This Website Sucks For Beginners

“you claim this to feed your ego and superiority complex.”
claiming that  one doesn’t need talent to reach their own level feeds ego? I thought it would be the opposite 

“  You are the type of person on social media that causes teen suicides, mass shootings and drug overdoses.  ”
um…

i have no words

Yet everyone can if they put in 20+ years of work with actual analysis and learning 

everyone has the capacity, but not the time and effort, as they may focus on other things.

You’re the one spouting theories. I have yet to see evidence that connects people of a certain mindset to these allegations.

Playing for 20+ years is not working on chess for 20+ years. Stop misrepresenting my points.

Show me their chess.com accounts. I assume they’re 1900 otb if you can’t, which is at least 2000+ strength online…

Problem with your lack of chess knowledge and common sense is that you don't under what it is you are hearing or reading. There are at least som GM or other top players who didn't red any books. But here is the problem: you think that joe everyman can emulate their training methodology without being as giftet as them and while not even knowing what they did. 

For most part, from the in depth articles I have red about similar people they:

• Are gifted in this field and can learn more from playing one game and quickly analyzing it on the go than I would from working one week with chess.
• They spent enormous amount of time on playing and learning chess, 6 - 10 hours / day.
• They don't need books because they have clubs, mentors, coaches and study buddies while books and videos are great for people who don't.

It is strange that you continue screaming about how once success in chess is completely dependent on once natural ability and yet you think that pro's methods are what regular people could do. A bit like every newbie in body building who never lifted and yet reject any good and stable starting program for beginners because this is not what he saw on youtube about some famous bodybuilder. 

And pretty sure you Biggest Loser program showed that people CAN lose weight when they are controlled instead of relying on famously inaccurate self-reporting. The fact that most can continue to regulate their weight when the controlled environment is gone is something else and should tell you more about peoples nature.

Well my 2 cents would go on CooloutAC.

If the idea is 'anyone can achieve 2000+ rating with sufficient time, training and effort' then frankly this is simply not true.  I won't even argue that everyone could achieve 200+! In fact I would guess that >50% of people couldn't get 200+!? Chess is the sort of activity were this could well be true.

Nature (or DNA) puts a cap on what is possible with all the Nurture in the world. The life-skill trick is to mine Nature in the most min-max practical way possible, and of course have as wide an early experience as possible such that a person (or child) can determine the best direction(s) to follow (something educational systems are not necessarily good at).

This is not something I was educated to believe when young but is the 'obvious' conclusion from a long life. And as subjective as this is, I won't even argue the point.

What I would argue is that the average chess player now, is superior to the average four+ decades ago. I doubt this is the case at the very extreme of talents, i.e. the early World Champions were just as likely to be as talented as the later ones. Expressed simply we live in a far richer world from which the vast majority benefit from, something the young have little understanding of and hence the sheer number of youthful anti-progress movements and memes.  Nurture >> Nature being one such harmful movement.

You were closer to the truth two week ago when you posted about how it is money which limit adult GM. Kids don't need to work, their parents pay for the coaches, mentors and everything else and adults don't see any reason to invest time and money with such small chance of getting investments back. And sure, money is one of motivators for people but existence of researchers should show that it is not the only motivator there is. But lets go on with your post:

1. Great hypothesis, do you have any proof that chess is a game where >= 50% of people can't get higher rating than 200 on chess.com? Maybe the median rating would be a good start, afterward we need to remove mostly inactive accounts and than see if those in the lower half or even lowest quartile and see if and how they improve their game. After that we could see if they would improve with some intervention (1 hour chess coaching on weekday + homework). Otherwise, pretty sure that 90% of healthy people who have iq >= 90 and are able to play chess, can improve.
   
   
2. Yeah, min-maxin life sounds fun. A bit like asian (China, South Korea and Japan from what I've heard) school and parenting system where kids spend their whole day on the important things only. If something does not generate money, why waste your time on it?! Materialistic, capitalistic realism gung ho!
3. Wait, what?! Average player has become better at chess because the environment became richer (I guess you mostly mean availability and access to information and global chess community)... but it was our lovely genes which hard capped our possibility to improve at chess? Did we had a chess breading program I am unaware of? Because I doubt more nutrition in food is explanation between 1982 and 2022 so called improvement in average chess player.
   
   
4. The fact the a better study environment together with better learning methodologies can improve mostly anyones skill, knowledge and ability is "anti-progress"? What the actual F'k?!

You beat me to the punch so I will just add:

To anyone following this thread that is curious, the difference between an 800, 1000, 1200, and 2000 player is their tactical skill.  An 800 is going to blunder several times a game.  A 1000 slightly less.  A 1200 a little less than that.  A 2000 will rarely make a 1-, 2-, or 3- move blunder.  It is this reason that, with proper training, most people are capable of reaching the 2000 level: it requires basic pattern recognition and building that mental muscle with the fundamental tactical patterns.  This is why those kids that claim they never read a book and "just did puzzles" (which, by the way, would be basically every kid that went through the Steps Method or the Tiger Academy) got there.  Are they actually reading the books?  No, but they are getting lectured (often by the author of the books) and then solving the puzzles (both the ones in the books and extra ones provided).

So, if tactics is all you really need to reach that level, why do so many people fail to do so?  The same reason that opening books are often the most popular books, but not the most useful for development.  Knowing what you should study to improve and studying what you like are often at odds.  Just like the people who claim they cannot lose weight no matter what they do; when they are forced to do the right things, suddenly things happen they claimed we're previously impossible.

The one thing I do agree with @CooloutAC on is setting realistic goals.  If you are 800 right now, it is silly to set yourself a goal of being 2000 by next year.  But there is no reason you could not set a goal of 1000 by the end of this year, 1200 next, 1800 in 5 years, and 2000 in 10 years.  It is a bit like math: when you are learning how to add and subtract, saying you want to learn calculus is premature.  But as you progress, you get closer and closer to that goal.  But saying "I may only know how to add and subtract and that is fine by me" is a defeatists attitude.

“Natural ability”

chess isn’t coded into our genes, as long as your actually studying you can improve, like me and so many other people

I probably agree with a lot of what you wrote in this thread and we probably think same thing but while it is good to have some strategic and tactical goals (usually 1 year from now, 2-3 year from now and 5 years from now), I believe it is much better to be more agile in once planing, if you excuse my pun. Have milestones but focus on daily, weekly and monthly progression instead.

Simple scrum isn't hard even for kids to understand and splitting up one year in twelve one-month sprints which themselves are made of 4 weekly sprints with introspection and review is better. If I want to reach 1200 in a year, I could already see in a month time how I am doing, what is working and what doesn't seem to work. Otherwise it can easier become 11 month of lazyness and 1 month of mad exam prep. 

You must be involved in project management as well

And yes, I agree 100%.  To borrow the weightlifting analogy:  if you had a goal to bench press 300lbs, and you were only able to do a 1 rep max of 150lbs right now, your goal is a ways off right now.  Your immediate goal should be to reach 175lbs in say, 3-6 months and then reassess for the next goal (perhaps of 200lbs), etc.  But that does not mean you should say "I'll never reach 300, so I should just be happy with where I am".  That attitude (complacency) is antithetical to improvement.

When I started playing a few months ago, I had no goals in mind. When I was at 600 I probably didn't think I'd ever get to 1000, so I'm extremely pleased to be there. However, I'm not sure that ratings should ever be the goal. There is so much to work on and so many subtleties to this game that make it so intriguing and so elegant, that it's almost an insult to the game to boil it down to a rating. I have a feeling after every game....a sense of how smart I was and how hard I worked....and whether I fought to the end or eased up when I felt defeated. That feeling is what I play for....to feel that I saw the opportunities and the traps, that I fought through difficult positions, that my opponent saw me as formidable, and that I never gave up.  If I feel that I didn't give it my all, and missed things I should have seen, it doesn't feel good even if I somehow won. If I'm at 1200 a year from now, great. If I'm still at 1000, or even 900, I hope I'll still be showing up and fighting the fight. 
I don't think I'm a "goal oriented" person. I think I just believe in the process, the fight, the effort, the journey. 

For me, with the right work ethic, the goals seem to take care of themselves. Not putting that on anyone else, though.

Having taught chess for decades.  I have noticed a few things in that time. 

The people that concentrate on the learning and enjoy playing progress faster than those that concentrate on the rating.

The rating in this discussion is mainly just used as a simple measure of strength.  I agree that it should not really be the goal, but it is easier to convey a numerical measure of progress (for the purpose of this discussion) than the more accurate "I want to spend time this year mastering X, Y, and Z tactical motifs ... next year I want to master P, Q, and R ... and in 10 years I will have mastered all of the basic tactical motifs".

For example, A friend of mine (who is a NM and a coach) asked me the other day (after I beat 4 of his students - all higher rated than me - in consecutive OTB games) why my rating was not higher.  Other than the obvious (I simply do not have time to play tournaments every weekend like those kids), my goal is not to reach a number, but to play good chess.  The number will come along all by itself.

Many people are terrible at assessing their own weaknesses, so they never work on them.  This is why many people only improve when they have a coach (not just in chess, but in other areas as well).  When I first started playing competitive OTB games, I thought my weakness was my positional/strategic play.  After a few months of not seeing any sort of improvement, I was not daft enough to keep beating my head against the wall and hired a coach.  He looked at a handful of my recent games and quickly determined that 1) my assessment of my weakness was entirely incorrect and 2) my actual weaknesses were things I was not even working on at all (time management and tactics being the biggest 2)!  That is, I was continuing to work on an area I was reasonably strong (for my level at the time) while neglecting areas where I was significantly weak - which is why I was not improving.  This is the same for many people, and why many of them do not improve after years of playing - they either have the wrong self-assessment of their weaknesses or simply continue doing things they enjoy but do not help them improve.

Response to 1. You are qualifying my original statement in order to argue against it, additionally the qualification used actually supports the statement!  How many people have IQs > 90 etc?

Response to 2. Adults will gravitate towards things they are good at and away from things they are poor at.  Consider the foolishness of doing the opposite.  Children on the other hand do need to be coerced as they have no knowledge/experience or even comprehension of what societies consider valuable in terms of being a productive member of the society. Consider the foolishness of doing the opposite.

Response to 3. Not all chess players reach their full potential - indeed very few do, I was merely saying that in all likelihood it is easier to do today than yesteryear. Therefore if true one would expect in absolute terms for the average chess player to be better today than in the past. If you accept that there has been progress over the last few decades then one would must follow the other?! Consider how the reverse could happen - food getting relatively cheaper and more abundant results in thinner people?

Response to 4. You switched subjects, "youthful anti-progress MOVEMENTS", although perhaps such a coda was a bit pointless in this context.  I'll not make the same mistake twice!

The best source of understanding of the Nurture v Nature debate is Steve Pinker's book "The Blank Slate". Not an easy read, definitely 2400+, however chapter one should be sufficient for most.

My old coach who is an IM said to look at your rating as an estimate of your most recent performance.  You don't just suddenly lose, or gain 200 points of chess knowledge.

That is not at all what was said in that thread.  Perhaps before you spend any more time studying chess, you might want to improve your reading and comprehension skills.

The point he was making in that thread was that kids progress faster than adults because they have lots of idle time to spend and no real responsibilities.  When you are an adult, you presumably have to work 8-10 hours a day in order to pay your bills.  That is 8-10 hours a day you do not have to practice your tactics, analyze your games, or even play games.  Adults that are independently wealthy can progress at almost the same rate as kids.  John Davis is an example of that - went from a complete beginner with a 359 USCF rating in 2017 to a peak of 1941 around July 2021 all as an adult.  Kids do that kind of thing all the time because of the massive amount of free time they have to throw at it.  No one in that thread was saying everyone can become a GM.  That would be like saying everyone can become a Nobel Laureate. 

2000 is a realistic rating for almost everyone simply because to get there requires mastery of only 1 thing:  tactics.  I know you don't like books, but pick up a copy of Michael de la Maza's "Rapid Chess Improvement" to see that point demonstrated.  All these "naturally talented kids" you keep referencing, they got to ~2000 that way:  tactics.  That is one of the reasons why older masters will play dull lines against improving kids; they want to shut down all the tactics and make the battle strategic in nature (usually driving the game towards a better endgame) to avoid where the kids are strong.

@Ziryab is a terrible example to show that people cannot make it to 2000.  The guy has an OTB rating that is ~1950 and a peak online rapid rating of ~2050.

"You must unlearn what you have learned" - Yoda

"It isn't that you do not know anything; it is that so much of what you know isn't so" - paraphrasing Ronald Reagan.