing to the conversation, I already said that. It's curious though that most of the unrealistic scenarios are the ones who portray the Americans are great and never the other way around. Ideology masquerading as entertainment.
> It's curious though that most of the unrealistic scenarios are the ones who portray the Americans are great and never the other way around. Ideology masquerading as entertainment.
Sorry I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Are you saying that Americans should lose more in film directed at Americans? It's not that it doesn't happen. It's just that it's hard to do. An example that immediately came to mind is the ironically named (for this conversation) show, "The Americans", where the Russians definitely win more than they lose. From Wikipedia:
"The series's final season earned Rhys the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, while Weisberg and co-lead writer Joel Fields won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series; it was also awarded the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama. Additionally, Margo Martindale won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series twice for her performance in the third and fourth seasons. It also became one of the rare drama shows to receive two Peabody Awards during its run."
It's easily my favorite show.
Looping back to Queens Gambit, I think the basic idea is that it's juuuust unrealistic enough without being too unreasonable to take you out of it. It's not unrealistic that Americans can be the best at chess. Hell, an American faced Magnus last world championship for the title and is still world #2. It's also not unrealistic that a Woman could get there as well. Hou Yifan is 84th right now.
But the combination is just unrealistic enough without taking you out of it, which makes it very entertaining.
A documentary about an orphan Russian or Chinese guy who ascends to the top? Might be more realistic, but not a good enough story for a Netflix #1 level of entertainment to a US audience.
It is a cool series but nowhere near real description of chess. Of course it’s ok, but it’s worth to remember, that in order to get to the international level you need excellent coaches and years of brutal many hour practice. Talent is somewhat important but nowhere as important as training.
To have more objective outlook at “chess prodigy” story it’s interesting to look story of Joshua Waitzkin. He is a great and talented chess player but not at the level of grandmasters. He explained that he didn’t really wanted to “sacrifice” other things in his life to become a grandmaster.
> Talent is somewhat important but nowhere as important as training.
Generally agreed on your post but I don't think I agree with this. You aren't making it to GM without an extreme amount of talent. Training is likely to be required too, but I'd say it's much more likely that an extremely talented but untrained person could make GM vs an not-so-talented person with rigorous training. Basically I'm saying that the vast majority of people would never be able to become a GM regardless of training.
Mikhail Botvinik who was the world champion between 1948-1963 (with two brief 1-year disruptions) also had a career as an electrical engineer during his peak chess years
Just watched it over the past week. I enjoyed it immensely. I don't care whether its depiction of chess is realistic. The lead actress is superb in her role. Its depiction of addiction and depression was spot-on with my experience; many of the scenes gave me chills, particularly when the adoptive mother is involved (whether directly or indirectly).
Highly recommended: "The Queen's Gambit", 7-episode miniseries on Netflix.
I've mentioned this before in other discussions about chess. I was a little over 2000 USCF when I went to college before I decided that girls were more important than getting to 2200, lol.
Anyways, if you're a newer player and want to improve your game fast, this is what I would focus on.
1. Tactics. The vast majority of games between newer players are decided by tactics...someone hanging a piece, falling into a trap, etc. Practice tactics by doing puzzles, reviewing games of strong players with tactical themes. Lichess and Chess.com both have decent collections of tactics puzzles.
2. Don't try to learn a ton of openings. Pick one or two openings for white and black, and focus on them. Don't try to memorize lines, but rather become more familiar with the structures that result out of the openings, what typical objectives for white and black are, etc.
3. Familiarize yourself with endgame play. This is less important than #1 as a newer player, because all the endgame knowledge in the world means nothing if you hang a rook in the first 15 moves. But, it IS still important though, because you will get into endgames with a small advantage (or disadvantage) so you need to be familiar with how to convert that into a win (or hold your position). Rook endgames are especially important since they are generally the most common type of endgame. Lev Alburt has a good book called "Just the Facts" which covers endgame play. There are also puzzles and excercises on lichess and chess.com
4. Probably the fastest way to improve is to actually play games against stronger players than you and have them analyzed or annotated. You can either do this with a computer program, or a stronger human player if youre fortunate enough to know a strong player or have a coach. Lichess and Chess.com both have tools which will analyze your game and point out mistakes, missed opportunities etc. These are very helpful, they will instantly point out key moments in the game so you can see where you (or your opponent) went wrong.
Improvement in chess is really a volume game. The strongest players have played thousands of games and have a good sense and understanding of different positions because they have seen so many of them. They're able to quickly recognize patterns in these positions and devise a plan based on strengths/weaknesses. The best way to sort of develop this sixth sense is to put in the volume and play!
Totally agree with all your points. I also have a rating little over 2000 USCF. New players tend to over-emphasize on openings. To this day I know only names of about 5 openings. I do not know more than a few moves in them. I have generic replies for most of them.
Majority of the games of new players are decided by some stupid blunder. Blitz games do not help improve this area much. Like you said game reviews and puzzles are best.
For complete cheers beginners who want to learn and understand the ideas of the game, I highly recommend buying an oldish engine, Chessmaster XI: Grandmaster Edition, as it contains a set of amazing, approachable tutorials by an IM Joshua Waitzkin. You might know him at the author of the Art of Learning book.
Some will say that the program is old. It is. Who cares, the engine is strong enough for you, of that I'm sure, and there isn't much else you'd want as a complete beginner.
I would actually advise against this game, the tutorial is interesting as are the different player profiles but I discovered it has a weird sinusoidal like algorithm where it would try to match your performance with some impossible, engine like moves after a series of weaker plays. It makes it pretty frustrating to play.
Honestly his progress doesn't seem especially fast.
I think he's spending way too much time on opening theory positional chess, when he'd probably get more bang for his buck drilling more tactics or playing some games with longer time controls.
Online chess is currently facing a wave of cheating. Kids, stuck at home by covid, are playing chess at grandmaster levels. They are using software to suggest moves. Detecting it has become an interesting big data/machine learning problem. So i wouldn't get to obsessed with soecific rank-based rating schemes.
>> In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1. And in a third, an Armenian grandmaster booted out for suspicious play accused his opponent of “doing pipi in his Pampers”.
I don't think this a real issue in online chess, cheaters get banned pretty fast, very easy to detect. There are cheaters as in any other game, but from my experience there are percentual a lot fewer cheaters in chess than in Counter Strike for example.
>> Such controversies have been replicated even in the lower-stakes world of junior play. Sarah Longson, a former British ladies’ champion who runs the Delancey UK Schools’ Chess Challenge, said at least 100 of 2,000 online participants cheated.
I would say 5% is pretty bad. Assuming there is an advantage to cheating, the higher up the ranks you get the greater the likelihood that you will face an undetected cheat.
I think that the big difference between chess and other competitive video games is that in chess you have to do all the steps as the computer says, not just a few of them. In high-level chess one good move is not enough to win a game, you have to consistently find the best move. In a game like Counter-Strike or League of Legends it is pretty easy to just use the cheat a few rounds, or just parts of a round to gain an advantage and then maintain that advantage.
You can do similar things in chess too. Just play your own game until you reach a tricky position where you ask the computer what to do. As long as you don't make massive blunders, you would win more games than you would without a computer. It's a lot harder to get caught for cheating online if you play like that. Playing the exact moves that the computer plays throughout the game is the easiest way to get caught cheating. Also, insert standard statement here about cheating being bad etc.
Maybe in tournaments, and in lower rated categories someone will use an engine once in a while to eek out a win. But it's not a rampant problem at all when it comes to casual online chess.
That was an amazing read but, to me, the whole thing sounds to me more like a second job than a hobby, if I'm being honest. Obviously different people relate differently with those side activities but your dedication to learn chess puts it very much outside my personal definition of hobby or unwinding activity.
I have a analog story that ended up burning my up with my hobby: playing music. I played guitar (acoustic and electric) since I was a teenager, and sometime after I was an adult, I decided to double down to really learn it (as a hobby, since I already had my main career). I set up several hours a week for deliberate practice, started a classic guitar class, tried some Brazilian MPB class. The endgame for me was that I got completely burned out.
After doing that for about 2 years, playing became a big chore for me. One day I just stopped and didn't touch a guitar again for almost 5 years.
It was still very interesting to see how you approached it.
At an Elo level of around 2000 they converge. (I.e. both lichess and chesscom calibrate their algorithm to match on-the-board standards around that region.)
For various reasons, online Elos are inflated by 100+ points if you go above 2500+ or below 1500. A progression from zero to 1750 rating is just as instructive if you assume he went from zero to 1650...
I have been thinking about chess for a while now as an indicator of cognitive health. Not that a single number can define how smart a person is relative to another, but instead how my own cognitive ability is doing.
I had been using the game of 2048, but given the random element and how easy the game is, it's just not a great measure anymore. I have recently started a different diet and I want some measurable way of knowing how well my own brain is affected by it.
The only real problem with chess as a measurement is that if you do the online games for example you get cheaters, etc. Does this detriment your ranking or do people generally find this not to be a problem?
You can also gauge how well you solve chess puzzles. A great place for this is Lichess[0], where you are presented with situations from real games played on the platform, and you are trying to find the best series of moves for one side, playing against the computer. Those puzzles have difficulty ratings based on the ratings of players who have been able to solve them or not, and your rating goes up or down depending on if you solve it successfully. It's also great because there's no time commitment or pressure with the puzzles. You can jump in or out at any time.
Yeah, I think chess can give you cold hard feedback on how well your mind is working on a given day. As the author already mentioned, performance can vary a lot. When you're doing poorly, you often don't feel very different, but then you sit down to play chess and realize you're basically sleep walking. What you're looking for is a fully awake, high alert, high awareness state of mind. Factors like diet and regular exercise can make a huge difference in my experience.
Absolutely. It is always a really indicator of if I'm tired or not if I start to fail a lot of chess puzzles where I should have seen something, but just didn't notice it because I was tired. As someone who tends to stay up late, it's been nice, because I have an objective measure of my cognitive decline from being tired that I wouldn't have seen otherwise, and it's made me want to go to bed so that I'm not tanking my puzzle rating on Lichess, haha. :)
A long while back, I dedicated my time to Tetris (on Gameboy). I surely spent less time on that than would have been necessary for chess, but it is amazing to see what progress is possible. I could play level 9[heart] without an end (in infinite play mode) or up to high 3 (6 rows of waste on bottom). When moving a brick to the left or right edge, the gameboy would make a long beep instead of individual blips. No idea how I could move my fingers that fast.
It is fun. For chess in contrast to Tetris, there is even a good chance for it to stay fun -- Tetris is a bit too simplistic for that, I think.
I did a similar thing. I bought a Gameboy and modded it for music production, but by far the most time I spend with it was playing Tetris DX where I started from failing really early up to the highest levels (that give you the rocket launch ending). It is a terrific device to play Tetris. No colour, no distraction, 30h of pure Tetris with one set of batteries.
I am however missing that you can't start from higher levels than 9 (thus forcing you to replay boring bits) and it is missing the modern Tetris features like holding and hard-drops. Somewhat surprising nobody implemented modern Tetris for the classic GB yet.
If you don't already know, then you might be interested in the Classic Tetris World Championship, which is currently running on Twitch (with VODs on YouTube). The YouTube channel aGameScout[0] also has a lot of interesting information on the history and recent developments of the tournament.
The most useful resource for beginner I found was "Chess King Learn" series of apps. The ones with beginner tactics puzzles - capturing pieces were invaluable. Those are simple drills, but when you do them you will be able to "spot" opportunities without effort. That made massive difference in my play.
That and Magnus trainer. I did not paid for subscription, but there are exercises focused on training your imagination, pathfinding and other similar skills.
Lichess people recommend is great for online play, but the above are much better for learning.
1750 is pretty good. But with chess you can get so many games per day, it's much easier than other games with the same ELO ranking system. It's the sheer number of valid games which are possible online. You can also easily cheat online.
An analogy: I started with 52 as regional table tennis player. In Saxony. I started with 1150 or so, and am now at 1300. We cannot play that many games, around 4 per month, so we cannot raise our points that much as in chess. But other countries do have a trick, and therefore have much higher ELO points. They added their self organized games in so-called "<sponsor>-pokal" leagues, which can be played daily around the district. You can easily organize your oiíwn tournament with the Swiss system, which guarantees time-bounded end times. You are sure that the tournament is finished by 10pm. And most countries honor these tournaments points, so you can easily raise up your ranking.
But my country saxony doesn't like this idea because there are folks who would cheat the system. They would loose on purpose in such tournaments to be able to stay in the official lower ranked leagues, where they will win more easily against lower ranked players. They would abuse the system. I'm pretty sure professional chess players in the lower ranks would also like to play for his club in much lower leagues, so that wins are easier. Only to get into international tournaments or the highest leagues you need the points. Many are also loosing on purpose at the end of the season to be able stay in the lower ranks, if the remaining games are not important anymore.
Eg when I played in the US I would beat the 1600 players. In Saxony no chance at all.
I've been studying chess for the past year as someone much older than 21, and I find it's pretty interesting! For one thing, tactics and calculation for sure will be varying considerably between players of different skill levels. For me, it can take forever to calculate 3 moves ahead because I lose my place as I go. I think for good players, they can see it almost instantly, subconsciously. And I think that is where the chess prodigy comes in. From the beginning, the chess prodigy probably gets their subconscious in tune with moving the pieces and can see tactics and N moves ahead almost instantly. I'm curious to see how much better that gets for me over time. If I practice a bit every day, how fast will my calculation get? It's probably logarithmic but still... Anyone have experience getting good (~1700 or >) as an adult?
I think the meta that these experiences renforce is (the somewhat cliche) growth mentality.
Path A is different from B in term of ratings progress for any given number of hours played/practiced. Playing Blitz. Playing Classic. Having a coach. Self coaching. Analyzing games. Tactics. Openings... Some combination of these will build skill more effectively than other. You can intentionally select an effective path, if you want/choose to.
Being just a game/hobby for most people, it's perfectly rational to choose a slower rate of improvement. I play mostly bullet... no analysis/study/etc. It's fun, but not much progress. That's a choice, conscious or otherwise.
I think a lot of people, in retrospect, might characterize the intentionally progressive path as too demanding on time. This is often illusionary. The X curve is hours dedicated, whether that's 10 per year or 1000. Skill progression is not more demanding of time, but it can demand more "energy".
This is important because we do dedicate our time to something, inevitably. We spend a lot of time on "skilled" activities in the sense that it's possible to improve at them.. How many hours do you spend writing emails? Writing is skilled work. Programming, obviously. etc. We cook. We have hobbies. If you spend 30m per day with your kids on homework, that's teaching. Teaching is a skilled task. Gardening. Home improvement. It is possible to intentionally get better at these skills, if we choose to. We're already spending the time.
Even passive activities can be (arguably) skilled. "Film appreciation" is also kind of skilled. You can learn to appreciate the shots, composition. Each movie you watch can extend your understanding of filmography.
There's something kind of magical about and elo rating. It's a nice objective number that changes every time we play. Imagine having an elo rating for your cooking/writing/programming/etc.
1750 rating is quite achievable, if you put certain interest on chess, via classic books or analyzing important games. Achieving 2000 is something different as well as 2300 and 2500
I think ratings up to 1750 is about not making silly mistakes, understanding the basic concepts.
I've noticed a big time day-to-day correlation between my chess performance and the amount of sleep I had. Also, coming back refreshed from a 1 or 2-week vacation (with plenty of sleep) leads to an immediate boost as well.
Sounds like "The yips". I know what you mean. It's as if overusing part of the brain makes the connections less powerful than they'd normally be. Possibly already some credible science behind it.
I've set out on a similar journey in the past couple of years, but been very much doing it 'in the dark' by focusing on learning and watching a lot of tactical videos on Youtube (mainly agadmator's and GothamChess's channels) which have given me a new insight into various chess theories.
I have a paid Chess.com account (same username as my HN handle), but still lack the confidence to really engage a human opponent 1 on 1. Maybe next year, once I have really got opening books and endgame theory down pat. I still make too many blunders in those parts.
I'm a fan of John Bartholomew myself. You've probably encountered his youtube channel. GothamChess is streaming on twitch all the time.
I've also set out to improve my chess, somewhat casually, over the last year. About an 1800 rapid player on Lichess (~1500 on Chess.com), their ratings differ.
As far as openings, I like the courses on chessable.com.
In my go games, I have noticed a massive aversion to actually playing, because I hate my blunders too much.
My advice would be, either accept that you will blunder and play anyway, or give up on playing.
Blunders are part of playing, there is no avoiding them. Moreover, the more you try to avoid them, the more they hurt when they inevitably do happen.
The only viable way to play that I can think of is to embrace that blunders will happen. For me that seems to be too hard, so I don't play anymore.
I don't know if I have the patience to learn chess to a high level as an adult. Also mentioned here, I too have been replaying Starcraft2 ladder as a way to keep up my 'fast' thinking skills.
The other pastime I used to engage in is Go. It's a good alternative to chess because for a long while you can choose to improve on your high-level strategy vs detailed tactics and playouts. At some point, I suppose it becomes like playing a few chess games that leak into each other.
This is a lot of time to devote to chess "as an adult". I've got children, who take up a lot of my time. I would love to learn how to play chess, but for "fun" not as some kind of competition. Is it worth while to learn chess for this reason, or is it only rewarding if you are beating somebody?
When talking about drilling with Anki, the author notes that they show the position where they made a mistake. When learning a game (Chess, Go, computer games) how do you identify where that mistake is? How do you develop the skill to recognize where the mistakes are?
I have to admit that Chess is one of those games that I am always hoping to learn to play well and am always reminded of my dumbness every time I try it.
I'm not good at chess by any standard, but I enjoyed playing for a while in my youth. My ex got interested, and I tried to teach her... She was so completely convinced that she was smarter than me that she swiped all the pieces clear across the room on her second mate and never wanted to play again.
do puzzles, blitztactics.com, play longer games and think deep, memorize 15+ moves into your favorite openings, you really only need 3-5 to be a decent player, e4, d4, c4, e.g. london, queen's gambit, king pawn, sicilian.
ELO ratings start at 600 for absolute beginner.
With a good amount of effort, a dedicated amateur can reach ~1500 without too much difficulty, and at that level you'll beat any casual player. 2000 is international standard. Best human player is around 2700.
Note - chess.com does not use ELO ratings - they have their own rating system which is more complex (includes an uncertainty factor based on how recently you have played), but is supposed to be roughly equivalent.
The author of the article is playing blitz chess (3 minutes a game) rather than standard chess, so the ratings are largely irrelevant to standard levels.
> With a good amount of effort, a dedicated amateur can reach ~1500 without too much difficulty
I read that kind of argument all over the place in the chess community, and that really strikes me as some kind of misplaced elitism.
ELO can be seen as a glorified indicator of where you stand in the distribution of a pool of players. Math aside, the ELO is a system that allows for the distribution of scores to evolve incrementally as matches are played.
All in all, if you want to interpret an ELO, you can always refer to the corresponding centile.
With an ELO of 1500 you are in the ~80 percentile of your pool (USCF). That places you as better than 80% of players (that are doing tournaments).
This requires a lot of work, and you would definitely not be a "regular amateur player".
The center of the distribution should be around 1200 ELO at the 50th centile.
Imagine what that would mean to be in the top 20% of all basket ball players that play tournaments.
I bet 2 years of daily effort and study would get most people to 1500.
How many people play for years without actual dedication, or join tournaments before they're at the 1500 level, or quit when they keep losing a lot to higher level people in tournaments, or whatever?
My definition of "dedicated" probably removes at least 50+% of the pool right away.
Bullies instinctively realize that there's an unusually smart person in their tribe who is wasting their gift on fruitless endeavors, thus reducing the survival chances of the tribe.
Of course, our modern society can afford to have smart people play chess. However, there is no evidence that chess skill transfers to other areas. Therefore, until proven otherwise, developing chess skill should be perceived as frivolous, just like developing skill in any other less prestigious game.
You are giving them too much credit. Humans only observe really local information and are, in most cases, unable to grasp the actual dynamics of the society, let alone 'what is beneficial' for it.
Chess can be used as a means of showing that any skill can be learned [1].
I'm not talking about complex societies, but about the kind of small tribes that we evolved in, where such information is local. School classes resemble such tribes.
If bullying was simply dominating behavior, it should be generally directed at anyone, yet it more commonly affects the stereotypical nerd.
In any case, this isn't to give credit to bullies. There is no credit to be given for behavior that I consider innate.
Apologies, by credit I meant to express that the causal relationship you are looking for may not exist.
> If bullying was simply dominating behavior, it should be generally directed at anyone, yet it more commonly affects the stereotypical nerd.
But then you risk a coalition that will shun you. A nerd is perceived as 'the weakest' of the tribe, this enables the rest of the tribe to bully the nerd by proxy, you give them somebody to look down on, without the risk of the nerd retaliating.
Funny you should mention the phenomenon of nerd bullying. Can't help but be reminded of Trump, a bully, who hosted a poker tournament in his failed casino. True to form, when asked if he was good at poker, he said he would be, if he had the time to commit to it. Later, an actual poker pro explained why his style in business and life indicates he would be a very terrible poker player, and might get lucky a few times, but then be defeated. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/12/what-donal... Funny how his career is now mimicking his nonexistent yet bragged about hypothetical poker career. Stories like these give me hope that maybe there is a game with transferable lessons and skills. But I am still searching for such a game. One other point on our failed leader: he also is fond of verbally abusing people who are actual masters of their craft (scientists). Probably not a coincidence.
I was doing this with Go and I kept stalling at around 5k. I don’t know about chess but Go servers can be pretty intense and competitive (especially Asian servers). Unless I devote a lot of my time into the game I doubt I will ever reach the dan level.
My only real commentary is that trying to follow a progression like this can be profoundly, profoundly frustrating. You need to really make sure you're enjoying this hobby before you try to dedicate yourself to a trajectory like this. It can really make you feel like shit a lot of the time, as you find yourself continually repeating mistakes that other people breeze past without issue. It takes true love of the game and a great deal of patience and persistence to push through all the downspells.
Eventually I decided that I no longer wished to prioritize the game over other things. The enormous time investment was no longer a worthwhile trade-off for me, and I stopped playing almost all together. I haven't regretted it since. There's just so many things to do in life. I gave it thousands of hours of my time, and now the door is closed on that. Now I'm learning Ruby on rails!