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How long does it take ordinary people to get good at chess?

240 points by rococode 5y ago

matreyes 5y ago
I’ve learned piano basics when I was a child. Then almost completely stopped playing (I devoted myself to learning IT). And a couple months ago I decided to start again (Im 36 now). I was searching for a book like this, and didn’t found anything. thanks a lot!!!!!
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DeathArrow 5y ago
The article said that there are some players who gained 500 or 1000 points in about two years and that they are outliers, they represent 1% of the total number of players. I would think that it would be far more interesting to consider these people as a percentage of the number of players which started from zero and dedicated two years to playing chess. I would suspect that the percentage would be much higher. I won't import and ETL the data myself just to answer to that but maybe the author can help.
fnord77 5y ago
when I was a kid, I had fun playing chess. other than opening moves, I didn't know any strategies nor did I think ahead more than a move. later when I found out "serious" chess was about memorization of classical moves and thinking in trees, I kinda lost all interest.
isenhaard 5y ago
Depends what you mean with ordinary people. It might take a construction worker around 1 billion years or so ;-D On the other hand, I have to admit that it would take me with my fragile body also 1 billion years to build a house. I’ve played club level chess in my teenage times between being 15 and 20 years old. I’ve even won a regional youth team title, but only at the 8th board (out of 8). But hey, still glorious times! :-) :-) After learning the first rules, I became interested about chess. I think it took me half a year up to 1 year of studying by myself (reading a basic book about chess and re-playing multiple games) before I decided to enter a chess club. Then I pretty fast was playing tournament chess. And I believe this title I got finally maybe two years before learning my first chess rules. So that’s not too long. My basic recommendation is: If you’re really interested in chess, you must buy a basic chess book asap or learn from similar resources. A basic book which covers all the basic topics will be enough. I’ve got a book of 200 pages only. That’s enough. With that knowledge along with studying other players’ games (those games will be in that book, too), you’re ready to be a club chess player. There’s a huge difference between someone who has read that book and someone who has not I can tell you. Without learning about basic strategy and tactics and principles, it will take you years before you really get a certain playing strength. There's really a HUGE difference between someone who has read that book and someone who has not. Theoretically of course, you could learn all this by yourself. But it would take you ages. So you can really forget about that. You must of course be willing to invest some time. I think in my first year after learning the first rules, I’ve read this book and re-played really a lot of games of other people. It became a dominant hobby at that time. But you also need not to do it the whole day or so. If you’re interested, you will do it anyhow regularly. Just like a normal hobby that you’re interested in. Finally, just to mention, before entering that club, I actually had nobody to play with (that was in the 90s by the way, so no internet chess available). I bought a basic chess computer, but I didn’t play with it too often. Actually I was most of the time studying theory and re-playing games within that first half a year or year before I entered the chess club. But despite having not much own playing practice, I at once defeated a lot of (weaker) club players there. So basic knowledge and analyzing games seems to help a lot, even as a beginner.
Rauchg 5y ago
Cool tidbit from the post: > For reference, the most improved player is (as of oct 2021) an 11 year old world chess champion from the Ukraine. His rate of improvement averaged out to 33 points per month over a period of 6 years.
- JimmyAustin 5y ago
  I’d assume most of that could be attributed to the average 11 year old being significantly smarter than the average 5, but I wonder how sustainable that gain is? Given a large enough cohort that practiced enough, ELO is probably a decent-ish proxy for mental development.
- User23 5y ago
  That’s nuts. Does that mean he went from 400 to 2800 in six years? Who is this?
  - radicalcentrist 5y ago
    https://lichess.org/@/PeshkaCh https://lichess.org/@/PeshkaCh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tykhon_Cherniaiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tykhon_Cherniaiev
Buttons840 5y ago
> According to 5.5 years of data from 2.3 million players and 450 million games, most beginners will improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points in 3-6 months. Most "experienced" chess players in the 1400-1800 rating range will take 3-4 years to improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points. There's no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker. There is obviously some minimum number of games required. I haven't played chess for 6 months, should I expect to be 100 points higher next time I play? Probably not, but I have watched some streamers and thought about the game a bit, so maybe. I have a goal to improve to at least 1400 in chess, and I'd like more analysis of how many games I'll have to play. Edit: These graphs are nice: https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/README.md#does-playing-more-games-make-you-a-better-chess-player https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA... Total number of games played has more correlation with rank than games per month it seems.
- betenoire 5y ago
  > However, there does seem to be a sweet spot in the elo gain rate where a large portion of the players who have gained the most elo per month seem to cluster around 100-300 games per month, which comes out to a handful of games per day. That may be evidence that playing at least a few games here and there on a consistent basis will give the best chances at improving, but that could also be due to the fact that there are just more data points for players playing at that rate.
Lordarminius 5y ago
I have been a serious chess player for over 20 years. Improvement in chess is not directly proportional to the number of games played - that is one factor. Amateur park players and hustlers rack up many hundreds of games per week, and thousands per year, but are usually beaten by masters who have played fewer games for shorter periods of time. Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess. Improvement is a function of directed study of chess : analysing one's games with the aim of eliminating weaknesses in one's play, becoming familiar with common patterns (and anti-patterns) of strategy and tactics, learning the fundamentals (and advanced aspects) of openings, middle games and endings, and conquering psychological barriers. I say this because we need to take this into account as we study perfomance else we get skewed results.
- toss1 5y ago
  Well Put Just by playing, you gain too little data - you'd have to re-invent the world's expertise on your own. One must study the vast amounts of data generated by other players, now embodied as knowledge. Not unlike many other fields. Reading and coaching count a lot.
- deleted 5y ago
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- nojs 5y ago
  > Improvement is a function of directed study of chess This is true of so many things. Improvement is proportional to the amount of deliberate, conscious practice, which is more uncomfortable than “game time”. When I used to play chess, I always found short time controls the most fun, but the least useful for long term improvement.
  - namelosw 5y ago
    It seems to be very true for humans to learn things that require practice. Playing video games, playing piano, sport, etc. My interpretation is even though I love those practices, I would still make myself tired from playing and concentrating for too long - after that my standard is downgrading. If I continue, I get used to those lower standards more than I could gain expertise.
arxanas 5y ago
This was interesting to me. I played chess seriously for about 4 years and gained about 400 Elo points. Apparently that's rather above the expectations for an "ordinary" person! I spent around 1000 hours practicing chess during that time, 3/4ths of which was spent on tactics training (writeup here: https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-rank/ https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-ra...). I'm guessing that's a significant differentiating factor, and that the majority of players only spent time playing games. Of course, you can't tell from the Lichess data in the post how much time was spent practicing via not playing. And I would argue that 250 hours per year, like I accomplished, is not actually that much.
- bsder 5y ago
  Tactics training is by far the most effective thing you can do to improve your game short of Master level (assuming you have the basics down). Chess before Master level is all about "avoiding blunders" and "capitalizing on blunders". It's a function of the fact that a single mistake can at any point completely destroy your game.
  - mpol 5y ago
    I agree and I don't agree :) It is not all about tactics, that is a mistake that I see repeated often. A difference between 1300 FIDE level and 1800 FIDE level is partly tactics and avoiding blunders, sure. But there is also more positional play, which is a very good addition in your toolbox, if it is even a tool. There is thinking in fields, which can be about controlling one field that is deciding the game, or about controlling the white fields for example, or the seventh row. There is also intuition, which is much more than pattern recognition, but more letting the unconscious part of the brain work for you (inspired by the moon or by god :) ). (edit) Oh, and I forgot about tempo, which is especially important in the opening or during an attack. Gambits are loved for a reason, you give a pawn for a tempo and win the game :) Also, I feel very much that improvement in chess is often sought in improving someones strong points, because they are the most fun to work on. There are also the weak points that you can work on, which are less comfortable and more confronting, but can be a bottleneck. In psychological sense this works as well.
ineedasername 5y ago
There's no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker. That's pretty interesting. I guess some types of learning can't be rushed by grinding practice.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I guess this is true for any activity requiring thinking. There must be a floor, a minimum frequency or total number of time practiced, but no specific ceiling or linearity between the time/frequency of practice and the progress in the art. If we had two pictures, and asked to guess which photographer takes 80 pictures a day and which takes 200, it would be a tough question. I see the above point the same way, past a certain point the number of games shouldn’t make a difference.
- firasd 5y ago
  I think the fact that good chess players memorize sets of positions is related to this finding that playing more games is not necessarily the way to improve your skill. Because chess improvement isn't necessarily dependent on reflexive subconscious action but in more conscious pattern recognition ('last time my opponent brought a knight to this square I got destroyed...')
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  in fact, grinding practice may make you worse at some activities, if you start picking up bad habits.
ofou 5y ago
Is it possible to create an AI-chess partner that optimizes for improving your own Elo-rating?
- thedwardo 5y ago
  The Maia engine seems promising. I've never really looked into it myself. But my understanding is that unlike AlphaZero or similar engines which use convolutional neural networks to predict a position's objective value and a probability distribution over legal moves and are trained by self-play which allows them to "learn" objectively best strategies, Maia's networks are trained on human moves taking rating into consideration. So humans typically don't gain much from playing traiditional engines, since they play at levels beyond mortal comprehension and make too deep moves from outer-space, Maia would be more down-to-earth. https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a-human-like-neural-network-chess-engine https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...
  - ofou 5y ago
    It's cool to see agents with more human-like style. But I'd love to see an agent designed specifically for improving your opponent skill.
ummonk 5y ago
Great analysis! I wonder whether you can also incorporate puzzle usage in this. "But while I have the data here, let's take a moment to answer the question everyone's asking: does playing more games make you a better chess player? Intuitively, the answer seems like it should be yes. Seems like experience should be a huge factor in someone's chess strength. It also seems like the go-to answer many of the top players recommend for improving at chess." That's actually not what I've seen top trainers recommend, at least for improvement at classical time controls. They recommend playing something like one or two games a day but carefully analyzing each game afterwards.
- yupper32 5y ago
  Yeah I don't know where this person was getting that idea. Almost every good chess player says to play less chess and do more tactics/study.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    Time playing chess should be at least a weak proxy for time spent on all chess activities, which you'd expect to correlate with improvement. At least at smaller numbers - of course if someone is spending 23 hours a day playing chess they aren't spending much time studying or anything else.
- interblag 5y ago
  > I wonder whether you can also incorporate puzzle usage in this. Unfortunately the article itself states that data on puzzles, lessons, etc are not available from the Lichess API, so all that they can really look at are games played... (Though agree this would be cool!)
mchusma 5y ago
This is not really related to what this author means as "good" at chess. But I found spending about 8 hours working through lessons and chess.com and Magnus Carlsen's app (I preferred the chess.com one personally), and maybe another 8 hours playing online was about what I needed to have the occasional "good game". Relatively speaking. It was eye opening for me learning some basic strategies and tactics. Mostly controlling the center, a couple of openings, and techniques for checkmate. Too much beyond that and most players are doing a lot of memorization and pattern recognition. Which I don't really want to do, but I am super happy I learned the basics because now chess is fun and I understand it. I'd recommend taking lessons online if you want to learn chess. Skip many games.
georgeoliver 5y ago
It seems like a significant confounding factor in analysis like this could be the "natural floor" of a beginning player. Some people signing up for Lichess have never or barely played a game, others have lots more experience. Wouldn't this affect their rate of improvement but be invisible in the data set? The OP touches on this a bit; what would be good ways to filter for it?
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Yes, I think the data is inherently corrupted this way. There's nothing to indicate when someone started playing. I'm on Gameknot rather than Lichess, but you try to measure my improvement? You're not seeing the 30 years I was playing before I ever did it online.
Madmallard 5y ago
Improve physical fitness and get professional coaching and you'll improve faster than any other way.
zw123456 5y ago
A weird observation for myself, sometimes I wake up at around 3AM for no apparent reason and can't get back to sleep. Sometimes I reach for my laptop and figure why not play a few games of chess. Weirdly, my strength of play is 400 - 600 higher than normal. This observation is a little off topic I know, but just made me wonder if anyone else has a similar experience.
- Madmallard 5y ago
  Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise. You can use these to your advantage when trying to climb rank.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    Is it weird if I feel like my brain is completely useless for the first 4 hours of the day, I feel like my concentration gets better the longer the day goes - exercise definitely does it for me too.
    - Madmallard 5y ago
      I'd look into health or sleep habit related things potentially causing this. I don't think that is normal, unless maybe you're addicted to caffeine.
  - IWantToRelocate 5y ago
    do you have any article pointing to that? i usually feel "powerful" for random activities after a 15min nap
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  - rramadass 5y ago
    >Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise. Can you recommend some books/papers/videos on this ?
mikewarot 5y ago
Define "good", I started LiChess 2 days ago.
dhosek 5y ago
On a vaguely related note, any suggestions for books for a 7½-year-old who's fascinated with chess? It seems like there's kind of a gap between books that are geared towards total beginners and those which will have you analyzing games. I'm looking for something that will help him develop his skills beyond the basic moves. (I will say, that having introduced him to loser's chess and finding a free iOS app for him to play, he as able to consistently beat the app within a couple weeks, but regular chess is still hit or miss for him and I suspect the AI in the loser's chess game might have been limited).
- mpol 5y ago
  The Steps method is the official didactic method in Dutch chess. There are different levels. If you succeeded all levels, you should arrive at 1600 FIDE, from there on you can pick up other methods. I have no idea if there is an international interest in this, but in the Netherlands this is standard repertoire for chess youth. https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/index.php https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/index.php
- 83457 5y ago
  Chess puzzles?
- desmosxxx 5y ago
  Jeremy Silman's books are great for beginner/intermediate strategy after they've read a few of the total beginner books. How to Reassess Your Chess & The workbook Complete Book to Chess Strategy are both good. They might be a little heavy for a 7 year old but with some guidance I think they're doable. I think I read them when I was 9 or 10 and didn't have any trouble. Chess.com lessons are really good too and might even be a better place to start. chess master 10 had a great walkthrough tutorial on strategy by josh watzkin that i did around that age, if you can find a copy of it
- billforsternz 5y ago
  The canonical answer to this question is "How to Beat Your Dad at Chess" by my good friend GM Murray Chandler.
- 5y ago
DantesKite 5y ago
One of my favorite posts so far. Loved this breakdown. I think you could extend the insights learned here to other domains too.
mappu 5y ago
I'm interested in the choice to use Airflow to download and munge the files. The author is clearly highly skilled with python for analysis/charting so i imagine another short python script could have done it with less ceremony. Why was Airflow used, can it do more interesting things?
- biellls 5y ago
  Ordinarily I would not recommend airflow over a script for a one off like this and you are right that it could be done with much less ceremony. I do however think it was a good choice in this case due to the sheer amount of data downloaded and how long it took because airflow gives you the following advantages: - Parallelization: this may be the most minor advantage in the list, but you don't need to set up thread pools to parallelize your work since the scheduler parallelizes tasks. - Observability: you easily see which tasks failed and look at the logs. -Reliability and task isolation: you can set up automatic retries for jobs that fail, and they won't affect the rest of the flow. You can easily relaunch the tasks that fail independently without restarting the whole load.
  - aelzeiny 5y ago
    All good choices, but it's also worth noting that the structure of the author's DAG is strange. The way this is set up, you would have to change Python code to run (or rerun) this task for different days. In canonical Airflow, the job would be one DAG, and each day would be a separate DAG run. Then you would backfill all the days that you would like the job to run. If there's some sort of max-concurrency requirement, that would be handled by setting the `max_active_runs` parameter or by using Airflow's pool concept. If I had to venture a guess, the author is not an experienced Airflow user, and just wanted to give a new technology an honest try.
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platz 5y ago
would love to see a similar breakdown for https://online-go.com/ https://online-go.com/
punnerud 5y ago
A good selftest: “Show a valid game for 1second, and try to place all the pieces” If you are pro you can do this easily, even for games with a long game play. A good chess player will not be able to do the same if the pieces is in random order, not connected to the rules of the game.
- mpol 5y ago
  Ah yes, taken from Susan Polgar in the documentary My Brilliant Brain. Recommended watch. She is put on a terrace in the street, and she can see a van with a chessboard painted on the side, and has to recreate the position. With a real position she succeeds, since she remembers the pieces and pawns in chunks. With a position that doesn't make any sense in chess, she cannot recreate it. Not sure how good of a selftest this is. But it can be good to remember pieces in chunks, like pawn structures. The same counts for tactic patterns, like knight with wood, or hook with ladder. Instead of 2 or 3 moves, you see a chunk of moves which take up the memory of 1 move.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    There are videos of Magnus Carlsen being shown various positions, and he can instantly tell which games they are from. Like their brain has an index on postions or something. Not only that, but also can tell how the game continues. One example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY
DeathArrow 5y ago
In most human activities requiring learning and training it takes a short time to go from the bottom to average but a very long time to get from average to the top. Unless you are a genius and have a different way to think then the most people, learning becomes exponentially harder after a point. Chess, or math, poker or chemistry, software or physics, go or biology it does not matter. Getting to medium level is easy, becoming really good is really hard.
jmkni 5y ago
Honestly, I've never played a game of Chess, I actually have no idea how it works (I'm 32 years old lol)! I'd love to learn though, I might write a blog post some day detailing how long it took for me to 'get good' (or I might suck at it).
- Rompect 5y ago
  I played one single game once and the opponent used one of these bait openings so obviously I fell for it and lost immediately.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  I'd read that post. There's a lot of good introductory material on Youtube, e.g. here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCSbzArwB10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCSbzArwB10
blixtenghningn 5y ago
Hej Jag heter nils och jag vill bara help
thanatos519 5y ago
I definitely need some directed study. https://vole.wtf/kilobytes-gambit/ https://vole.wtf/kilobytes-gambit/ beats me handily.
geonic 5y ago
Maybe I’m reading the plot wrong but doesn‘t it show people getting worse after some time of improvement?
NewEntryHN 5y ago
> calculating the monthly average This abstracts away a fundamental property of skill improvement that is true for any game, but intensively true at chess: any ELO you win during a gaming session will be lost soon by a new gaming session in which you play the game tired, or unfocused, or angry, or feeling under the weather. You still improve from one session to the next, so there is a little delta because your average ELO win is greater than you average ELO loss, but it makes the overall process extremely slow. What I'm saying is that 100 ELO doesn't make that much of a difference in skill. You probably regularly play at +200 ELO of your actual ELO. However, maintaining a clean game hygiene and actually accumulating the ELO points to reach this level of "estate" is a whole other story.
- deleted 5y ago
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- Levitz 5y ago
  Which is why, if the objective is to improve, you simply don't play unless you are in good conditions to play. The higher your ELO the better your opponents, the more you are set to learn. I understand this used to be harder in the past, if you are to meet a guy at 5 to play a match then that's that, but in today's age there is really no reason to have a subpar performance in competitive matches.
- abnry 5y ago
  This is so, so true. I play chess, but only for fun, or as a way to pass time. I play 2+0 bullet on lichess. I am solidly 50th percentile. If I lose a material advantage, I'll very quickly resign. There are so many things wrong with this from the perspective of "playing chess well". At my rating, it is ludicrous to resign when down a bishop, as there is too much variability, let alone the variability in bullet chess. I don't bring a fighting spirit because I don't want to expend the effort. If I did so, I'd certainly be rated higher. But I haven't attached any ego to my rating so I am free to play how I want.
pastrami_panda 5y ago
I just started playing maybe 4 weeks ago and have found it quite funny how high you can climb by mostly just moving your pawns and memorizing ways you lost (blitz and bullet). It's sort of a mini game for me now where I try to climb as high as possible by only using memory and pawn structure. I've climbed to 1200 ELO using just this strategy, but it's probably going to stop working soon.
- rtpg 5y ago
  One thing is blitz/bullet is totally not the same game as when you have 20+ minutes on the clock. Even at lower levels, once you kinda absorb how to do depth searching and thinking about positions, you will be thinking much more deeply than what is seen in blitz Lots of people consider blitz and bullet to be brain poison for playing chess well
  - anbende 5y ago
    I was just watching a GM Hikaru video (bullet speed run) and be briefly talked about this. He said her recommends people stay away from bullet until they have an “over the table” elo of about 1800 (1900 or 2000 online). He said you could probably play 5|0 blitz once you have an elo of 1200 in rapid. It was an eye opening comment for me. I play a lot of 3|0 blitz and should really just be playing rapid as my elo isn’t 1200 there yet… :/
    - gameswithgo 5y ago
      I am ~850 ELO and I could tell that 5 minute blitz was no good for me, I had no time to think about anything. I would use up all my time just scanning for immediate threats. 10 minute works out well though, I can look for tactics. At some point you probably get faster as scanning for immediate threats and looking for tactics and 5 minute games start to make sense.
  - pastrami_panda 5y ago
    Yes it's very different from regular chess. But you learn very fast common attacks and defenses since you experience a magnitude more games playing with some time limits. You could make the argument a lot of those moves should happened in the players mind - and the timer should just accommodate that. But this is a tradeoff and depends on the players preferences. For instance I'm having tons of fun meeting hundreds of players with different styles and quirks and it makes it a really fun fast paced game that's still essentially just chess. Is it known what time the creators intended for rounds?
chegra 5y ago
There is definitely a sweet spot in learning to play chess; too much, your performance declines. My training protocol for maximal improvement(empirically derived): Practice 25 tactics, play 5 games reviewing after each game... Repeat 3 times daily. When you are reviewing the key thing for your opening is to ensure you get out perfect. Your first 10 moves should be absolutely flawless...Your next objective should be gain a tactical advantage which tend to arise by your opponent making a mistake... be patient don't force it. Once you have the advantage, rapidly trade off pieces. My claim to fame... I drew a FIDE Master in the 2020 online Olympiad[1].[the most unlikely draw based off of ratings.]Also, had the 11th most unlikely win in that Olympiad. [2] Also, wrote tactics app that I am kind of embarrassed to share on HN. But, here it is: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chestergrant.tacticsdojo https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chestergra... Why would I need to write a tactics app? Well, I teach it. Not all tactics are created equal. Some tactics you will not see it again in your lifetime in a real game, so why practice it. My app focuses on the common patterns. Also, I wanted a reporting function to see how much my students are practicing their tactics in one view. [1] - https://youtu.be/_apayzDTIZo?t=9532 https://youtu.be/_apayzDTIZo?t=9532 [2] - https://replit.com/@ChesterGrant/Olympiad2020#main.py https://replit.com/@ChesterGrant/Olympiad2020#main.py
- lupire 5y ago
  75 puzzles plus 15 games plus review a day? That's several hours.
contravariant 5y ago
Weird choice to put everything into 1 airflow run when they could have just instructed it to schedule runs for all months from 2013 up to now.
randomuname 5y ago
based on my anecdotal observations on various hobbies (from a variety of computer games to more physical hobbies), i find these are mostly true, regardless of hobbies. - say level 0 is an average performance of a complete beginner with <1 hour experience on the subject (not just counting the experience from the hobby in question. count every experience from similar hobbies). if there are some players that mostly win against level 0 players(at least >80%), mark them as level 1 players. keep doing the same on level 1, 2, ..., n. you usually ended up with nmax of 10-30. - obviously, not all players starts at level 0. some starts below 0 and some do better. it's possible for someone to have a starting position of level nmax * 0.8-0.9. for example, #1 CS GO player will be pretty good at any other fps games on their first play, probably better than the average people will ever be (no matter how hard the average people is trying). however, a true beginner starts anywhere near that. if nmax is 20, then i would say level 5-10 is the highest starting position for a complete beginner. - first few level up occurs naturally from experience. you could somewhat boost this process up, but you don't need to as they happen pretty fast(it usually takes 100-1000 hours of experience on the subject, to completely exhaust those easy level up opportunities). as such, a complete beginner with an average performance (level 0), or somewhat above average performance (level 1-2) is no match to a beginner with some experience (who became level 3-6 after spending 100-1000 hours). but there are rare breed of beginner who just starts right up at level 5-10, even though they don't have any experience on the subject or anything related. these rare breed could beat a beginner with 100-1000 hours of experience, when they only got minimal experience (a few hours). - after reaching the plateau of hobbyist (around level 5, who easily beat most beginners without much experience, but still nothing on the entire spectrum), you don't get much of auto level up by playing more games mindlessly, at least not as fast as you'd hope for. as such, if someone just mindless play more rounds without any study, it won't get them very far. even if they spend tremendous amount of time (like >10k hours), many of them won't even reach level 10. - however, if you study about the game, you would level up significantly faster than mindless playing (though this is still a lot slower than the first few auto level ups). there are many approach, including a) watch a replay of a better player and try to mimic their play, b) study about the basic fundamentals that are not required to just play, etc. there is no single approach that can cover everything, so you're almost required to do all of them at least for some bits, if your aim is high (such as level 15+ on nmax 20 game). - usually the main driver is analyzing the play of better players. if you don't exactly know why they make such move (this should happen a lot if you go into detail), then just memorize and and try to mimic their movement exactly. one day, you might understand (but not guaranteed), or at least try to play exactly the same on the same situation (also not guaranteed). - but this doesn't get you to the nmax. people have their own ceilings. no matter how hard they tried, or what methods they've used, their ceilings stay the same. there is no way to break the ceiling, hence ceiling. also, it's extremely unlikely that you have a ceiling of nmax. usually, if you have a ceiling of 80% nmax, that's pretty high. average people often have 50% nmax ceiling - usually, your ceiling is formed based on your nature + nurture. but there are some other elements, which is not directly related to your ability about the subject, but still act as a ceiling. for example, there are some hobbies that you need to spend $1k for one hour of experience, which translates to $100k spending for the basic 100 hours of experience (and this could be prohibitively expensive for many people). these type of hobbies usually have lower nmax (since much fewer people have ever stepped a foot into this type of hobby), as well as lower level requirement to become a professional player.
synergy20 5y ago
what does chess really serve the human? is it just a way to enjoy time well-spend or personal improvement? or does it help to evolve our gene somehow? I always feel smart people spending so much time and part of their life on chess, is like a waste of talent, that could be well put into other things that are more meaningful to the society, such as, inventing new system, improving existing design, fixing some real issues, or even teaching coding to the public etc.
- criddell 5y ago
  Like John Lennon said, time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted.
  - synergy20 5y ago
    which is, IMHO, nonsense. looking at those kids obsessed at games these days, it's truly time wasted no matter how they enjoyed it.
    - criddell 5y ago
      At least they aren't in your yard.
rayrrr 5y ago
Perhaps a more fitting title for this article would have been "How many games does it take to establish an accurate ELO rating?"
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michalu 5y ago
I got into 1400-1600 on lichess relatively quickly but I did that by taking about 15 private lessons with an IM and doing a lot of puzzles. He taught me a solid opening that I played going forward which allowed me to beat opponents in that 1400-1600 range and then I basically staled playing the same thing over and over with anyone in the higher ratings not having hard time to counter. Getting past that required significant investments in time and effort. With that I found that it's about that range when playing chess reaches diminishing returns. Everything useful it can teach you about life at a reasonable cost you'll probably know by then. Going forward is more about, well, getting good at a board game. Plus, there's a risk of loss as chess can screw with your head. I's much rather invest time into something like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which contains all components of chess, has real life application and keeps you fit, social and sane.
- deleted 5y ago
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240 points by rococode 5y ago

I’ve learned piano basics when I was a child. Then almost completely stopped playing (I devoted myself to learning IT). And a couple months ago I decided to start again (Im 36 now). I was searching for a book like this, and didn’t found anything. thanks a lot!!!!!

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DeathArrow 5y ago

The article said that there are some players who gained 500 or 1000 points in about two years and that they are outliers, they represent 1% of the total number of players. I would think that it would be far more interesting to consider these people as a percentage of the number of players which started from zero and dedicated two years to playing chess. I would suspect that the percentage would be much higher. I won't import and ETL the data myself just to answer to that but maybe the author can help.

fnord77 5y ago

when I was a kid, I had fun playing chess. other than opening moves, I didn't know any strategies nor did I think ahead more than a move. later when I found out "serious" chess was about memorization of classical moves and thinking in trees, I kinda lost all interest.

isenhaard 5y ago

Depends what you mean with ordinary people. It might take a construction worker around 1 billion years or so ;-D On the other hand, I have to admit that it would take me with my fragile body also 1 billion years to build a house. I’ve played club level chess in my teenage times between being 15 and 20 years old. I’ve even won a regional youth team title, but only at the 8th board (out of 8). But hey, still glorious times! :-) :-) After learning the first rules, I became interested about chess. I think it took me half a year up to 1 year of studying by myself (reading a basic book about chess and re-playing multiple games) before I decided to enter a chess club. Then I pretty fast was playing tournament chess. And I believe this title I got finally maybe two years before learning my first chess rules. So that’s not too long. My basic recommendation is: If you’re really interested in chess, you must buy a basic chess book asap or learn from similar resources. A basic book which covers all the basic topics will be enough. I’ve got a book of 200 pages only. That’s enough. With that knowledge along with studying other players’ games (those games will be in that book, too), you’re ready to be a club chess player. There’s a huge difference between someone who has read that book and someone who has not I can tell you. Without learning about basic strategy and tactics and principles, it will take you years before you really get a certain playing strength. There's really a HUGE difference between someone who has read that book and someone who has not. Theoretically of course, you could learn all this by yourself. But it would take you ages. So you can really forget about that. You must of course be willing to invest some time. I think in my first year after learning the first rules, I’ve read this book and re-played really a lot of games of other people. It became a dominant hobby at that time. But you also need not to do it the whole day or so. If you’re interested, you will do it anyhow regularly. Just like a normal hobby that you’re interested in. Finally, just to mention, before entering that club, I actually had nobody to play with (that was in the 90s by the way, so no internet chess available). I bought a basic chess computer, but I didn’t play with it too often. Actually I was most of the time studying theory and re-playing games within that first half a year or year before I entered the chess club. But despite having not much own playing practice, I at once defeated a lot of (weaker) club players there. So basic knowledge and analyzing games seems to help a lot, even as a beginner.

Rauchg 5y ago

Cool tidbit from the post: > For reference, the most improved player is (as of oct 2021) an 11 year old world chess champion from the Ukraine. His rate of improvement averaged out to 33 points per month over a period of 6 years.

JimmyAustin 5y ago
I’d assume most of that could be attributed to the average 11 year old being significantly smarter than the average 5, but I wonder how sustainable that gain is? Given a large enough cohort that practiced enough, ELO is probably a decent-ish proxy for mental development.
User23 5y ago
That’s nuts. Does that mean he went from 400 to 2800 in six years? Who is this?
- radicalcentrist 5y ago
  https://lichess.org/@/PeshkaCh https://lichess.org/@/PeshkaCh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tykhon_Cherniaiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tykhon_Cherniaiev

Buttons840 5y ago

> According to 5.5 years of data from 2.3 million players and 450 million games, most beginners will improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points in 3-6 months. Most "experienced" chess players in the 1400-1800 rating range will take 3-4 years to improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points. There's no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker. There is obviously some minimum number of games required. I haven't played chess for 6 months, should I expect to be 100 points higher next time I play? Probably not, but I have watched some streamers and thought about the game a bit, so maybe. I have a goal to improve to at least 1400 in chess, and I'd like more analysis of how many games I'll have to play. Edit: These graphs are nice: https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/README.md#does-playing-more-games-make-you-a-better-chess-player https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA... Total number of games played has more correlation with rank than games per month it seems.

betenoire 5y ago
> However, there does seem to be a sweet spot in the elo gain rate where a large portion of the players who have gained the most elo per month seem to cluster around 100-300 games per month, which comes out to a handful of games per day. That may be evidence that playing at least a few games here and there on a consistent basis will give the best chances at improving, but that could also be due to the fact that there are just more data points for players playing at that rate.

Lordarminius 5y ago

I have been a serious chess player for over 20 years. Improvement in chess is not directly proportional to the number of games played - that is one factor. Amateur park players and hustlers rack up many hundreds of games per week, and thousands per year, but are usually beaten by masters who have played fewer games for shorter periods of time. Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess. Improvement is a function of directed study of chess : analysing one's games with the aim of eliminating weaknesses in one's play, becoming familiar with common patterns (and anti-patterns) of strategy and tactics, learning the fundamentals (and advanced aspects) of openings, middle games and endings, and conquering psychological barriers. I say this because we need to take this into account as we study perfomance else we get skewed results.

toss1 5y ago
Well Put Just by playing, you gain too little data - you'd have to re-invent the world's expertise on your own. One must study the vast amounts of data generated by other players, now embodied as knowledge. Not unlike many other fields. Reading and coaching count a lot.
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nojs 5y ago
> Improvement is a function of directed study of chess This is true of so many things. Improvement is proportional to the amount of deliberate, conscious practice, which is more uncomfortable than “game time”. When I used to play chess, I always found short time controls the most fun, but the least useful for long term improvement.
- namelosw 5y ago
  It seems to be very true for humans to learn things that require practice. Playing video games, playing piano, sport, etc. My interpretation is even though I love those practices, I would still make myself tired from playing and concentrating for too long - after that my standard is downgrading. If I continue, I get used to those lower standards more than I could gain expertise.

arxanas 5y ago

This was interesting to me. I played chess seriously for about 4 years and gained about 400 Elo points. Apparently that's rather above the expectations for an "ordinary" person! I spent around 1000 hours practicing chess during that time, 3/4ths of which was spent on tactics training (writeup here: https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-rank/ https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-ra...). I'm guessing that's a significant differentiating factor, and that the majority of players only spent time playing games. Of course, you can't tell from the Lichess data in the post how much time was spent practicing via not playing. And I would argue that 250 hours per year, like I accomplished, is not actually that much.

bsder 5y ago
Tactics training is by far the most effective thing you can do to improve your game short of Master level (assuming you have the basics down). Chess before Master level is all about "avoiding blunders" and "capitalizing on blunders". It's a function of the fact that a single mistake can at any point completely destroy your game.
- mpol 5y ago
  I agree and I don't agree :) It is not all about tactics, that is a mistake that I see repeated often. A difference between 1300 FIDE level and 1800 FIDE level is partly tactics and avoiding blunders, sure. But there is also more positional play, which is a very good addition in your toolbox, if it is even a tool. There is thinking in fields, which can be about controlling one field that is deciding the game, or about controlling the white fields for example, or the seventh row. There is also intuition, which is much more than pattern recognition, but more letting the unconscious part of the brain work for you (inspired by the moon or by god :) ). (edit) Oh, and I forgot about tempo, which is especially important in the opening or during an attack. Gambits are loved for a reason, you give a pawn for a tempo and win the game :) Also, I feel very much that improvement in chess is often sought in improving someones strong points, because they are the most fun to work on. There are also the weak points that you can work on, which are less comfortable and more confronting, but can be a bottleneck. In psychological sense this works as well.

ineedasername 5y ago

There's no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker. That's pretty interesting. I guess some types of learning can't be rushed by grinding practice.

makeitdouble 5y ago
I guess this is true for any activity requiring thinking. There must be a floor, a minimum frequency or total number of time practiced, but no specific ceiling or linearity between the time/frequency of practice and the progress in the art. If we had two pictures, and asked to guess which photographer takes 80 pictures a day and which takes 200, it would be a tough question. I see the above point the same way, past a certain point the number of games shouldn’t make a difference.
firasd 5y ago
I think the fact that good chess players memorize sets of positions is related to this finding that playing more games is not necessarily the way to improve your skill. Because chess improvement isn't necessarily dependent on reflexive subconscious action but in more conscious pattern recognition ('last time my opponent brought a knight to this square I got destroyed...')
bobthepanda 5y ago
in fact, grinding practice may make you worse at some activities, if you start picking up bad habits.

ofou 5y ago

Is it possible to create an AI-chess partner that optimizes for improving your own Elo-rating?

thedwardo 5y ago
The Maia engine seems promising. I've never really looked into it myself. But my understanding is that unlike AlphaZero or similar engines which use convolutional neural networks to predict a position's objective value and a probability distribution over legal moves and are trained by self-play which allows them to "learn" objectively best strategies, Maia's networks are trained on human moves taking rating into consideration. So humans typically don't gain much from playing traiditional engines, since they play at levels beyond mortal comprehension and make too deep moves from outer-space, Maia would be more down-to-earth. https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a-human-like-neural-network-chess-engine https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...
- ofou 5y ago
  It's cool to see agents with more human-like style. But I'd love to see an agent designed specifically for improving your opponent skill.

ummonk 5y ago

Great analysis! I wonder whether you can also incorporate puzzle usage in this. "But while I have the data here, let's take a moment to answer the question everyone's asking: does playing more games make you a better chess player? Intuitively, the answer seems like it should be yes. Seems like experience should be a huge factor in someone's chess strength. It also seems like the go-to answer many of the top players recommend for improving at chess." That's actually not what I've seen top trainers recommend, at least for improvement at classical time controls. They recommend playing something like one or two games a day but carefully analyzing each game afterwards.

yupper32 5y ago
Yeah I don't know where this person was getting that idea. Almost every good chess player says to play less chess and do more tactics/study.
- dmurray 5y ago
  Time playing chess should be at least a weak proxy for time spent on all chess activities, which you'd expect to correlate with improvement. At least at smaller numbers - of course if someone is spending 23 hours a day playing chess they aren't spending much time studying or anything else.
interblag 5y ago
> I wonder whether you can also incorporate puzzle usage in this. Unfortunately the article itself states that data on puzzles, lessons, etc are not available from the Lichess API, so all that they can really look at are games played... (Though agree this would be cool!)

mchusma 5y ago

This is not really related to what this author means as "good" at chess. But I found spending about 8 hours working through lessons and chess.com and Magnus Carlsen's app (I preferred the chess.com one personally), and maybe another 8 hours playing online was about what I needed to have the occasional "good game". Relatively speaking. It was eye opening for me learning some basic strategies and tactics. Mostly controlling the center, a couple of openings, and techniques for checkmate. Too much beyond that and most players are doing a lot of memorization and pattern recognition. Which I don't really want to do, but I am super happy I learned the basics because now chess is fun and I understand it. I'd recommend taking lessons online if you want to learn chess. Skip many games.

georgeoliver 5y ago

It seems like a significant confounding factor in analysis like this could be the "natural floor" of a beginning player. Some people signing up for Lichess have never or barely played a game, others have lots more experience. Wouldn't this affect their rate of improvement but be invisible in the data set? The OP touches on this a bit; what would be good ways to filter for it?

LorenPechtel 5y ago
Yes, I think the data is inherently corrupted this way. There's nothing to indicate when someone started playing. I'm on Gameknot rather than Lichess, but you try to measure my improvement? You're not seeing the 30 years I was playing before I ever did it online.

Madmallard 5y ago

Improve physical fitness and get professional coaching and you'll improve faster than any other way.

zw123456 5y ago

A weird observation for myself, sometimes I wake up at around 3AM for no apparent reason and can't get back to sleep. Sometimes I reach for my laptop and figure why not play a few games of chess. Weirdly, my strength of play is 400 - 600 higher than normal. This observation is a little off topic I know, but just made me wonder if anyone else has a similar experience.

Madmallard 5y ago
Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise. You can use these to your advantage when trying to climb rank.
- jjcon 5y ago
  Is it weird if I feel like my brain is completely useless for the first 4 hours of the day, I feel like my concentration gets better the longer the day goes - exercise definitely does it for me too.
  - Madmallard 5y ago
    I'd look into health or sleep habit related things potentially causing this. I don't think that is normal, unless maybe you're addicted to caffeine.
- IWantToRelocate 5y ago
  do you have any article pointing to that? i usually feel "powerful" for random activities after a 15min nap
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- rramadass 5y ago
  >Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise. Can you recommend some books/papers/videos on this ?

mikewarot 5y ago

Define "good", I started LiChess 2 days ago.

dhosek 5y ago

On a vaguely related note, any suggestions for books for a 7½-year-old who's fascinated with chess? It seems like there's kind of a gap between books that are geared towards total beginners and those which will have you analyzing games. I'm looking for something that will help him develop his skills beyond the basic moves. (I will say, that having introduced him to loser's chess and finding a free iOS app for him to play, he as able to consistently beat the app within a couple weeks, but regular chess is still hit or miss for him and I suspect the AI in the loser's chess game might have been limited).

mpol 5y ago
The Steps method is the official didactic method in Dutch chess. There are different levels. If you succeeded all levels, you should arrive at 1600 FIDE, from there on you can pick up other methods. I have no idea if there is an international interest in this, but in the Netherlands this is standard repertoire for chess youth. https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/index.php https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/index.php
83457 5y ago
Chess puzzles?
desmosxxx 5y ago
Jeremy Silman's books are great for beginner/intermediate strategy after they've read a few of the total beginner books. How to Reassess Your Chess & The workbook Complete Book to Chess Strategy are both good. They might be a little heavy for a 7 year old but with some guidance I think they're doable. I think I read them when I was 9 or 10 and didn't have any trouble. Chess.com lessons are really good too and might even be a better place to start. chess master 10 had a great walkthrough tutorial on strategy by josh watzkin that i did around that age, if you can find a copy of it
billforsternz 5y ago
The canonical answer to this question is "How to Beat Your Dad at Chess" by my good friend GM Murray Chandler.
5y ago

DantesKite 5y ago

One of my favorite posts so far. Loved this breakdown. I think you could extend the insights learned here to other domains too.

mappu 5y ago

I'm interested in the choice to use Airflow to download and munge the files. The author is clearly highly skilled with python for analysis/charting so i imagine another short python script could have done it with less ceremony. Why was Airflow used, can it do more interesting things?

biellls 5y ago
Ordinarily I would not recommend airflow over a script for a one off like this and you are right that it could be done with much less ceremony. I do however think it was a good choice in this case due to the sheer amount of data downloaded and how long it took because airflow gives you the following advantages: - Parallelization: this may be the most minor advantage in the list, but you don't need to set up thread pools to parallelize your work since the scheduler parallelizes tasks. - Observability: you easily see which tasks failed and look at the logs. -Reliability and task isolation: you can set up automatic retries for jobs that fail, and they won't affect the rest of the flow. You can easily relaunch the tasks that fail independently without restarting the whole load.
- aelzeiny 5y ago
  All good choices, but it's also worth noting that the structure of the author's DAG is strange. The way this is set up, you would have to change Python code to run (or rerun) this task for different days. In canonical Airflow, the job would be one DAG, and each day would be a separate DAG run. Then you would backfill all the days that you would like the job to run. If there's some sort of max-concurrency requirement, that would be handled by setting the `max_active_runs` parameter or by using Airflow's pool concept. If I had to venture a guess, the author is not an experienced Airflow user, and just wanted to give a new technology an honest try.

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platz 5y ago

would love to see a similar breakdown for https://online-go.com/ https://online-go.com/

punnerud 5y ago

A good selftest: “Show a valid game for 1second, and try to place all the pieces” If you are pro you can do this easily, even for games with a long game play. A good chess player will not be able to do the same if the pieces is in random order, not connected to the rules of the game.

mpol 5y ago
Ah yes, taken from Susan Polgar in the documentary My Brilliant Brain. Recommended watch. She is put on a terrace in the street, and she can see a van with a chessboard painted on the side, and has to recreate the position. With a real position she succeeds, since she remembers the pieces and pawns in chunks. With a position that doesn't make any sense in chess, she cannot recreate it. Not sure how good of a selftest this is. But it can be good to remember pieces in chunks, like pawn structures. The same counts for tactic patterns, like knight with wood, or hook with ladder. Instead of 2 or 3 moves, you see a chunk of moves which take up the memory of 1 move.
- matsemann 5y ago
  There are videos of Magnus Carlsen being shown various positions, and he can instantly tell which games they are from. Like their brain has an index on postions or something. Not only that, but also can tell how the game continues. One example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY

DeathArrow 5y ago

In most human activities requiring learning and training it takes a short time to go from the bottom to average but a very long time to get from average to the top. Unless you are a genius and have a different way to think then the most people, learning becomes exponentially harder after a point. Chess, or math, poker or chemistry, software or physics, go or biology it does not matter. Getting to medium level is easy, becoming really good is really hard.

jmkni 5y ago

Honestly, I've never played a game of Chess, I actually have no idea how it works (I'm 32 years old lol)! I'd love to learn though, I might write a blog post some day detailing how long it took for me to 'get good' (or I might suck at it).

Rompect 5y ago
I played one single game once and the opponent used one of these bait openings so obviously I fell for it and lost immediately.
_dain_ 5y ago
I'd read that post. There's a lot of good introductory material on Youtube, e.g. here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCSbzArwB10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCSbzArwB10

blixtenghningn 5y ago

Hej Jag heter nils och jag vill bara help

thanatos519 5y ago

I definitely need some directed study. https://vole.wtf/kilobytes-gambit/ https://vole.wtf/kilobytes-gambit/ beats me handily.

geonic 5y ago

Maybe I’m reading the plot wrong but doesn‘t it show people getting worse after some time of improvement?

NewEntryHN 5y ago

> calculating the monthly average This abstracts away a fundamental property of skill improvement that is true for any game, but intensively true at chess: any ELO you win during a gaming session will be lost soon by a new gaming session in which you play the game tired, or unfocused, or angry, or feeling under the weather. You still improve from one session to the next, so there is a little delta because your average ELO win is greater than you average ELO loss, but it makes the overall process extremely slow. What I'm saying is that 100 ELO doesn't make that much of a difference in skill. You probably regularly play at +200 ELO of your actual ELO. However, maintaining a clean game hygiene and actually accumulating the ELO points to reach this level of "estate" is a whole other story.

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Levitz 5y ago
Which is why, if the objective is to improve, you simply don't play unless you are in good conditions to play. The higher your ELO the better your opponents, the more you are set to learn. I understand this used to be harder in the past, if you are to meet a guy at 5 to play a match then that's that, but in today's age there is really no reason to have a subpar performance in competitive matches.
abnry 5y ago
This is so, so true. I play chess, but only for fun, or as a way to pass time. I play 2+0 bullet on lichess. I am solidly 50th percentile. If I lose a material advantage, I'll very quickly resign. There are so many things wrong with this from the perspective of "playing chess well". At my rating, it is ludicrous to resign when down a bishop, as there is too much variability, let alone the variability in bullet chess. I don't bring a fighting spirit because I don't want to expend the effort. If I did so, I'd certainly be rated higher. But I haven't attached any ego to my rating so I am free to play how I want.

pastrami_panda 5y ago

I just started playing maybe 4 weeks ago and have found it quite funny how high you can climb by mostly just moving your pawns and memorizing ways you lost (blitz and bullet). It's sort of a mini game for me now where I try to climb as high as possible by only using memory and pawn structure. I've climbed to 1200 ELO using just this strategy, but it's probably going to stop working soon.

rtpg 5y ago
One thing is blitz/bullet is totally not the same game as when you have 20+ minutes on the clock. Even at lower levels, once you kinda absorb how to do depth searching and thinking about positions, you will be thinking much more deeply than what is seen in blitz Lots of people consider blitz and bullet to be brain poison for playing chess well
- anbende 5y ago
  I was just watching a GM Hikaru video (bullet speed run) and be briefly talked about this. He said her recommends people stay away from bullet until they have an “over the table” elo of about 1800 (1900 or 2000 online). He said you could probably play 5|0 blitz once you have an elo of 1200 in rapid. It was an eye opening comment for me. I play a lot of 3|0 blitz and should really just be playing rapid as my elo isn’t 1200 there yet… :/
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    I am ~850 ELO and I could tell that 5 minute blitz was no good for me, I had no time to think about anything. I would use up all my time just scanning for immediate threats. 10 minute works out well though, I can look for tactics. At some point you probably get faster as scanning for immediate threats and looking for tactics and 5 minute games start to make sense.
- pastrami_panda 5y ago
  Yes it's very different from regular chess. But you learn very fast common attacks and defenses since you experience a magnitude more games playing with some time limits. You could make the argument a lot of those moves should happened in the players mind - and the timer should just accommodate that. But this is a tradeoff and depends on the players preferences. For instance I'm having tons of fun meeting hundreds of players with different styles and quirks and it makes it a really fun fast paced game that's still essentially just chess. Is it known what time the creators intended for rounds?

chegra 5y ago

There is definitely a sweet spot in learning to play chess; too much, your performance declines. My training protocol for maximal improvement(empirically derived): Practice 25 tactics, play 5 games reviewing after each game... Repeat 3 times daily. When you are reviewing the key thing for your opening is to ensure you get out perfect. Your first 10 moves should be absolutely flawless...Your next objective should be gain a tactical advantage which tend to arise by your opponent making a mistake... be patient don't force it. Once you have the advantage, rapidly trade off pieces. My claim to fame... I drew a FIDE Master in the 2020 online Olympiad[1].[the most unlikely draw based off of ratings.]Also, had the 11th most unlikely win in that Olympiad. [2] Also, wrote tactics app that I am kind of embarrassed to share on HN. But, here it is: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chestergrant.tacticsdojo https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chestergra... Why would I need to write a tactics app? Well, I teach it. Not all tactics are created equal. Some tactics you will not see it again in your lifetime in a real game, so why practice it. My app focuses on the common patterns. Also, I wanted a reporting function to see how much my students are practicing their tactics in one view. [1] - https://youtu.be/_apayzDTIZo?t=9532 https://youtu.be/_apayzDTIZo?t=9532 [2] - https://replit.com/@ChesterGrant/Olympiad2020#main.py https://replit.com/@ChesterGrant/Olympiad2020#main.py

lupire 5y ago
75 puzzles plus 15 games plus review a day? That's several hours.

contravariant 5y ago

Weird choice to put everything into 1 airflow run when they could have just instructed it to schedule runs for all months from 2013 up to now.

randomuname 5y ago

based on my anecdotal observations on various hobbies (from a variety of computer games to more physical hobbies), i find these are mostly true, regardless of hobbies. - say level 0 is an average performance of a complete beginner with <1 hour experience on the subject (not just counting the experience from the hobby in question. count every experience from similar hobbies). if there are some players that mostly win against level 0 players(at least >80%), mark them as level 1 players. keep doing the same on level 1, 2, ..., n. you usually ended up with nmax of 10-30. - obviously, not all players starts at level 0. some starts below 0 and some do better. it's possible for someone to have a starting position of level nmax * 0.8-0.9. for example, #1 CS GO player will be pretty good at any other fps games on their first play, probably better than the average people will ever be (no matter how hard the average people is trying). however, a true beginner starts anywhere near that. if nmax is 20, then i would say level 5-10 is the highest starting position for a complete beginner. - first few level up occurs naturally from experience. you could somewhat boost this process up, but you don't need to as they happen pretty fast(it usually takes 100-1000 hours of experience on the subject, to completely exhaust those easy level up opportunities). as such, a complete beginner with an average performance (level 0), or somewhat above average performance (level 1-2) is no match to a beginner with some experience (who became level 3-6 after spending 100-1000 hours). but there are rare breed of beginner who just starts right up at level 5-10, even though they don't have any experience on the subject or anything related. these rare breed could beat a beginner with 100-1000 hours of experience, when they only got minimal experience (a few hours). - after reaching the plateau of hobbyist (around level 5, who easily beat most beginners without much experience, but still nothing on the entire spectrum), you don't get much of auto level up by playing more games mindlessly, at least not as fast as you'd hope for. as such, if someone just mindless play more rounds without any study, it won't get them very far. even if they spend tremendous amount of time (like >10k hours), many of them won't even reach level 10. - however, if you study about the game, you would level up significantly faster than mindless playing (though this is still a lot slower than the first few auto level ups). there are many approach, including a) watch a replay of a better player and try to mimic their play, b) study about the basic fundamentals that are not required to just play, etc. there is no single approach that can cover everything, so you're almost required to do all of them at least for some bits, if your aim is high (such as level 15+ on nmax 20 game). - usually the main driver is analyzing the play of better players. if you don't exactly know why they make such move (this should happen a lot if you go into detail), then just memorize and and try to mimic their movement exactly. one day, you might understand (but not guaranteed), or at least try to play exactly the same on the same situation (also not guaranteed). - but this doesn't get you to the nmax. people have their own ceilings. no matter how hard they tried, or what methods they've used, their ceilings stay the same. there is no way to break the ceiling, hence ceiling. also, it's extremely unlikely that you have a ceiling of nmax. usually, if you have a ceiling of 80% nmax, that's pretty high. average people often have 50% nmax ceiling - usually, your ceiling is formed based on your nature + nurture. but there are some other elements, which is not directly related to your ability about the subject, but still act as a ceiling. for example, there are some hobbies that you need to spend $1k for one hour of experience, which translates to $100k spending for the basic 100 hours of experience (and this could be prohibitively expensive for many people). these type of hobbies usually have lower nmax (since much fewer people have ever stepped a foot into this type of hobby), as well as lower level requirement to become a professional player.

synergy20 5y ago

what does chess really serve the human? is it just a way to enjoy time well-spend or personal improvement? or does it help to evolve our gene somehow? I always feel smart people spending so much time and part of their life on chess, is like a waste of talent, that could be well put into other things that are more meaningful to the society, such as, inventing new system, improving existing design, fixing some real issues, or even teaching coding to the public etc.

criddell 5y ago
Like John Lennon said, time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted.
- synergy20 5y ago
  which is, IMHO, nonsense. looking at those kids obsessed at games these days, it's truly time wasted no matter how they enjoyed it.
  - criddell 5y ago
    At least they aren't in your yard.

rayrrr 5y ago

Perhaps a more fitting title for this article would have been "How many games does it take to establish an accurate ELO rating?"

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michalu 5y ago

I got into 1400-1600 on lichess relatively quickly but I did that by taking about 15 private lessons with an IM and doing a lot of puzzles. He taught me a solid opening that I played going forward which allowed me to beat opponents in that 1400-1600 range and then I basically staled playing the same thing over and over with anyone in the higher ratings not having hard time to counter. Getting past that required significant investments in time and effort. With that I found that it's about that range when playing chess reaches diminishing returns. Everything useful it can teach you about life at a reasonable cost you'll probably know by then. Going forward is more about, well, getting good at a board game. Plus, there's a risk of loss as chess can screw with your head. I's much rather invest time into something like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which contains all components of chess, has real life application and keeps you fit, social and sane.

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