To extend your analogy, though, investing is a very different competitive game from Chess, because the rewards of "winning" your regional/hyperlocal competition

To extend your analogy, though, investing is a very different competitive game from Chess, because the rewards of "winning" your regional/hyperlocal competition (i.e. small caps) are financially equivalent to "winning" the biggest competitions in the world (betting on interest rate fluctuations, the earnings of any S&P500 company, etc.). It's much easier to "double" your money in one of those local games, because the competition is weaker, their attention is divided, and their holding periods are brief. Until you're playing with 10s or 100s of millions USD or have super short holding periods, there's no need to play against 1800 elo players – the pie of "the market" is absolutely massive. The 1800+ players exclusively play in big markets, on the payroll of people with billions and tens of billions of capital to deploy – but if you're not throwing billions around, why bother playing that game? You might need 10k hours to bet competently on highly-competitive, complicated financial instruments. But I reckon you'd only need ~100-1000 hours of education to do a surprising amount of damage in simpler markets. YMMV.