12 ms·

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. > While that statement may seem dis

by lysp 4y ago

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. > Greats like Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen, and almost all of the modern GMs who have been established as top five players, were notable GMs by age 15 at the latest Wow.

htrqball 4y ago
Aronian was a late bloomer. No evidence here at all.
- glenstein 4y ago
  How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess? It doesn't really matter, does it? There's a big difference between telling someone "if you're not a GM by age 14 [but actually I mean 15], then don't bother, it's hopeless" and "a typical top-level player reaches GM by age 14, but it is possible to reach that level even if you are a relatively 'late bloomer'." I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - a-dub 4y ago
      as a rule it is decidedly uncouth in our society to use population statistics when speaking in terms of ability or potential, as the act of making those statements can bias real world abilities and potentials by setting expectations of limits.
    - dhikapow 4y ago
      There's a big difference between "[if you're not a GM by age 14], it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess." and "..then don't bother, it's hopeless". The former statement is perfectly valid, nobody saying that it's hopeless
      - quadrifoliate 4y ago
        > nobody saying that it's hopeless Well, it's a report about cheating which is essentially claiming that if you're not a GM by age 14, then you must be cheating. Which is...kind of the same thing.
        burnished 4y ago
        It literally does not say that. What do you want them to do? Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it? The conclusion of their report is repeated several times; no evidence of OTB cheating.
        quadrifoliate 4y ago
        > Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it? I don't think any serious commenters are going to complain about the absence of stereotypes about "the greats" unbacked by statistical analysis. That is what is bad. The actual analysis of anomalously fast progress at equivalent ages is fine.
    - glenstein 4y ago
      >It doesn't really matter, does it? It's literally the single most important fact in this context. If there are lots of people like Aronian, then there's nothing out of the ordinary about the evolution of Hans Neiman as a player. If he's a rare and unusual example, he shouldn't be cited to suggest Hans' skill growth is within the norm. >I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try. This is a non-sequitur.
- seer-zig 4y ago
  The exception the proves the rule?
  - addicted 4y ago
    One of the stupidest phrases vert. Almost by definition the exception disproves the rule. There’s literally no logical sense in which the exception can prove the rule unless the rule is not really a rule but more of a suggestion.
    - maoeurk 4y ago
      Yeah it's pretty much exclusively used incorrectly. The original meaning was that an exception to a rule proves that such a rule exists. For example, "no parking on Sunday" is an exception that implies that parking on any day except Sunday is okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule It honestly doesn't bother me as much as when people incorrectly say "begs the question" when they mean "raises the question" but I think we're long past the point of us ever correcting any of these.
      - xxs 4y ago
        One note about parking - normally all actions (incl. parking) are allowed, unless they are explicitly forbidden. Lack of any other rules/guidance implies the parking is allowed.
        hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
        That’s a fairly generic statement, have you confirmed that rule to be true across every city/state/country across the globe?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
bsder 4y ago
> > The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. This is confusing correlation and causation. One thing that people don't realize is the sheer amount of money required to become a "GM". You have to get a certain number of "norms" from FIDE and the requirements list is a PITA: https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/ https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/ If you don't have a lot of money and a lot of free time to go to a lot of chess tournaments around the world, you are not getting a "GM" title in this day and age. This favors children (few time constraints) with rich parents (lots of coaching along with the ability to travel). The problem is that if you aren't a "chess prodigy" by 15 it generally isn't worth continuing to pursue--what does sinking the resources into being a "GM" get you at the end? If you're one of the "Chess Gods", you have entry into the tournaments anyway, and, if you're not, it doesn't really matter.
- addicted 4y ago
  This also ignores a once in a century pandemic. It’s an absolutely ridiculous basis to make a claim.
  - pedrosorio 4y ago
    > This also ignores a once in a century pandemic. Hans Niemann was almost 17 years old when the pandemic started. When he turned 15 (June 2018) his rating was 2313, almost 200 points (an immense gulf at that level) below the minimum to become a grandmaster.
    - User23 4y ago
      A name that basically means “John Nobody” is pretty curious.
- User23 4y ago
  That's why I quit playing seriously when I was still an underclassman. It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant, and there was absolutely no practical reason for me to play chess whatsoever. Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.
quadrifoliate 4y ago
In my opinion, this sort of ad-hoc stereotyping weakens the rest of the analysis. There are plenty of counterexamples. Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19 and is still ranked World No. 9 currently (at age 52). Ding Liren (Current No. 2) became a GM at 17. Grischuk (currently No. 17, peak No.3) became a GM at 17. All three have crossed 2800 ELO at some point. I hope this is not the sort of analysis that chess.com has run in the other 71 pages of the report.
- maegul 4y ago
  Yea generally I wouldn't characterise the report as being a glimmering indication of the scientific quality of the chess.com cheat detection team. Even the graphs look a lot like copy-paste jobs from excel, which is fine obviously, but not the sort of thing I'd expect competent scientists/data-scientists/developers to be doing, especially for a big public report where some of the formatting issues are just about readability and basic presentation quality. Like Figures F and G (page 14) ... why are they styled so differently? Same question applies to many of the graphs, which isn't to mention label font sizes either. Beyond that, yea I'd say good amounts of the data and logic are pretty basic and wouldn't be surprising from an amateur on the internet. The main thing chess.com have seems to be their Strength Score algorithm, which IMO is probably developed and maintained by a team different from the one that prepared this report.
  - Orothrim 4y ago
    Good design skills have zero correlation with good data analysis skills.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I might even go so far as to say it’s negative correlation. I’ve seen wonderful and factual data analysis presented in the most horrible default templates and hacked together screenshots.
    - maegul 4y ago
      Honestly wonder how much of a HN crowd viewpoint that is. I'm not sure there's too much "correlation" between the two. Instead I'd say that if your job involves communication and data, then that necessitates decent visualisations and whatever "design skills" that entails. Honestly, you don't need "design skills" to make a decent graph ... just the wherewithal to think about what would make a graph clearer/easier to understand the same we expect of ourselves with writing.
langsoul-com 4y ago
Most of the sports starts tend to start very very young. Some more true than others, like how most ice skating Olympic winners are sub 18. More true for classical music as well.
- treis 4y ago
  But not all of them have immediate success. Look at someone like Kurt Warner. It took him until his senior year to start at the University of Northern Iowa. Then he plays 3 years for the Iowa Barnstormers in Arena Football and 1 year for Amsterdam in NFL Europe. Finally he gets on a NFL roster as 3rd string for St Louis. Cleveland skips picking him in the expansion draft. The Rams sign a different starting QB and trade away #2 QB leaving Warner as the backup. The starter gets hurt and with basically no first team practices Warner gets named the starter. After all that and starting for the first time in the NFL at age 28 he has one of the best statistical seasons ever for QB and wins the MVP and Superbowl. Goes on to win the MVP again and has a 10 year HOF career. If we apply Chess.com's logic he's the biggest cheater that ever cheated. But obviously he's not because you can't really cheat at QB in the NFL.
_the_inflator 4y ago
The trouble I have is, that Hans is 19. Given the accusations and his own confession, he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Hans confessed to have cheated at age 12 and 16. Since cheating is arguable habit forming, he simply based his career on cheating. Where others put in the mileage, he invested in his cheating expertise.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >... he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Is this an accurate statement given that, because of this report, we are now aware that a lot of other GMs have cheated as well?
- undefinedzero 4y ago
  He cheated as a child during a stressful period that children still need to figure out how to deal with. I think it’s very unreasonable to cancel someone over things they did as a child, much less to cancel them IRL over things they did as a child in an online game.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    We have evidence of a sustained period of cheating that he then lied about and obfuscated as a legal adult. This is not just a childish mistake. A teenager, in particular a person capable of being a professional chess player, can fully understand the ramifications of these sorts of actions. What about the stress of the players he's cheated against?
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    Except the only reason we know is because chess.com said so. He hasn't exactly come clean about it, he's been lying about this whole time. It's fair to judge him for his childhood cheating if he is still lying about it as an adult.
rossdavidh 4y ago
Another explanation is simply that, if you reach early adulthood without deciding to devote your life to becoming good at chess, you are unlikely to do it later. Becoming among the best in the world at anything requires not only natural talent but also focused, almost monomaniacal work, and if you haven't started doing that (for chess) by your mid-teens, it's hard to see why you would start. If, for some reason, you decided to drop your budding music/engineering/whatever career at age 20 to focus entirely on chess, and you had the natural aptitude to be able to become a GM, perhaps it could happen. But rarely would a person decide to do that, if they had not prior to that point.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Brain plasticity is real. If I dropped everything and devoted my life to studying Chinese I would still never learn to speak it as well as a child who grew up in China. I think both effects have something to do with it.
  - rossdavidh 4y ago
    Definitely brain plasticity is real, but there are people who learn to speak languages as adults, with native proficiency. I recall hearing on the radio, people in India who (as adults) learned a Midwestern US accent, because they were doing phone support and they could get through each phone call quicker if the old person on the other end of the line wasn't confused by an Indian accent. I am a midwesterner, and I could not detect anything "off" in their midwestern accent, even though I knew they were Indian. In other words, you can only learn a language natively, if you have some good reason to do so, like say money. But, your basic point that both effects have something to do with it, is surely correct.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      Actually I did something similar - learned to speak French with no perceptible foreign accent at age 17 (unfortunately my abilities have decayed in the intervening years, so I’m sure now I’d sound American, but anyway…) However, accent is only one part of language. I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary, reading speed, writing elegance, etc. of (educated) native speakers.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. Totally unnecessary sentence that just leads to derailment (like in this subthread).

by lysp 4y ago

htrqball 4y ago

Aronian was a late bloomer. No evidence here at all.

glenstein 4y ago
How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess? It doesn't really matter, does it? There's a big difference between telling someone "if you're not a GM by age 14 [but actually I mean 15], then don't bother, it's hopeless" and "a typical top-level player reaches GM by age 14, but it is possible to reach that level even if you are a relatively 'late bloomer'." I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - a-dub 4y ago
    as a rule it is decidedly uncouth in our society to use population statistics when speaking in terms of ability or potential, as the act of making those statements can bias real world abilities and potentials by setting expectations of limits.
  - dhikapow 4y ago
    There's a big difference between "[if you're not a GM by age 14], it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess." and "..then don't bother, it's hopeless". The former statement is perfectly valid, nobody saying that it's hopeless
    - quadrifoliate 4y ago
      > nobody saying that it's hopeless Well, it's a report about cheating which is essentially claiming that if you're not a GM by age 14, then you must be cheating. Which is...kind of the same thing.
      - burnished 4y ago
        It literally does not say that. What do you want them to do? Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it? The conclusion of their report is repeated several times; no evidence of OTB cheating.
        quadrifoliate 4y ago
        > Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it? I don't think any serious commenters are going to complain about the absence of stereotypes about "the greats" unbacked by statistical analysis. That is what is bad. The actual analysis of anomalously fast progress at equivalent ages is fine.
  - glenstein 4y ago
    >It doesn't really matter, does it? It's literally the single most important fact in this context. If there are lots of people like Aronian, then there's nothing out of the ordinary about the evolution of Hans Neiman as a player. If he's a rare and unusual example, he shouldn't be cited to suggest Hans' skill growth is within the norm. >I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try. This is a non-sequitur.
seer-zig 4y ago
The exception the proves the rule?
- addicted 4y ago
  One of the stupidest phrases vert. Almost by definition the exception disproves the rule. There’s literally no logical sense in which the exception can prove the rule unless the rule is not really a rule but more of a suggestion.
  - maoeurk 4y ago
    Yeah it's pretty much exclusively used incorrectly. The original meaning was that an exception to a rule proves that such a rule exists. For example, "no parking on Sunday" is an exception that implies that parking on any day except Sunday is okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule It honestly doesn't bother me as much as when people incorrectly say "begs the question" when they mean "raises the question" but I think we're long past the point of us ever correcting any of these.
    - xxs 4y ago
      One note about parking - normally all actions (incl. parking) are allowed, unless they are explicitly forbidden. Lack of any other rules/guidance implies the parking is allowed.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
        That’s a fairly generic statement, have you confirmed that rule to be true across every city/state/country across the globe?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

bsder 4y ago

> > The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. This is confusing correlation and causation. One thing that people don't realize is the sheer amount of money required to become a "GM". You have to get a certain number of "norms" from FIDE and the requirements list is a PITA: https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/ https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/ If you don't have a lot of money and a lot of free time to go to a lot of chess tournaments around the world, you are not getting a "GM" title in this day and age. This favors children (few time constraints) with rich parents (lots of coaching along with the ability to travel). The problem is that if you aren't a "chess prodigy" by 15 it generally isn't worth continuing to pursue--what does sinking the resources into being a "GM" get you at the end? If you're one of the "Chess Gods", you have entry into the tournaments anyway, and, if you're not, it doesn't really matter.

addicted 4y ago
This also ignores a once in a century pandemic. It’s an absolutely ridiculous basis to make a claim.
- pedrosorio 4y ago
  > This also ignores a once in a century pandemic. Hans Niemann was almost 17 years old when the pandemic started. When he turned 15 (June 2018) his rating was 2313, almost 200 points (an immense gulf at that level) below the minimum to become a grandmaster.
  - User23 4y ago
    A name that basically means “John Nobody” is pretty curious.
User23 4y ago
That's why I quit playing seriously when I was still an underclassman. It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant, and there was absolutely no practical reason for me to play chess whatsoever. Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.

quadrifoliate 4y ago

In my opinion, this sort of ad-hoc stereotyping weakens the rest of the analysis. There are plenty of counterexamples. Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19 and is still ranked World No. 9 currently (at age 52). Ding Liren (Current No. 2) became a GM at 17. Grischuk (currently No. 17, peak No.3) became a GM at 17. All three have crossed 2800 ELO at some point. I hope this is not the sort of analysis that chess.com has run in the other 71 pages of the report.

maegul 4y ago
Yea generally I wouldn't characterise the report as being a glimmering indication of the scientific quality of the chess.com cheat detection team. Even the graphs look a lot like copy-paste jobs from excel, which is fine obviously, but not the sort of thing I'd expect competent scientists/data-scientists/developers to be doing, especially for a big public report where some of the formatting issues are just about readability and basic presentation quality. Like Figures F and G (page 14) ... why are they styled so differently? Same question applies to many of the graphs, which isn't to mention label font sizes either. Beyond that, yea I'd say good amounts of the data and logic are pretty basic and wouldn't be surprising from an amateur on the internet. The main thing chess.com have seems to be their Strength Score algorithm, which IMO is probably developed and maintained by a team different from the one that prepared this report.
- Orothrim 4y ago
  Good design skills have zero correlation with good data analysis skills.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I might even go so far as to say it’s negative correlation. I’ve seen wonderful and factual data analysis presented in the most horrible default templates and hacked together screenshots.
  - maegul 4y ago
    Honestly wonder how much of a HN crowd viewpoint that is. I'm not sure there's too much "correlation" between the two. Instead I'd say that if your job involves communication and data, then that necessitates decent visualisations and whatever "design skills" that entails. Honestly, you don't need "design skills" to make a decent graph ... just the wherewithal to think about what would make a graph clearer/easier to understand the same we expect of ourselves with writing.

langsoul-com 4y ago

Most of the sports starts tend to start very very young. Some more true than others, like how most ice skating Olympic winners are sub 18. More true for classical music as well.

treis 4y ago
But not all of them have immediate success. Look at someone like Kurt Warner. It took him until his senior year to start at the University of Northern Iowa. Then he plays 3 years for the Iowa Barnstormers in Arena Football and 1 year for Amsterdam in NFL Europe. Finally he gets on a NFL roster as 3rd string for St Louis. Cleveland skips picking him in the expansion draft. The Rams sign a different starting QB and trade away #2 QB leaving Warner as the backup. The starter gets hurt and with basically no first team practices Warner gets named the starter. After all that and starting for the first time in the NFL at age 28 he has one of the best statistical seasons ever for QB and wins the MVP and Superbowl. Goes on to win the MVP again and has a 10 year HOF career. If we apply Chess.com's logic he's the biggest cheater that ever cheated. But obviously he's not because you can't really cheat at QB in the NFL.

_the_inflator 4y ago

The trouble I have is, that Hans is 19. Given the accusations and his own confession, he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Hans confessed to have cheated at age 12 and 16. Since cheating is arguable habit forming, he simply based his career on cheating. Where others put in the mileage, he invested in his cheating expertise.

jjulius 4y ago
>... he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Is this an accurate statement given that, because of this report, we are now aware that a lot of other GMs have cheated as well?
undefinedzero 4y ago
He cheated as a child during a stressful period that children still need to figure out how to deal with. I think it’s very unreasonable to cancel someone over things they did as a child, much less to cancel them IRL over things they did as a child in an online game.
- Bakary 4y ago
  We have evidence of a sustained period of cheating that he then lied about and obfuscated as a legal adult. This is not just a childish mistake. A teenager, in particular a person capable of being a professional chess player, can fully understand the ramifications of these sorts of actions. What about the stress of the players he's cheated against?
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Except the only reason we know is because chess.com said so. He hasn't exactly come clean about it, he's been lying about this whole time. It's fair to judge him for his childhood cheating if he is still lying about it as an adult.

rossdavidh 4y ago

Another explanation is simply that, if you reach early adulthood without deciding to devote your life to becoming good at chess, you are unlikely to do it later. Becoming among the best in the world at anything requires not only natural talent but also focused, almost monomaniacal work, and if you haven't started doing that (for chess) by your mid-teens, it's hard to see why you would start. If, for some reason, you decided to drop your budding music/engineering/whatever career at age 20 to focus entirely on chess, and you had the natural aptitude to be able to become a GM, perhaps it could happen. But rarely would a person decide to do that, if they had not prior to that point.

School-Cotton 4y ago
Brain plasticity is real. If I dropped everything and devoted my life to studying Chinese I would still never learn to speak it as well as a child who grew up in China. I think both effects have something to do with it.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  Definitely brain plasticity is real, but there are people who learn to speak languages as adults, with native proficiency. I recall hearing on the radio, people in India who (as adults) learned a Midwestern US accent, because they were doing phone support and they could get through each phone call quicker if the old person on the other end of the line wasn't confused by an Indian accent. I am a midwesterner, and I could not detect anything "off" in their midwestern accent, even though I knew they were Indian. In other words, you can only learn a language natively, if you have some good reason to do so, like say money. But, your basic point that both effects have something to do with it, is surely correct.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Actually I did something similar - learned to speak French with no perceptible foreign accent at age 17 (unfortunately my abilities have decayed in the intervening years, so I’m sure now I’d sound American, but anyway…) However, accent is only one part of language. I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary, reading speed, writing elegance, etc. of (educated) native speakers.

avgcorrection 4y ago

> > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. Totally unnecessary sentence that just leads to derailment (like in this subthread).