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Becoming a Chess Grandmaster

248 points by _ttg 5y ago

exhilaration 5y ago
Related: there was a recent article in the New York Times about the problems with this process: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mishra-grandmasters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mis...
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  After reading that article it seems like it would be better to replace the “grandmaster norm” part of the process with standardized tournaments against a calibrated computer engine.
  - bttrfl 5y ago
    Why?
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      You can’t pay off a computer to throw a game.
  - gurchik 5y ago
    While it might solve issues with the norm process, it introduces more problems, specifically that two players of equal rating can have vastly different performance against a computer because they don't play like humans do.
    - hugh-avherald 5y ago
      Why is that a problem?
      - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
        Because the purpose is to establish how good people are at playing other people, not engines.
  - dannyz 5y ago
    While computer engines that are significantly better than the best chess players are plentiful, computer engines that are human rated and play human like moves do not exist. From the definition of ELO you could make a 1500 rated chess engine that plays perfectly half of its games and plays random moves the other half of the games, and it would stay at 1500 ELO if it continued to play against 1500 ELO players. This is an extreme example but it is not too far off from what chess engines do to reduce their ELO.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      I haven’t followed the new wave of DL based engines but in the old Alpha-Beta algorithm days engines could be tuned by giving them a fixed processing budget per move (or a more sophisticated processing budget to allow for bursting). Is that not a viable strategy on the new engines?
      - sweezyjeezy 5y ago
        I think it's really hard to make it play like a human. Even GMs miss two-move tactics sometimes, wheras computers are pretty perfect at this. On the other hand traditional algorithms might not be very good at positional chess when on a budget, wheras even weak human players can understand basic concepts like putting your rook on an open file. Then it gets even more complicated with the NNUE position evaluation models - maybe even with a one-move budget the neural net is still implicitly strong at understanding several moves ahead, and could still beat a strong human player.
    - sweezyjeezy 5y ago
      Yeah exactly - it's easier to build an engine that plays as well as possible compared to an engine that plays reasonable/imperfect moves like a strong human player.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      > computer engines that are human rated and play human like moves do not exist Without knowing much about chess, I'd be inclined to say this can't possibly be true. Predicting human chess moves given an ELO rating sounds like a much easier task than training it to be good at the game. It is a different task alltogether, but until you reach relatively high elo scores, I'd expect a fake human ai would have a much easier time simply because it only needs to plan a few moves ahead to mimic the mindset of a lower level player.
  - sd8f9iu 5y ago
    Computers are far stronger than humans and win every game. They cannot be artificially weakened as they do not play like weaker humans, but rather make a mixture of incredibly strong moves and random mistakes. As such, it would be a tournament of trying to lose the best game against a computer, which is not an accurate simulation of what human-human chess is like.
    - thom 5y ago
      This isn’t really how most engines work. Reducing the depth that engines calculate to, or altering how they weight certain aspects of evaluation, are both perfectly natural ways to reduce an engine’s strength. They still won’t play like a human, but they don’t need to be forced into random mistakes.
      - gurchik 5y ago
        Sorry if I misunderstood but it sounds like you're saying engines aren't programmed to make random mistakes in order to lower playing strength, but this is how Stockfish works. Lowering the calculation depth and calculation time is used to reduce difficulty, but in addition to those it is programmed to make mistakes: > Internally, MultiPV is enabled, and with a certain probability depending on the Skill Level a weaker move will be played. Within the constraints of the depth and calculation times it determines the best move, but depending on MultiPV it will deliberately not play that move and play an inferior one instead.
        thom 5y ago
        This still doesn’t mean that engines can’t be made to play weaker moves without making deliberate mistakes, which is the only point I was making.
      - sd8f9iu 5y ago
        Your experience with engines then is very different from my own and that of the wider chess community. The general consensus is that playing computers at any strength is both counterproductive and unfulfilling. They do indeed make random blunders if you lower their search depth. The engine will play brilliant moves for any tactic that falls within the search depth, but fail miserably for tactics that fall one ply outside of it. Humans function very differently to computers: they evaluate a fraction of the positions, but use a much more sophisticated evaluation function. There is no way of emulating human weakness with such a vastly different style of computation. Here is a game I just played that illustrates this phenomenon: https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black The engine plays well before making a series of random blunders no human would make. You can try this yourself by playing the different Stockfish levels on lichess.org. You will be unable to find a level that makes for an enjoyable game. There are some new engines that use neural networks to try and play similarly to how humans do [1]. I can't comment on their success, but their lack of wide adoption by the chess community signals to me that it is still incomparable to humans. [1] https://maiachess.com/ https://maiachess.com/
- michaelt 5y ago
  TLDR, as the article is paywalled: * You have to win a bunch of games against grandmasters, earning 'GM Norms', in order to become a grandmaster yourself. * It is normal, at some contests, for lower-ranked players to pay to attend, while GMs are paid for attending. * It is widely rumoured some contests are "norm factories" where fee-paying players get matched up with washed-up GMs who essentially throw the game. * There are even rumours of contests where an aspiring grandmaster's parents offered cash to their opponents. There are even rumours of contests that took place only on paper.
  - nextlevelchess 5y ago
    yeah, sadly there are some dirty things going on when it comes to Norms. I guess with a better leadership and a clear policy of not tolerating pre-arranged games, this should change. But as with doping, it will never be erased 100%.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Pay money to advance in ratings? Nonsense! Just come up with a clever way to employ Stockfish over the board!
judofyr 5y ago
This is a very factual article explaining how to become a grandmaster, but I feel like it needs a disclaimer: I know that Hacker News likes the idea that if you work hard enough then anything is possible [especially when there's so many easily available resources], but when it comes to becoming a grandmaster it has to be said that it's painstakingly hard. If you actually intend to become a grandmaster you'll essentially have to make your full life be devoted to chess for years. We're talking about making it your full-time job for at least 10 years. Yes, that's how hard it is. Today there are countless of IMs (the title just below GM) that has played since they were small kids, won a bunch of tournaments when they were teenagers and yet they realize that becoming a GM is so much work that it's not worth it. If you like chess, then play chess! It's a fun game with an amazing depth and a huge player base. But if you're just starting out: Please forget about having "becoming a grandmaster" as a goal.
- publicola1990 5y ago
  Actually I think there are seperate titles for correspondence chess, and these might be easier to get.
  - judofyr 5y ago
    That's a good suggestion! Chess also has a very decent rating system (either the official FIDE rating or the ratings on online chess servers) so another way of setting yourself an achievable goal is to pick a rating (i.e. 1700 on Lichess) and then work towards that. Rinse and repeat!
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I’d be happy with 1000. I keep getting close and then falling back into the 800s
- 300bps 5y ago
  I used to play Scrabble daily and got pretty good. Memorized all of the two letter words, memorized a good number of the three letter words and thought about playing in a tournament. Then someone gave me the book Word Freak and I lost any interest in playing in a tournament. The people that win Scrabble tournaments memorize dictionaries as their full-time job hoping to make $20,000 in tournament prize money per year. I can't compete with that. It's still amazing to me though that the winner of the 2015 French Scrabble Tournament didn't speak French. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/winner-of-french-scrabble-title-does-not-speak-french https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378... All of his strategy tools and anagram skills would've helped him but he still had to memorize 386,000 French words that he didn't know the meaning of.
TylerLives 5y ago
> There are much fewer female Chess players, so it is logical that there are less female GM’s But even relative to the total number of female players, much smaller % reaches GM.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Should we do what we now do in other areas (military) and change the definition / standards of GM to encourage "equality"?
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles#Woman_Grandmaster_(WGM) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles#Woman_Grandmaste...
    - V-2 5y ago
      It's a different title, however. It is Woman Grandmaster. It is not at all easier for a woman to obtain the regular Grandmaster title. A subtle difference perhaps, but nevertheless a difference.
- dahart 5y ago
  It makes sense that if the participation rate for women is lower, then the attrition rate is also higher, no? Or what was your point? There is a variety of possible reasons this is happening, and the same effects can be seen in business (smaller ratio of female CEOs than employees) and other competitive sports historically dominated by men.
- typon 5y ago
  Most likely because the dedication required to reach grandmaster level, essentially wasting your life away for a game, is socialized out of women in most cultures because they have to have responsibilities and be care givers. It's becoming less and less true though, at least in western culture.
- ar_lan 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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imglorp 5y ago
I found this interesting: "Most active Grandmasters are living in Russia. A whopping 256 Grandmasters are registered under the Russian Flag. The United States of America has 101 active Grandmasters, while 96 Grandmasters are playing for Germany." That's: pop gm gm per 1e7 US 333091348 101 3.0 RU 146001137 256 17.5 DE 84070834 96 11.4
- djtriptych 5y ago
  Chess has been a huge part of Russian culture (compared to the US) for like a century. I imagine we'd have more with state/popular support. I doubt the average American can name any American player besides Fischer, even though we've had the current world #2 for years (Caruana, although he may slip to #3 this month).
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    I doubt the average American can even name Fischer.
    - djtriptych 5y ago
      Yeah maybe most Americans over 60 or something. He was huge domestically at his prime.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    A tad bit unfair re: Caruana, considering he's flipped back and forth between the US and Italy a bit, most recently as 2015. Hikaru Nakamura is a bigger personality, he might have marginally more name recognition, though generally the point is well made. Hikaru is making inroads with streaming culture, so honestly the group that might know him best are younger people, not even necessarily chess players. He's known for... well, being exactly himself, and it fits perfectly with the rest of streaming culture, so honestly it's a great match. While we're talking about money, Hikaru has 4.4k subscribers [0] on his twitch channel, of which he makes $2.49 per (so $11,115.36 per month), in case you were curious about what kind of monetization he's able to create out of this. [0] - https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru
bttrfl 5y ago
I've stopped playing chess as a teenager having reached ~2360. I was national youth champion, a vice-champion, 5th in the world at one point. I played 100+ games every year. Each game could last up to 5-6h. Some games were exhausting, some not. After each game you had to prepare for another one - study your opponent's games, prepare openings and variants. This effort took tool on some and older players were visibly weird, plenty were alcoholics. I used to say that football (soccer) players have bended legs, chess players have bended minds. Anyway, if you want to make chess your profession (you don't need to be a GM to make a living), keep your mind healthy!
V-2 5y ago
The choice of color scheme in the "Chess Grandmasters Per Country" pie chart doesn't strike me as particularly well thought through, especially in terms of accessbility.
deleted 5y ago
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univalent 5y ago
IM checking in. My cousin became a GM while still a teenager. There will come a point sometime in your life (for me that was the ripe old age of 14 or 15) when you realize that you are simply not smart enough to make the cut. When that point come, the best thing to do is bail, play for fun and focus on academics.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "There will come a point sometime in your life (for me that was the ripe old age of 14 or 15) when you realize that you are simply not smart enough to make the cut." Chess playing ability is not a good measure of intelligence.
  - argc 5y ago
    If you can remove opening preparation (and all preparation) I think it probably is. Calculating moves is a good measure of working memory and is an important aspect of intelligence. There are certainly other things that are important, like creativity, but anyways, intelligence is probably not a specific enough word for this to be meaningful. But as an example, I think I'm intelligent enough in a lot of ways but my ability to calculate far ahead is held back by my mediocre working memory.
    - glxxyz 5y ago
      Yes brute force RAM that works with these types of problems is of important, and is the reason why the vast majority of us would never be able to become a grandmaster no matter how much of our lives we devoted to it. Here's a clip of GM Peter Svidler talking about his memory: https://youtu.be/ssBcIg3cEPI?t=3622 https://youtu.be/ssBcIg3cEPI?t=3622 In the same way, most of us would never be able to compete at any given physical sport no matter how much time we put in.
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    I think the poster was just generalizing there. Playing chess at the GM level just requires an astounding leap in working memory and recall to be able to remember similar board positions and then further thoughts on end-game and mid-game macro strategy. Chess playing ability is probably a good correlation with higher intelligence (if intelligence is measured by strong working memory)
alberth 5y ago
http://lichess.org http://lichess.org I can't recommend enough lichess. It's been featured on HN numerous times [0]. Will always be free and has an extremely interesting tech stack. Note: lichess isn't just about playing chess with other people online. They have great "training" section (e.g. how to mate in X moves, pick the best move available, etc). I almost enjoy the training section more than playing against someone else. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910579
- dragontamer 5y ago
  There's a big difference between looking at a "puzzle" (and knowing that there's a solution), and playing a game (and not knowing if there's a solution to any position). Puzzles are good for when you're still learning how to look at basic things: forks, pins, etc. etc. But you need lots of experience in-games (especially with the "lack of knowledge" about whether or not a pin is possible in any position). Puzzles are much easier than playing a game. Focusing for just 1 to 2 minutes on a particular board state is much less tiring than focusing for an hour over a "Rapid" game.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Puzzles are not just for training. Many like me enjoy puzzles because it a problem to solve like any other type of pzzule not because it helps in the learning the game. Knowing that a puzzle(chess or regular) has a solution does not take away the joy of solving it.
    - XCSme 5y ago
      True, trying to solve a puzzle that might or might not have a solution doesn't sound that fun. I guess this is what researches do all day.
- kofejnik 5y ago
  and https://listudy.org/en https://listudy.org/en is a great free study complement to lichess
- 5y ago
equivocates 5y ago
> It is sad that I have to mention it, but it has absolutely nothing to do with their race, but with opportunities. As if access to opportunities has nothing to do with race.
- blitz_skull 5y ago
  Access to opportunities has to do with socio-economics. His point was that simply existing with a darker shade of skin does not preclude you from being a GM due to any innate (in)ability. It's generally considered in bad-faith to presume an author is making a political statement that they very clearly aren't making.
blitz_skull 5y ago
I do not believe everyone has the mental capacity to become a grandmaster. In case you think that's overly harsh, I'll expand that to say I'm almost certain I do not have the mental capacity to become a grandmaster. It just takes a different type of analytical thinking ability.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  The best way I've found to think about this is that, physiologically, there's nothing stopping your brain or mine from being the brain that holds a GM mind. However, in order for that to have happened, we needed to have our brains manipulated a very specific way as children, when plasticity was at its highest, into learning how to think the way that best fits with being a chess GM. Since that didn't happen, our minds have settled into patterns of thinking that are very hard to now undo or rebuild, and likely not as well suited for chess. Could we tear down how we think about problems at a fundamental level and rebuild ourselves to think like GMs? Yeah, probably. Could we do this while maintaining any amount of day job, social life, or literally any other aspect of a natural human life? No, probably not. Changing not just your opinion on a topic, but literally how you think, seems pretty insanely hard to do after childhood/adolescence. I don't love the phrase "mental capacity", maybe "mental configuration" is more accurate.
  - foobarbaz33 5y ago
    > here's nothing stopping your brain or mine from being the brain that holds a GM mind Is it really true everyone has the same mental potential? For the specific case of a chess GM, it could be many people have the potential. Or maybe not. There are some easy tests to quickly observe and compare mental traits between people. For example, some people can juggle many distinct numbers in their head at once. Their brain is like a computer memory. Personally I start to fall off around 4 variables when doing mental math and don't believe I can increase that significantly. Do I have (or ever had) the same potential as someone who can juggle 50 variables in their head?
  - password321 5y ago
    We have different capacities. That is why some become a GM at 12 and some are stuck an IM for life. And it extends beyond just being a GM or not. No one atm is as good as Magnus Carlsen for example, yet have been training at even younger ages.
kruxigt 5y ago
Why is chess so much more racist than basketball?
Nohortax 5y ago
"I am definitely not believing that is has to do something with Biology. People telling “female are just less smart” or some bullshit like that are living under a rock and not in the 21st century." I'm happy to read that. So many guys have hard thoughts about women on this topic. I'm nevertheless sad that women are not more present in "guy's stuff". They might reverse this way of thinking and put themselves forward. But the education even in developed countries is still deepening a gap gender. E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing
- hirundo 5y ago
  There could be a male biological advantage across the population without females being less smart as a population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis But that's hard to separate from the fact that there are just so many more males in the pool of chess players.
- watwut 5y ago
  > E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing Another side of it would also be boys in girls hobbies I think. There is no reason boys can't dance, except cultural. It is perfectly fine sport/art. I think that one can't exist without another.
- legohead 5y ago
  I'm very interested in this male vs female subject with regards to games (chess, video games). I don't think it has to do with intellect, but there has to be some biological difference. I don't know why everyone is so afraid of men and women being different biologically. Men are physically stronger, that's a fact. Why can't other differences exist?
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  Whether or not there is a difference in biology, most likely there is something much more overt that swamps that difference. Girls get the message early on that their abilities are unwanted in areas that have traditionally been the province of boys. A bit later many get the message that they are appreciated for the sexual opportunity they represent and their abilities are minimized. I've read too many stories of women who faced this in STEM subjects, and it is apparently even worse in the gaming community.
airocker 5y ago
I recently started playing blitz games on lichens.org. It has a similar rating system. It takes 10 min a game and I have been having lot of fun. Wish it translated to fide points.
- Upvoter33 5y ago
  this is a great typo
  - airocker 5y ago
    Oh man, I cant edit it. I should not comment from my phone. I meant lichess.org
MaysonL 5y ago
I gave up playing chess seriously after watching the one grandmaster I ever played compete in the US championship, and learned that he was driving a cab to make ends meet.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Top 50 players in the world can make rather decent ~$100k per year. But that's just top 50!
deleted 5y ago
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huachimingo 5y ago
If you want to have a more engaging round like real life battles, try to play chess with a clock. Give 15-20 min to each one without any adding system, or 5min (or less) if you want to play FPS-ish chess. There are some apps to simulate these clocks. See also adding systems if you want more variety.
QuantumGood 5y ago
For anyone thinking that it might seem more possible than others are saying, remember that many online and country rating systems are equivalent to lower FIDE ratings—adding as much as 250 points to what you have to achieve from where you are now.
pHollda 5y ago
Chess is a boring game about memorizing patterns.
- vecter 5y ago
  Although there is a lot of memorization required, especially at top-level play (opening theory and your opponent’s preference, as well as preparation), the most beautiful aspects of chess are brilliancies involving quiet positional moves or explosive piece sacrifices that seem unbelievable at first. Search for “Stockfish NNUE sacrifice” on YouTube to see examples, or the AlphaZero vs. Stockfish playlist on chess.com’s YouTube channel.
matoyce 5y ago
It's crazy how low the percentage of women chess grandmasters and black chess grandmasters is. I wonder how many grandmasters are aged below 15 years old. It's amazing how players play against each other despite the age difference.

248 points by _ttg 5y ago

Related: there was a recent article in the New York Times about the problems with this process: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mishra-grandmasters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/sports/chess-karjakin-mis...

bradleyjg 5y ago
After reading that article it seems like it would be better to replace the “grandmaster norm” part of the process with standardized tournaments against a calibrated computer engine.
- bttrfl 5y ago
  Why?
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    You can’t pay off a computer to throw a game.
- gurchik 5y ago
  While it might solve issues with the norm process, it introduces more problems, specifically that two players of equal rating can have vastly different performance against a computer because they don't play like humans do.
  - hugh-avherald 5y ago
    Why is that a problem?
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      Because the purpose is to establish how good people are at playing other people, not engines.
- dannyz 5y ago
  While computer engines that are significantly better than the best chess players are plentiful, computer engines that are human rated and play human like moves do not exist. From the definition of ELO you could make a 1500 rated chess engine that plays perfectly half of its games and plays random moves the other half of the games, and it would stay at 1500 ELO if it continued to play against 1500 ELO players. This is an extreme example but it is not too far off from what chess engines do to reduce their ELO.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    I haven’t followed the new wave of DL based engines but in the old Alpha-Beta algorithm days engines could be tuned by giving them a fixed processing budget per move (or a more sophisticated processing budget to allow for bursting). Is that not a viable strategy on the new engines?
    - sweezyjeezy 5y ago
      I think it's really hard to make it play like a human. Even GMs miss two-move tactics sometimes, wheras computers are pretty perfect at this. On the other hand traditional algorithms might not be very good at positional chess when on a budget, wheras even weak human players can understand basic concepts like putting your rook on an open file. Then it gets even more complicated with the NNUE position evaluation models - maybe even with a one-move budget the neural net is still implicitly strong at understanding several moves ahead, and could still beat a strong human player.
  - sweezyjeezy 5y ago
    Yeah exactly - it's easier to build an engine that plays as well as possible compared to an engine that plays reasonable/imperfect moves like a strong human player.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    > computer engines that are human rated and play human like moves do not exist Without knowing much about chess, I'd be inclined to say this can't possibly be true. Predicting human chess moves given an ELO rating sounds like a much easier task than training it to be good at the game. It is a different task alltogether, but until you reach relatively high elo scores, I'd expect a fake human ai would have a much easier time simply because it only needs to plan a few moves ahead to mimic the mindset of a lower level player.
- sd8f9iu 5y ago
  Computers are far stronger than humans and win every game. They cannot be artificially weakened as they do not play like weaker humans, but rather make a mixture of incredibly strong moves and random mistakes. As such, it would be a tournament of trying to lose the best game against a computer, which is not an accurate simulation of what human-human chess is like.
  - thom 5y ago
    This isn’t really how most engines work. Reducing the depth that engines calculate to, or altering how they weight certain aspects of evaluation, are both perfectly natural ways to reduce an engine’s strength. They still won’t play like a human, but they don’t need to be forced into random mistakes.
    - gurchik 5y ago
      Sorry if I misunderstood but it sounds like you're saying engines aren't programmed to make random mistakes in order to lower playing strength, but this is how Stockfish works. Lowering the calculation depth and calculation time is used to reduce difficulty, but in addition to those it is programmed to make mistakes: > Internally, MultiPV is enabled, and with a certain probability depending on the Skill Level a weaker move will be played. Within the constraints of the depth and calculation times it determines the best move, but depending on MultiPV it will deliberately not play that move and play an inferior one instead.
      - thom 5y ago
        This still doesn’t mean that engines can’t be made to play weaker moves without making deliberate mistakes, which is the only point I was making.
    - sd8f9iu 5y ago
      Your experience with engines then is very different from my own and that of the wider chess community. The general consensus is that playing computers at any strength is both counterproductive and unfulfilling. They do indeed make random blunders if you lower their search depth. The engine will play brilliant moves for any tactic that falls within the search depth, but fail miserably for tactics that fall one ply outside of it. Humans function very differently to computers: they evaluate a fraction of the positions, but use a much more sophisticated evaluation function. There is no way of emulating human weakness with such a vastly different style of computation. Here is a game I just played that illustrates this phenomenon: https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black https://lichess.org/PiIFqI2c/black The engine plays well before making a series of random blunders no human would make. You can try this yourself by playing the different Stockfish levels on lichess.org. You will be unable to find a level that makes for an enjoyable game. There are some new engines that use neural networks to try and play similarly to how humans do [1]. I can't comment on their success, but their lack of wide adoption by the chess community signals to me that it is still incomparable to humans. [1] https://maiachess.com/ https://maiachess.com/
michaelt 5y ago
TLDR, as the article is paywalled: * You have to win a bunch of games against grandmasters, earning 'GM Norms', in order to become a grandmaster yourself. * It is normal, at some contests, for lower-ranked players to pay to attend, while GMs are paid for attending. * It is widely rumoured some contests are "norm factories" where fee-paying players get matched up with washed-up GMs who essentially throw the game. * There are even rumours of contests where an aspiring grandmaster's parents offered cash to their opponents. There are even rumours of contests that took place only on paper.
- nextlevelchess 5y ago
  yeah, sadly there are some dirty things going on when it comes to Norms. I guess with a better leadership and a clear policy of not tolerating pre-arranged games, this should change. But as with doping, it will never be erased 100%.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Pay money to advance in ratings? Nonsense! Just come up with a clever way to employ Stockfish over the board!

judofyr 5y ago

This is a very factual article explaining how to become a grandmaster, but I feel like it needs a disclaimer: I know that Hacker News likes the idea that if you work hard enough then anything is possible [especially when there's so many easily available resources], but when it comes to becoming a grandmaster it has to be said that it's painstakingly hard. If you actually intend to become a grandmaster you'll essentially have to make your full life be devoted to chess for years. We're talking about making it your full-time job for at least 10 years. Yes, that's how hard it is. Today there are countless of IMs (the title just below GM) that has played since they were small kids, won a bunch of tournaments when they were teenagers and yet they realize that becoming a GM is so much work that it's not worth it. If you like chess, then play chess! It's a fun game with an amazing depth and a huge player base. But if you're just starting out: Please forget about having "becoming a grandmaster" as a goal.

publicola1990 5y ago
Actually I think there are seperate titles for correspondence chess, and these might be easier to get.
- judofyr 5y ago
  That's a good suggestion! Chess also has a very decent rating system (either the official FIDE rating or the ratings on online chess servers) so another way of setting yourself an achievable goal is to pick a rating (i.e. 1700 on Lichess) and then work towards that. Rinse and repeat!
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I’d be happy with 1000. I keep getting close and then falling back into the 800s
300bps 5y ago
I used to play Scrabble daily and got pretty good. Memorized all of the two letter words, memorized a good number of the three letter words and thought about playing in a tournament. Then someone gave me the book Word Freak and I lost any interest in playing in a tournament. The people that win Scrabble tournaments memorize dictionaries as their full-time job hoping to make $20,000 in tournament prize money per year. I can't compete with that. It's still amazing to me though that the winner of the 2015 French Scrabble Tournament didn't speak French. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/winner-of-french-scrabble-title-does-not-speak-french https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378... All of his strategy tools and anagram skills would've helped him but he still had to memorize 386,000 French words that he didn't know the meaning of.

TylerLives 5y ago

> There are much fewer female Chess players, so it is logical that there are less female GM’s But even relative to the total number of female players, much smaller % reaches GM.

hereforphone 5y ago
Should we do what we now do in other areas (military) and change the definition / standards of GM to encourage "equality"?
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles#Woman_Grandmaster_(WGM) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_titles#Woman_Grandmaste...
  - V-2 5y ago
    It's a different title, however. It is Woman Grandmaster. It is not at all easier for a woman to obtain the regular Grandmaster title. A subtle difference perhaps, but nevertheless a difference.
dahart 5y ago
It makes sense that if the participation rate for women is lower, then the attrition rate is also higher, no? Or what was your point? There is a variety of possible reasons this is happening, and the same effects can be seen in business (smaller ratio of female CEOs than employees) and other competitive sports historically dominated by men.
typon 5y ago
Most likely because the dedication required to reach grandmaster level, essentially wasting your life away for a game, is socialized out of women in most cultures because they have to have responsibilities and be care givers. It's becoming less and less true though, at least in western culture.
ar_lan 5y ago

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imglorp 5y ago

I found this interesting: "Most active Grandmasters are living in Russia. A whopping 256 Grandmasters are registered under the Russian Flag. The United States of America has 101 active Grandmasters, while 96 Grandmasters are playing for Germany." That's: pop gm gm per 1e7 US 333091348 101 3.0 RU 146001137 256 17.5 DE 84070834 96 11.4

djtriptych 5y ago
Chess has been a huge part of Russian culture (compared to the US) for like a century. I imagine we'd have more with state/popular support. I doubt the average American can name any American player besides Fischer, even though we've had the current world #2 for years (Caruana, although he may slip to #3 this month).
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I doubt the average American can even name Fischer.
  - djtriptych 5y ago
    Yeah maybe most Americans over 60 or something. He was huge domestically at his prime.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  A tad bit unfair re: Caruana, considering he's flipped back and forth between the US and Italy a bit, most recently as 2015. Hikaru Nakamura is a bigger personality, he might have marginally more name recognition, though generally the point is well made. Hikaru is making inroads with streaming culture, so honestly the group that might know him best are younger people, not even necessarily chess players. He's known for... well, being exactly himself, and it fits perfectly with the rest of streaming culture, so honestly it's a great match. While we're talking about money, Hikaru has 4.4k subscribers [0] on his twitch channel, of which he makes $2.49 per (so $11,115.36 per month), in case you were curious about what kind of monetization he's able to create out of this. [0] - https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru

bttrfl 5y ago

I've stopped playing chess as a teenager having reached ~2360. I was national youth champion, a vice-champion, 5th in the world at one point. I played 100+ games every year. Each game could last up to 5-6h. Some games were exhausting, some not. After each game you had to prepare for another one - study your opponent's games, prepare openings and variants. This effort took tool on some and older players were visibly weird, plenty were alcoholics. I used to say that football (soccer) players have bended legs, chess players have bended minds. Anyway, if you want to make chess your profession (you don't need to be a GM to make a living), keep your mind healthy!

V-2 5y ago

The choice of color scheme in the "Chess Grandmasters Per Country" pie chart doesn't strike me as particularly well thought through, especially in terms of accessbility.

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univalent 5y ago

IM checking in. My cousin became a GM while still a teenager. There will come a point sometime in your life (for me that was the ripe old age of 14 or 15) when you realize that you are simply not smart enough to make the cut. When that point come, the best thing to do is bail, play for fun and focus on academics.

pmoriarty 5y ago
"There will come a point sometime in your life (for me that was the ripe old age of 14 or 15) when you realize that you are simply not smart enough to make the cut." Chess playing ability is not a good measure of intelligence.
- argc 5y ago
  If you can remove opening preparation (and all preparation) I think it probably is. Calculating moves is a good measure of working memory and is an important aspect of intelligence. There are certainly other things that are important, like creativity, but anyways, intelligence is probably not a specific enough word for this to be meaningful. But as an example, I think I'm intelligent enough in a lot of ways but my ability to calculate far ahead is held back by my mediocre working memory.
  - glxxyz 5y ago
    Yes brute force RAM that works with these types of problems is of important, and is the reason why the vast majority of us would never be able to become a grandmaster no matter how much of our lives we devoted to it. Here's a clip of GM Peter Svidler talking about his memory: https://youtu.be/ssBcIg3cEPI?t=3622 https://youtu.be/ssBcIg3cEPI?t=3622 In the same way, most of us would never be able to compete at any given physical sport no matter how much time we put in.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  I think the poster was just generalizing there. Playing chess at the GM level just requires an astounding leap in working memory and recall to be able to remember similar board positions and then further thoughts on end-game and mid-game macro strategy. Chess playing ability is probably a good correlation with higher intelligence (if intelligence is measured by strong working memory)

alberth 5y ago

http://lichess.org http://lichess.org I can't recommend enough lichess. It's been featured on HN numerous times [0]. Will always be free and has an extremely interesting tech stack. Note: lichess isn't just about playing chess with other people online. They have great "training" section (e.g. how to mate in X moves, pick the best move available, etc). I almost enjoy the training section more than playing against someone else. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910579

dragontamer 5y ago
There's a big difference between looking at a "puzzle" (and knowing that there's a solution), and playing a game (and not knowing if there's a solution to any position). Puzzles are good for when you're still learning how to look at basic things: forks, pins, etc. etc. But you need lots of experience in-games (especially with the "lack of knowledge" about whether or not a pin is possible in any position). Puzzles are much easier than playing a game. Focusing for just 1 to 2 minutes on a particular board state is much less tiring than focusing for an hour over a "Rapid" game.
- manquer 5y ago
  Puzzles are not just for training. Many like me enjoy puzzles because it a problem to solve like any other type of pzzule not because it helps in the learning the game. Knowing that a puzzle(chess or regular) has a solution does not take away the joy of solving it.
  - XCSme 5y ago
    True, trying to solve a puzzle that might or might not have a solution doesn't sound that fun. I guess this is what researches do all day.
kofejnik 5y ago
and https://listudy.org/en https://listudy.org/en is a great free study complement to lichess
5y ago

equivocates 5y ago

> It is sad that I have to mention it, but it has absolutely nothing to do with their race, but with opportunities. As if access to opportunities has nothing to do with race.

blitz_skull 5y ago
Access to opportunities has to do with socio-economics. His point was that simply existing with a darker shade of skin does not preclude you from being a GM due to any innate (in)ability. It's generally considered in bad-faith to presume an author is making a political statement that they very clearly aren't making.

blitz_skull 5y ago

I do not believe everyone has the mental capacity to become a grandmaster. In case you think that's overly harsh, I'll expand that to say I'm almost certain I do not have the mental capacity to become a grandmaster. It just takes a different type of analytical thinking ability.

TameAntelope 5y ago
The best way I've found to think about this is that, physiologically, there's nothing stopping your brain or mine from being the brain that holds a GM mind. However, in order for that to have happened, we needed to have our brains manipulated a very specific way as children, when plasticity was at its highest, into learning how to think the way that best fits with being a chess GM. Since that didn't happen, our minds have settled into patterns of thinking that are very hard to now undo or rebuild, and likely not as well suited for chess. Could we tear down how we think about problems at a fundamental level and rebuild ourselves to think like GMs? Yeah, probably. Could we do this while maintaining any amount of day job, social life, or literally any other aspect of a natural human life? No, probably not. Changing not just your opinion on a topic, but literally how you think, seems pretty insanely hard to do after childhood/adolescence. I don't love the phrase "mental capacity", maybe "mental configuration" is more accurate.
- foobarbaz33 5y ago
  > here's nothing stopping your brain or mine from being the brain that holds a GM mind Is it really true everyone has the same mental potential? For the specific case of a chess GM, it could be many people have the potential. Or maybe not. There are some easy tests to quickly observe and compare mental traits between people. For example, some people can juggle many distinct numbers in their head at once. Their brain is like a computer memory. Personally I start to fall off around 4 variables when doing mental math and don't believe I can increase that significantly. Do I have (or ever had) the same potential as someone who can juggle 50 variables in their head?
- password321 5y ago
  We have different capacities. That is why some become a GM at 12 and some are stuck an IM for life. And it extends beyond just being a GM or not. No one atm is as good as Magnus Carlsen for example, yet have been training at even younger ages.

kruxigt 5y ago

Why is chess so much more racist than basketball?

Nohortax 5y ago

"I am definitely not believing that is has to do something with Biology. People telling “female are just less smart” or some bullshit like that are living under a rock and not in the 21st century." I'm happy to read that. So many guys have hard thoughts about women on this topic. I'm nevertheless sad that women are not more present in "guy's stuff". They might reverse this way of thinking and put themselves forward. But the education even in developed countries is still deepening a gap gender. E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing

hirundo 5y ago
There could be a male biological advantage across the population without females being less smart as a population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis But that's hard to separate from the fact that there are just so many more males in the pool of chess players.
watwut 5y ago
> E.g. dollies/ make up/dance for girls, cars/ shirt/football for boys. We don't mix enough "gender interests" and we inculcate this difference in kids even not on purpose. I hope it's changing Another side of it would also be boys in girls hobbies I think. There is no reason boys can't dance, except cultural. It is perfectly fine sport/art. I think that one can't exist without another.
legohead 5y ago
I'm very interested in this male vs female subject with regards to games (chess, video games). I don't think it has to do with intellect, but there has to be some biological difference. I don't know why everyone is so afraid of men and women being different biologically. Men are physically stronger, that's a fact. Why can't other differences exist?
tasty_freeze 5y ago
Whether or not there is a difference in biology, most likely there is something much more overt that swamps that difference. Girls get the message early on that their abilities are unwanted in areas that have traditionally been the province of boys. A bit later many get the message that they are appreciated for the sexual opportunity they represent and their abilities are minimized. I've read too many stories of women who faced this in STEM subjects, and it is apparently even worse in the gaming community.

airocker 5y ago

I recently started playing blitz games on lichens.org. It has a similar rating system. It takes 10 min a game and I have been having lot of fun. Wish it translated to fide points.

Upvoter33 5y ago
this is a great typo
- airocker 5y ago
  Oh man, I cant edit it. I should not comment from my phone. I meant lichess.org

MaysonL 5y ago

I gave up playing chess seriously after watching the one grandmaster I ever played compete in the US championship, and learned that he was driving a cab to make ends meet.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Top 50 players in the world can make rather decent ~$100k per year. But that's just top 50!

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huachimingo 5y ago

If you want to have a more engaging round like real life battles, try to play chess with a clock. Give 15-20 min to each one without any adding system, or 5min (or less) if you want to play FPS-ish chess. There are some apps to simulate these clocks. See also adding systems if you want more variety.

QuantumGood 5y ago

For anyone thinking that it might seem more possible than others are saying, remember that many online and country rating systems are equivalent to lower FIDE ratings—adding as much as 250 points to what you have to achieve from where you are now.

pHollda 5y ago

Chess is a boring game about memorizing patterns.

vecter 5y ago
Although there is a lot of memorization required, especially at top-level play (opening theory and your opponent’s preference, as well as preparation), the most beautiful aspects of chess are brilliancies involving quiet positional moves or explosive piece sacrifices that seem unbelievable at first. Search for “Stockfish NNUE sacrifice” on YouTube to see examples, or the AlphaZero vs. Stockfish playlist on chess.com’s YouTube channel.

matoyce 5y ago

It's crazy how low the percentage of women chess grandmasters and black chess grandmasters is. I wonder how many grandmasters are aged below 15 years old. It's amazing how players play against each other despite the age difference.