Did you know that Fischer had no chess talent?

Whaaaaaaat? Dude, this posting really makes no sense. But anyway, you have caught my attention and I will share with you Fisher's best hidden secret. Fisher was not human, he was actually an android created by IBM to take over the Chess world. Unfortunately for IBM, once the Fisher android gained the WCC, it malfunction and hid from its creators for ever. Therefore, IBM was not able to replicate the intelligence chip until they created Deep Blue and conquer the Chess world all over again. Now, I can't tell you how I got this extremely clasified information....but I can assure you that there are other few members of Chess.com who also know this secret. I will let them provide you the rest of the details if they so pleased. Now I must leave since there are two men all dressed in black knocking at my door.

When you use the "how else do you explain it?" argument, you can make anything up. What if I said it was because an invisible purple elephant wanted to (and could) make these guys good at chess? Sound ridiculous? Ok, but "how else do you explain such phenomenons?"

This is how ghosts can be proven -- we hear a noise, we can say it's a ghost because there's no other explanation. There is no objective definition of the word that everyone goes by: they make it whatever they want it to be, whether it's that they're made out of energy or "nothing" using above reasoning as justification.

My point is people can use this argument for talent, but I rarely see concrete support of this concept talent, such as actual gene data.

I argue about this particularly because of my own chess experience. I don't know if I'm "talented" or "just have it" or not, if talent exists. It certainly seemed like I didn't for a while -- I was just a 1000-1100 player for several years, never getting better. Grandmaster plans seemed alien to me. But now I can make the deepest and subtlest of plans ( which doesn't mean the best plans, but my enthusiasm for depth I think will help me later on). I would always blunder. I practiced. A lot. I'd go over the most horrific blunders I ever made; the simplest Tactics Trainer puzzles I missed. Now I rarely make simple blunders.

To me, the recurring theme is that the more mature I get in working on my weaknesses and making the commitment, the more I improve. I have been improving lately and I think it's because of a drastic change in studying. I seem to have a bright future; back several years ago the problem was I wasn't mature enough to teach myself the right way; I would instead study what I wanted to study. But now that I study what I most dread doing, I improve so much. When I don't make a commitment, I stay the same for several years; when I do, I improve hundreds of points a year. I don't feel like there is any concept in chess that I can't learn, and that contradicts the idea of a need for innate ability, that you had to be "born" to understand certain concepts. There are lots of positions I don't understand, but you know what, there is nothing that tells me that I am incapable of comprehending the logic of them, I simply need to commit the time to learn. That's why subtle plans that seemed impossible for me to ever understand gradually became more and more natural. And that will continue to happen as long as I open my mind to learn more about this game.

Maybe I have an innate ability to use objectivity to improve the flaws in my game? *shrug

Wrong. He was actually one of the chess aliens who captured Kirsan. He was sent to check on the status of the chess on this planet as well as speed up the development of it a bit.

I personally feel that you have a narrow view on this subject. I agree that the "how else do you explain it?" argument has faults, this is way more grounded than you make it out to be.

Take gravity for example. It is accepted that two masses will attract each other. Nobody really knows how or why but that is how it works. People know this is true because of many measurements that were taken during many experiments.

Now with chess, nobody knows what exactly is talent or how to quantify it. All they know is some people get very good and some people don't. Some people spend hours on tactics trainer and play for hours a day and can't get a rating over 1200 here after years. Some people sit down and, with no real prior experience, play with a 1300 level in a month with little effort. How can anyone argue that hard work is what seperates these two types of players?

While the real causes of "talent" escape us, it does still exist, in my opinion. It's like mrguy88 says, some people just sit down and play at an expert level, without much prior experience. In this case "talent" is whatever separates them from the 99% of mortals who need years of study to get to that level.

You're still using the same argument I quoted.

Let's clarify: I don't disagree that we all have slightly different innate abilities. What I don't agree with though is that the effects of talent can't be re-created; in other words, if you're not a born chess player, or you're not good right away, you don't have the gift, and if you don't have the gift, you are doomed not to be good. It will be difficult, but there is no pre-determination here that anyone can truly foresee.

Start teaching children chess, it won't take you long to see there is definitely such a thing as naturally talented chess players.

It's so obvious this argument is absolutely absurd.

But I never said that the effects of talent cannot be re-created. With hard work, they can. It's just that some people get the knack of things incredibly quickly. And that's what is coloquially called talent.

Now again, I mainly post on this subject because my first years playing as a young boy did not suggest any kind of talent; I was not that six year old who gave his teacher at his chess club knight odds. I actually did tend to be the best player in my club, but nevertheless, that's nothing like being 2200 at a young age. At all.

But now I see myself improving extremely quickly, after years of none at all. Sometimes I find myself understanding positions better than masters; I can't beat them because I give too many things away with blunders, but there are those specks of brilliance here and there, and if I can make my play more consistent I might start beating those players after all.

But why then wasn't I like that in my first years playing?

Well, anyway, just wanted to share my experience. It doesn't prove anything, but that's where my refusal to complacently accept, without any doubt, the idea that chess players are born comes from.

I just keep an open mind, you know?

The human brain is a mystery. From what you said it sounds a lot like you have little to no talent at tatics but you have very good positional talent. You had a tough time improving because tactics are absolutely everything for lower levels and had to grind through your lack of talent with lots of hard work.

When you started improving in leaps and bounds could be the point where positional factors start coming in. If you understand some positions more than masters but still blunder away lots of material that sort of supports my theory.

I do not claim to know you or anything but what you say seems to point to talent more than it points to lack of it.

Perhaps you misunderstood me. My point was that you can know something exists by seeing it at work despite not understanding it in the slightest.

I compared that to seeing people work hard and not do as well as people who don't work at all. Even if you don't understand what talent is or where it comes from, you see it at work so you can be pretty sure it exists.

I can still remember one kid in the first grade who blew the teacher away by drawing realistic pictures of people, cars, etc. without any special training, while the rest of us were slopping out stick figures.

Anyway, I'm just playing devil's advocate. My point is if something isn't scientifically proven or close to so, you shouldn't assume it to be true. It might be true, but it's a bit much to presume it so. That quickness of assumption always annoys me, as does the "how else do you explain it" argument, as you know now It's not a bad idea in itself by any means, but as a means of proving something? It's a joke! You need more than that.

I think you're right about where my talent would be if it existed. Perhaps I just have a different kind of chess talent, an atypical one, one that is only rewarded as I get better at the bread and butter (tactics).

All humans may possess talents to a certain degree. If they are profoundly talented then they are considered gifted. Some are even profoundly gifted. We do not care how talented one may be, if one is not profoundly gifted one will not make music like Mozart, paint like Van Gogh, box like Ali, nor play chess like Fischer. Ever. >:[

"It" is talent. I meant that people don't know exactly what is involved in talent.

If you take the two players from before, there is obviously something other than hard work involved. The something other than hard work is called talent. Do you despute talent is not a factor in music, sports, math, art, and every other pursuit? If not, than why is chess different?

I think a lot of confusion is added by working in absolutes. One does not have talent or have no talent, everyone has different degrees of it in different areas. It isn't either hard work or talent, it is a bit of everything. You are not doomed to be horrible or great, almost everyone falls in medium.

Yes, I agree. I would add that certain kinds of talent might not be immediately visible, e.g., this person doesn't become master at age 12  

This black or white thing is really what I have been arguing against I guess, not the concept of talent in its purest form. You can't just watch how a kid plays his first few games and go "Bam, there's your next world champion," or "He'll never make it." It's just too simplistic.

We can talk about all the prodigies in the world, but if we take someone like GM Yasser Seirawan instead, who presumably learned the game as an adult, a rare association for a grandmaster, we have to come up with some less typical explanations. Perhaps his kind of talent couldn't be fostered so well as a kid, for whatever reason. Kind of like why I didn't start off so exceptionally.

Seirawan showed fine aptitude for the game early on.

Seirawan began playing chess at 12; at 13 he became Washington junior champion. At 19 he won the World Junior Chess Championship.

Somewhere in there, maybe at age 16, he was Seattle city champion, and they had some decent NMs in the area at that time.

True. I see other threads are beginning to develope some common sense too. Whew! 

If talent/aptitude doesn't exist, companies sure are wasting a lot of money to give prospective employees screening tests to see if they have talent for certain types of jobs.