Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

http://nautil.us/issue/73/play/learning-chess-at-40-rp

by dnetesn • 7 years ago

159 75 7 years ago

nautil.us

dang• 7 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11653538

gdcohen• 7 years ago

I wonder if learning to program at age 40 vs age <10 would be similar?

mquander• 7 years ago

I have some personal experience that gives me a different perspective. I learned chess when very young (~5) but I failed to be a successful prodigy -- my rating capped out around 1100 USCF. Every few years I would pick the game back up and play a few tournaments, and each time I improved a bit. I love chess, but it's never been anything like the central focus of my life.

In my late 20s I moved to California and also started playing again after a few years of drought. My strength was about 1950 USCF. In the Bay Area 80% of the players I play in tournaments at that strength are kids -- the median age is perhaps 11.

At first I thought it was shocking that they could be 1950 at 11 years old, and I was like 1200, or whatever. That's a pretty huge gap in what you might think is "talent". But then I started looking at the tournament history of my opponents. I was astonished to find that the majority of them had played substantially more total chess at age 11 than I had managed to play by my late 20s.

For example, here is someone I have played several times:

http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?15250088

He's 10 years old and 2055 USCF. He has played in 175 tournaments in the past 5 and a half years. That's almost three per month, every month! If you don't regularly play in chess tournaments, they are frequently a serious commitment -- the better part of a day, or for big ones, multiple full days. Perhaps his average tournament might involve 10 hours of serious chess. How many adults work so hard on their hobby? Is that degree of return on investment even surprising? I've only played in 129 tournaments since 1992 and I am the same strength.

The player above is not at all an outlier in this regard. I never yet observed a kid who achieved an impressive degree of skill in chess without spending this kind of time. So while I continue to be impressed by the dedication and ability of young kids who are really strong, I stopped thinking that they are magic learning machines whose age makes them unreachably capable. The author's daughter at least has regular coaching, which I suppose the author doesn't have. Does he even spend more time on the game than her? I bet he doesn't.

nezaj• 7 years ago

We should play again sometime

michaelbuckbee• 7 years ago

This is something I've found fairly shocking as a parent of an 8-year-old: the deep commitment on the part of other families to really commit to a specific sport or hobby. I don't know if I just grew up in too small of a rural town to have access to these opportunities (or if they're even healthy).

As an example, one of the girls on my daughter's volleyball team is on 3 separate volleyball clubs simultaneously. She plays 5 days a week at least an hour a day.

choeger• 7 years ago

Without proper training (i.e., taking care of all the stuff that is not Volleyball but supports you playing it, like back muscles, shoulder mobility and stability, stretching, school), it is certainly not healthy at a certain level/age. Otoh, playing five hours of volleyball alone a week is not that much if the level is not too demanding.

atupis• 7 years ago

There was pretty good econtalk about this topic http://www.econtalk.org/david-epstein-on-mastery-specializat... . But generally there are these sports with very narrow skills like chess which you has to specialize very early. Then there is these sports with very width skills like soccer where generally get best outcomes when you specialize rather late like 16 year old.

zawerf• 7 years ago

A famous competitive programming prodigy is tourist[1]. You can find his rating graph starting from 2006 on topcoder when he was just 12 years old: https://www.topcoder.com/members/tourist/details/?track=DATA...

He's now indisputably the best competitive programmer in the world. But it's comforting to know that he too had to slowly grow over many years starting from a mere mortal 1200 rating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich

icr04• 7 years ago

sometimes I read this guy's wikipedia page for inspiration

vymague• 7 years ago

The wikipedia article says he qualified for the 2006 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) at the age of 11 and got a silver medal. His 2006 starting point was already beyond most mortals.

soup10• 7 years ago

Never really liked the structure of Topcoder and similar competitions most of the "skill" is just memorizing the algorithms that show up frequently and practicing typing out the solutions fast. A great mathematician would be able to finish a math exam quicker and more accurately than a student. But someone that spends all their time practicing speedrunning math exams would smoke him, only a fool would say the speedrunner is more talented at mathematics than the mathematician that understands the material deeply and has innovated and contributed to the field.

ycombinete• 7 years ago

I only picked up chess in my mid 20's, and fell completely in love with the game. At 32 now I barely ever play, and am far happier for it. Through chess, I came to a number of realisations about myself, and what I want from games/hobbies in general.

I moved to Dubai recently, and started attending local meetups here. I even started my own mini-club. I quickly realised that the guys I was playing with were almost all much better than me. That they put more time in, and they had more history with the game. From this I saw that, just in order to get good enough to have any fun at these meetings, I would have to put in more time and effort than I even had available to me. I found myself having less and less fun. Winning felt okay, and losing felt like dying.

I have since moved on to other board games. Competitively: Magic the Gathering. And many other Euro-style board games that are not based on such zero-sum 1:1 competition (e.g. Caverna). MTG especially has been a god-send for me, as anyone can win a magic game, due in a large part to the randomness that is an essential part of the game. On top of the randomness there is the theme that is built into every card, and every magic colour in the game. This balances out the pure calculation of deck building and sequencing play with a healthy dose of imagination.

I grew up eschewing randomness at all costs, being fiercely competetive and hating the idea of winnin/losing as a result of something as seemingly arbitraty as a die roll, or card draw (heck I even refused to play 30 seconds with a die). But I've come to love randomness. When I sit down to play a game of magic my skill level is highly important in the outcome of the game, but so are the cards which I draw. That means that people of all skill levels can sit down and compete with each other. In chess a 300-500 ratings difference basically means that one player has close to 20% chance of winning. For a game that I would want to pursue as an after work activity those odds really just aren't good enough for me.

1. So I guess I've learnt that I need to keep in mind that I pursue any hobby purely for enjoyment.

2. That it's easy to lose sight of that. That, for me, enjoyment must come from more than just winning.

3. That I can't get this from chess in the long run. That I am not willing to put the time and effort into any game where it is 100% skill vs skill, as this is too competetive.

4. The games I play need some element of randomness to bridge those skill gaps, and add flavour to encounters.

5. Theme is so important, to keep my imagination involved in the game, not just calculation. Why should I just move abstracts around a board when I can play against other people, while imagining a small family of dwarfs, collecting goods, tending their farm in the forest, growing their little family, and building their home in the caves they dig out of the mountain.

I still play the odd game of chess on lichess.com, but every time I do all of the above comes back to me, and I remember why I stopped playing chess.

circlefavshape• 7 years ago

1 and 2 ring very true for me. Playing something where you have to bring every ounce of your intellectual power to bear in order not to be humiliated just isn't any fun.

otabdeveloper42• 7 years ago

Protip: it's okay to play chess for fun. Winning isn't the goal.

acollins1331• 7 years ago

I've started relearning chess after having played it a bit with my dad who learned from Microsoft chess. I came back and was ranked around 800 in December and have increased to around 1300 on lichess. Making sure to try to figure out what my opponent is wanting to do on his next move (to stop my own blunders) and learning the most common variations to an opening for each white and black contributed to a massive increase in rating. I imagine more focus on not blundering and learning some of the opening traps I tend to get caught in will probably get me to 1800 online.

cubano• 7 years ago

Learning chess is a very time consuming skill. I don't think there is any other way besides playing lots of games against players better then you, or to endlessly drill problems, to get any better.

I am not sure how this fact lines up well with a 40yo lifestyle. This is usually the time of life where you are raising kids or making career moves, so I am not sure just how many available hours one has for study.

pstuart3• 7 years ago

I highly recommend lichess. Create an account and bookmark it and play endgames when you need a "distraction": https://lichess.org/training

patrickdavey3• 7 years ago

hell yes, I've been playing those little chess puzzles for ages. Extremely addictive!. Neat that you can drop into the game and "continue" from a point when you're just _sure_ the computer has it wrong, only to find out that of course it was correct all along.

Yes, rate the training puzzles!

arunix• 7 years ago

Do you know if there's a similar resource for Go?

pstuart3• 7 years ago

Sorry, no. But for Golang there's always https://play.golang.org/.

(sorry, couldn't resist).

thom2• 7 years ago

Worth noting that lichess and all of the code behind it (some of which is algorithmically very interesting) is developed in the open[0], and Thibault Duplessis even regularly livecodes on Twitch[1].

0: https://github.com/ornicar

1: https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2

pstuart3• 7 years ago

I discovered lichess when I was looking for JS framework for a project and found mithril.js, where they referenced it as a successful user of the project.

person_of_color3• 7 years ago

Has anyone taken up a hobby for the sole reason of staving off a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's?

bubblewrap• 7 years ago

I'm sure many people have, but less sure that it works.

WalterBright7• 7 years ago

If anything, programming ought to do it.

Though I have read that learning to play a musical instrument helps as well.

gbacon2• 7 years ago

https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/av...

Flying as a Challenge

If you go to the local general aviation airport, you'll find lots of guys in their 60s and 70s who are tackling challenges that are way beyond your own capabilities. Certainly these guys are much sharper and in better mental and physical shape than the average person of their age. Flying requires mental acuity and real-time decision-making that seems to keep pilots young. A lot of older folks seem to be preoccupied with trivial matters, such as organizing their junk mail or minutia within their childrens' lives. Old pilots don't seem to be subject to these preoccupations and the topics of their conversations have more in common with young pilots than with other old people.

The very process of training to be a pilot is challenging and inherently motivational. The FAA sets up milestones and checkpoints: Private Pilot, Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot, Multi-Engine Rating, Helicopter Rating, Seaplane Rating, Airline Transport Pilot. A desire to excel was probably a factor in your ability to retire young. If you have that desire, the FAA rating system gives you a lot of opportunities to improve and prove yourself.

One of the tragedies of getting older is the narrowing of one's activities. An elementary school kid will write poetry, paint, play music, do math, write prose, etc. An adult will do three or four things that he or she can do at a professional level of competence. These are the things for which an adult draws a paycheck or these are the things that the adult finds rewarding because they can be done so well.

Learning to fly is an opportunity to go back to elementary school. No human is a natural aviator. Everything has to be learned, which by itself is stimulating.

ChicagoBoy11• 7 years ago

I'm relatively young (31) and learned to fly last year. Out of all activities I've ever been involved in (sports, programming, executive life, teaching, etc.), flying has BY FAR made me most aware of my mental state and thought process. Nothing I've ever done has made me feel so task-saturated and consciously aware of how well (or poorly) I was coping with a cognitive task.

Not only can it sometimes be a very task-saturating environment (especially single-pilot IFR flying), but the added "nerves" of flying make it a perfect combo for you to become hyper-aware of yourself in a way that I hadn't yet experienced. The most interesting part of the whole ordeal for me has been to see my progression in terms of how my brain could handle the tasks at hand. At first, I remember intently listening to the weather report on the radio only to IMMEDIATELY forget the information I had just heard, such was my cognitive overload. Now, I can be in the middle of clouds, seeing nothing, punching information into the flight computer while hand flying the plane listening to ATC in one ear and talking to my passenger on the other. To have been acutely aware how slowly my brain adapted to the new demands I was placing on it was incredibly interesting.

person_of_color3• 7 years ago

Great, now just got to figure out how to retire early.

lmm2• 7 years ago

I've known mahjong players who claimed that was their reason. But while that might be someone's reason to start a new hobby, I suspect that few if any people would be able to sustain a hobby they didn't actually enjoy.

akjsdnajksdnjk• 7 years ago

I was never able to "get" chess.

I know the rules, I can methodically scan every position, but I feel that I can never really think more than one step ahead. I just start feeling restless, get overwhelmed at the board and my processing slows to a crawl.

I might look calm and focused on the outside, but inside I'm fidgety and thinking "what the fuck am I looking at? how can I ever think of a larger strategy when I can barely think of a move that doesn't get my pieces killed?" It feels like I become a very slow triply-nested for-loop.

I work at a FANG and am very good at my job, so don't need the validation. Still a bummer. Wish I was better.

tudorconstantin• 7 years ago

Chess excellence depends very much on experience: the more you play and train, the better you get. See, people say it's the mind game, but it only depends on the intelect as long both players are similarly experienced.

Also, a game of chess is long and can get boring: in the beginning of a game people usually play "by the book", trying to adhere to some basic principles (control the center of the table, pull out your pieces into play, protect your king by castling, etc).

In the middle of the game, as long as you managed to avoid losing any piece so far, is where the actual play takes place, when you try to gain material advantage and this is where I spend most of my thinking fuel.

The end of the game, again, depends very much on training and experience, because there are known strategies how one should play with pawn and king against king for example. Of course, some of the strategies are obvious, like promoting your pawn to a queen and mate your opponent, but others are not, like gaining the opposition to be able to promote/block the pawn.

I don't have too much patience playing whole games myself, but I like training my mind by making chess puzzles/tactics daily, which I'd recommend you try yourself: your offered a position where you know that after a few moves you have to end up in advantage.

cocochanel• 7 years ago

It's more akin to becoming a guitar virtuoso: deliberate practice. You working at FANG has nothing to do with it.

qazpot• 7 years ago

I work at a FANG and am very good at my job, so don't need the validation.

You whole post is about seeking validation.

pdm55• 7 years ago

I play regularly on chess.com. (I pay for a membership to avoid ads.) On these online sites, you quickly get matched with players around your skill level. I play 5 min games for the quick thrill. I just stick with the Queen's Gambit with white. There is one key mistake that black sometimes makes in that opening, otherwise, it's on to the middle game hijinks. At my level the opponents tend to favour e4 with white. You need a couple of defences for their key attacks. I usually review the game with the online computer, because you can see better moves you could have made - it's a great way to slowly improve. I'm in my sixties and finally have the time and the tools to enjoy chess.

surfsvammel• 7 years ago

I am going through this very process at the moment. Picked up chess for the first time three months ago and trying to learn it. Studying hours per day. It is kind of an experiment. How good can I get in a couple of months at the age of 37?

So far, it seems, not that good... Chess is a lot tougher to learn than I initially thought.

nanijoe• 7 years ago

how are you learning though? Who you play against is pretty important. You need to try and play against the strongest players you can find. Dont be afraid of losing to them

crististm• 7 years ago

Playing against strongest players (or engines) demoralizes me. It makes me want to avoid the game. I find I need to play against a challenger that is better than me but one that I can beat about 30% of the time.

Back in the day I was pretty good at Warcraft 2 - solo and missions. I have a friend that never lost to me - not even once, although later I found I was close on two occasions to beat him. In the end I lost interest to play with him because in a way I would know the outcome.

icr04• 7 years ago

I started chess at about 900 lichess, and plateaued at 1800(10+0 rapid).

What got me from 900-1100 was playing carefully and evaluating my move before I played it(can this piece be taken/is there a mating strategy for my opponent), to prevent blunders

What got me from 1100-1400 was learning two solid openings (Ruy lopez for both sides/ Grunfeld against 1.d4)

1400-1600 was doing hella tactic puzzles, and putting myself in my opponent's position and looking for his tactics

1600-1800 i have no idea, just practice i guess

John Bartholomew's strategy videos and Saint Louis Chess Club opening videos were probably the best resources for me to learn

philbarr• 7 years ago

Openings are the killer for me - I can never remember them, and it feels like a cheat to just remember a particular opening and trot out all the same moves all the time anyway.

But then I lose because I've made an obvious mistake during the opening...

ecocentrik• 7 years ago

Memorized openings just get you out of the gate in avoiding common pitfalls. Understanding why they work gets you a lot further. It's very similar to music in this way. Learning to play a song is a very different exercise from delving into music theory, improvising and composing other songs in the same form.

have_faith• 7 years ago

It's more important to remember the theme of an opening than the specifics of the multiple lines sprouting from it. For instance some openings revolve around having a bishop on a strong diagonal and an important central square or two to hold. If you remember these themes a lot of the available moves become (relatively) easy to work out, because you know why the moves are made in the first place. The best thing you can do is find resources that cover the themes as much as the lines/moves themselves, some of the Lichess studies are good, some just cover moves though which isn't helpful.

I've played a lot of people that go down 12 moves of an opening they remembered only to falter as soon as their memory runs out. It's very common, and you will always run out.

swang• 7 years ago

this is the same with poker. lots of resources and more opportunity to play the game.

in the early 2000s internet poker starting getting more and more popular and more and more knowledge was made available because of the internet. more and more players trained on the internet began showing up to live tournaments.

a lot of the "live" pros hated the way "internet kids" were playing poker but at the same time those internet kids had probably played more hands than most of the live pros did.

in a live setting you're lucky to get 30 hands an hour. probably more average would be 10-15. meanwhile players online were getting anywhere from 75-90 hands an hour.... per table. okay players probably could get to 4 tables with no trouble while at the extreme end there were people 24-tabling. 24*75 = 1800. that's about 60 hours at best for a live player.

scoutt• 7 years ago

As we get older, there is one thing at which we get worse: Being a novice.

Personally, I love being a novice. I intentionally seek it since mid 20 (being ~40 years old now), by learning a new game, mastering a microcontroller or programming language, etc.

I still don't notice a "slow-down" in my learning process... but maybe because learning is a process that I train continuously?

What I do notice is a mechanical-learning slow-down, for example, if I pick a new videogame, it takes a while until I "catch-up" with aiming, or button sequences, etc.

WalterBright7• 7 years ago

I can't say I understand devoting such time to learning a completely useless, extremely narrow, skill. Learning mathematics is useful. Learning to play a guitar is useful. Learning to program is useful.

I came to this conclusion in college. It was hard enough learning math, thermo, physics, etc., and seemed a complete waste of time to get better at chess. The former consumed my mental energies.

danielbarla2• 7 years ago

Chess is just about the most highly refined competitive intellectual task / "sport" you can ask for (by sheer weight of the number of serious players, and the level of play, though a similar argument can be made for Go). In and of itself, that could be an interesting concept to explore. And if we reject it, I suspect we'd also have to reject other competitive endaevours, like soccer, tennis, etc. To be honest, I sometimes do wonder why we as a species seems to be so intensely focused on silly, "useless" skills like running the 100m in under 10 seconds. I guess it's in our nature to be competitive.

(Obligatory "I didn't downvote you")

WalterBright7• 7 years ago

I long ago lost the remotest interest in who wins a baseball/tennis/football/olympic game, as it's meaningless. I know people get all wrapped around the axle on who wins, and the ludicrous propaganda of "medal counts" in the Olympics. But it's not for me.

I have found it interesting to write software to play chess for me. The last few times I tried to play chess, my mind would just drift off designing a program to do it so I wouldn't have to bother.

I don't play video games, either. It takes about 3 minutes for one to bore me to tears. Part of that is I had a job in college testing video games - that sure ruined it for me.

The universe is full of puzzles that mean something to solve. Why not work on those instead? Why would those be less interesting than a contrived set of rules?

_carl_jung2• 7 years ago

Well, some people want to devote themselves to joy, rather than usefulness.

WalterBright7• 7 years ago

I find joy in programming, and it's useful, too! For example, the other day I was pretty excited to figure out a solution to a long standing programming problem.

Yajirobe• 7 years ago

How are guitar playing skills useful if you don't plan to be a professional musician?

Simon_says• 7 years ago

Chicks dig musicians.

pessimizer• 7 years ago

You can entertain people around a campfire. Or even on plastic benches on a concrete patio outside of a Nowhere, Arkansas highway gas station that sells milkshakes.

gauravphoenix• 7 years ago

I see that you don't understand, does it imply that you disagree too?

icr04• 7 years ago

I mean, to be completely honest, I find playing chess very fun, even if it was a "waste of time"

patrickdavey3• 7 years ago

I played a little as a child (enough to beat my dad, who was a complete beginner). I've become quite addicted in the last couple of years (and yes, I'm 40 now). While I agree with the sentiments that "it's a total waste of time and I should learn something useful", it's still fun to have a challenging distraction.

One thing I've found it quite good for is _learning to lose_. I _hate_ losing at games, even now, but, the nice thing about being a beginner chess player is that there are bazillions of people better than you to play against, and lose to!.

On the topic of improving, as others have said, the training puzzles on lichess are great. I've also got quite a lot of value out of [0] chessable.com . Nice little site, teaches you some basic openings which are really fun when people fall into the traps!

[0] https://www.chessable.com/

ArneVogel• 7 years ago

You mention chessable so I would like to shout out my own project. I created listudy[0] that does a lot of the things that chessable does, but is also free open source[1]. On my site I use spaced repetition to memorize openings. Unfortunately there are not many studies on there right now but hopefully this will change in the future. [0] https://listudy.org/ [1] https://github.com/ArneVogel/listudy

jammygit2• 7 years ago

I never played against good chess players really I once went 8 years without losing while playing every chance I got. Now that I’ve found good players to play against, I'm honestly scared to play because I’m sure to be worse than somebody. I would honestly appreciate some elaboration on how you learned to lose.

I’m not an amazing player at all, just sheltered.

patrickdavey3• 7 years ago

Somewhat tongue in cheek, but, learning to lose is easy, just play online and you'll get plenty of practice ;)

I think just losing regularly helps to make it easier? Maybe. I still don't like it very much! Good luck :)

bluewater• 7 years ago

https://www.chesstactics.org

I believe I picked up on this site from HN years ago and I found it to be a great resource. Easy to digest a lot of the basic concepts to improve your play.

thom2• 7 years ago

I have loved chess on and off all my life, but it is an extremely harsh mistress. I'm going through the same thing, trying to become a more reliable teacher for my kids right now, but it's a fraught process.

Chess is an utterly unforgiving game: I have played many more hours of things like Magic: the Gathering in my life, the creator of which quite rightly understood that adding variance to a game means lower skilled players actually have a chance (and some actual fun) against higher skilled ones. Navigating a child's demands that you "play your hardest" against them can be quite difficult. The thing I hate most about chess is that you can play well, perhaps for _weeks_ in a correspondence game, and then one mistake undoes it all, with no hope of coming back (but then again, never resign).

The lessons you need to learn are all very valuable: the pure skill of calculation is extremely difficult but if you can teach yourself to concentrate, visualise positions and juggle the variations, I think these are actually brain powers you can take into other aspects of your life.

The rote learning aspects aren't that fun, but again, being able to memorise literally hundreds of branching openings not only buys you free wins, but teaches you a lot of patience and general schemes for memorization (or so I imagine, I am terrible at this, especially on shorter time controls).

Learning to lose is very difficult, but the one kindness chess does is that there is (at lower levels of play) almost always a reason your lose.

The interplay of tactics and strategy is very satisfying, knowing when to use your instinct or general heuristics, instead of when to brute force calculate a move, is again the type of skill you find yourself more aware of in other pursuits.

The best thing about learning chess in 2019 though is there is so much great content. Thousands of hours of stuff from the St Louis and Atlanta Chess Clubs, coverage of every major tournament on Chess24 and myriad Twitch channels, and games of every possible skill level, variation and time control at your fingertips. ChessKid is also an excellent app + educational environment for kids.

jammygit2• 7 years ago

I played chess constantly from 5 until 25. I don’t feel like I have time for it these days and I miss it. I can promise that my concentration and ability to visualize has decreased since I stopped playing

Edit: I never played online which might be a problem. Not having a physical board and another human present really throws me off, or else I wonder if I would still play

Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

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