Chess and Ageing

Beliefs can be very powerful.

With a little luck you might even get mated :)

when i play my dad over the board i like the game to go on are over 1 hour that way he gets very tired and makes mistakes ive won a lot of games this way. by the way he is 50 and hes eyes get sleepy

Age is not a criteria for playing chess. only interest,patience,thinking and discipline in the game  counts.

I'm 47. Compared to my teenage years? Positional play is better now, tactical play is worse, and timed play much worse. 2 days ago I played 3 OTB-blitz games against a decent player, and won (not really) them all only by grace of him spotting me "5 more" each time I flagged :).

 That is a little gem

There was a book published in the UK called the Age Heresy by Tony Buzzan and Kay Keene (UK GM) which claimed that mental ability declined only slowly with age and then by not a lot provided the brain was exercised regularly. I don't know how robust their empirical evidence was. 

Ok so... My granny is 93 years old. Friend of mine's got a granny about age 75.

Mine takes walks every day, solves cross word puzzles, read books (magnifier glass ;)), cooks and sleeps on occasion.

Friends granny does nowt, just sits there, complaining. Yes I know, it's sad. I feel bad just for typing this, exploiting a person you will never meet.

The difference? I dunno. Genes? Activities? Life view? Certainly!

When you reach old age, there is no ability to decline. 

Where are all the strong 70+ players?

Eh?

Thell

Speed and stamina decline with age which explains why there are few strong 70+ OTB players. I'm not certain this applies to On Line / Correspondence Chess. 

Actually the Age old tellings go the younger you are the easier it is to retain knowledge. A good example being meditation. It can take sometimes only 6 months to teach a 6 year old to meditate properly, 1 year to teach a 10 year old, 2 years to teach a 14 year old, 4 years to teach a 20 year old, and anyone 30+ can take them a decade! Now i made all of those stats up...because 90% of the time i'm right all the time, but the point inside. I think your all right :) life is such a mystery isn't it??? 

 anyone who can't learn to meditate properly in an hour is an idiot.

I think age is relative to time and culture. For instance a Roman soldier, 2000 years ago, got his old age pension at 43 - which sounds great until you realise the average age of death was 45. A British worker in the 1940s got his pension at 65 - AAD = 67. My generation is living into its 80s. My children's could routinely see 100. Perhaps we do decline as we get older but the definition of old is fluid. Can the brain adapt as the body lives longer? I suspect it can.

I beg to differ Mr. You are not talking about the accual art of meditation, You need to change your lifestyles, diet, thought provacativeness, for someone my age it would take years. Buddist monks spend a life time reaching "enlightenment" which is the goal of true meditation. Ive never meditated a day in my life, so call me a caller, but i do subscribe to national geographic and spunge as much knowlege as possible while i am still in my mid 20's!!!

The top level players have two factors working against them-- decreasing ability with age, and also susceptibility to burnout that can come after years and years of intense study and application.  Many of the best players reach a point where they no longer want to put in such focussed effort before they reach a point where they can't continue to achieve at the same level.  It's the same at the highest levels of a lot of other professions and sports.

Maximum potential in chess probably declines beyond early middle age, but the vast majority of us don't apply ourselves to chess to a point where we ever approach our personal maximum potential.  Most of us will play at levels where we can probably continue to improve throughout our lives if we continue studying and playing.  Except at blitz-- carpal tunnel, arthritis, and bursitis begin to have an effect at some point! 

My grandfather lived to be 96, and when it came to playing cards he got slower and slower every year.  When it was his turn you could read a couple pages in the newspaper before he played.  But he still ended up with most of the chips at the end of the game.

i think chess helps you when youraging  you can do any thing if you try hard enoth

Hi Yosi. You are right. I am a far better player today than I was 30 years ago because I have had time to learn the game. I hope to improve more. Some things are getting difficult. My mind cannot calculate quickly enough for fast blitz. So what? I play longer games and if Live becomes too difficult then there is Turn Based. I did read your blog and highly recommend it.