This Website Sucks For Beginners

Guys like Levy and James Canty are not just relatable, but also entertaining.  It is much easier to learn when you are engaged.

A modern-day GM can most likely give at least pawn odds to a 2000. Unless you mean otb ratings which is vague and honestly useless for those asking who don't play otb.

I haven't bothered reading all of @tygxc's posts here, but I see a few people arguing with him, so I assume they're rubbish, as usual.

It's really too bad he posts in topics where beginners ask questions, since he has many incorrect ideas.

The term "grandmaster" did not mean what it means today at the time.  At the time Lasker wrote his manual, there were only a handful of people in the world considered to be "grandmasters".  What he was referring to was what we would refer to today as an "expert", "candidate master", "class A", or "category 1" player.  That is, you have enough mastery of it that you can play a halfway decent game.  Similar to math - virtually anyone (regardless of age) can learn enough math to be able to understand algebra with enough practice.

     Starting at your age, it is virtually impossible that you will ever be a GM. Don't worry about ratings, just play because you enjoy the game. The more you play and study the more you will learn and sooner or later your ratings will rise. Often players get stuck in a certain rating range for a while, then things "click into place" and their play improves. Of course what happens is that your rating will go up, you'll face stronger players, and your progress will be slowed until you absorb the finer points of the game that your stronger opponents understand and your former opponents didn't.

I know you might not want to hear this, but at your level, you are more than likely losing games due to not seeing tactics.  At your level if you want to apply pressure in your games, hit all your opponents pieces.  So that means look for the attack in each position.  More than likely they will defend from the attack, opening themselves up to problems.  So open your game how you like, then start putting pressure on your opponents pieces.  Look for pins, and forks with pawns or knights.  Try to attack 2 pieces at once.  And trade when you can.  Attack the piece, then trade it.  So for instance knights on bishops, and vice versa.  Just take the piece right away.  That usually upsets low rated players, and simplifies the game for you to see easier tactics later in the game.  Once you hit 1000 then start playing more sensibly.  But this should get you close to 1000 doing this alone.  

Also at your level, play aggressive openings.  So Kings Gambit, Scholar's mate, "Bughouse players favorite opening" Which is to sac your king's knight on f7 on the 3rd move, so you can rapidly develop your light bishop, queen, queen's knight, and rapid pawn breaks in the center to open up lines against the black king that lost the right to castle due to having to capture your king's knight.  It's a bad opening in general, but at your level is fun, and leads to very aggressive tactical games, that you can take advantage of.  It has the same principles behind the Fried Liver Attack, but done much faster, and more carelessly.  Players at your level have a hard time defending their king, and don't know what to do if they can't castle.  Have fun! 

Can - as in they have the ability to do so - yes.  Will - as in they will do what is necessary to actually achieve to their ability - well, you are a clear example that not everyone will.

Put another way:  barring any physical deformities, any person can run a mile in under 8 minutes.  Not everyone will achieve that goal, however.

The nature vs nurture argument strikes again.  Realize that if you do not have any major mental deficiencies, you can learn virtually anything (not you, specifically as you have clearly demonstrated you lack basic reasoning skills, but the general you).

No contradiction.  Without deficiencies out of your control (i.e. mental illness, missing prefrontal cortex, etc), you can learn whatever you put your mind to.  At that point, it boils down to desire and method.

The average is 800 for several reasons.  First, when you allow people to select "beginner" and start at 800, is it any wonder that their average ratings skew the overall results?  For example, suppose I create a new account at the beginner level, play 1 blitz game and lose, dropping my rating to ~600ish and then stop playing blitz and go play bullet or rapid.  Now my results are pulling down the average, despite the fact that I only played a single game.

Most people do not study what they need to study to improve, nor in a manner that would be conducive to improvement.

To drive the point home:  Lasker was good friends with Einstein.  Einstein was a ~1800 player.  If he had ever decided to focus on chess in a diligent manner, he would have been able to reach the 2000-2200 level.  The reason he didn't was that he viewed chess as a hobby and he would rather spend his mental energy on things he viewed as more important.  That is the situation most people are in.  They simply have other priorities, which is perfectly fine and and normal.

Hi,

1. Forget that you are anything like a grandmaster. You are a novice, an absolute pupil. GMs can play that fast because they've spent their life in chess halls minutely analyzing every move until understanding what chess is. So just diligently learn the opening lines, see when best moves arise, and pick up speed later. Confidence is good but does not lead to playing good moves. A sharp mind does.

Compare it to doing a math exercise - the first ones can be torture, later you can comfortably solve them, later you solve them faster, even later you can simply see the solution at once because your mind can now see all the underlying patterns in parallel.

2. Starting on Lichess is a good idea for beginners. Experiment there. The Chess.com crowd is far more theoretically minded.

3. Free analysis is possible when you download your game as a PGN, and import it into chess.com/analysis !! Use it to analyze all of your games where you aren't clear about why you won or lost. Again, diligent study will make you progress. You have a brain, so you will get beyond 1,000.

4. Make it a habit of your mind to consider many moves in parallel, rather than focusing on just one or two.

5. Go deeper with learning chess principles. You know how to develop pieces, but you're doing so much wrong. Seeing forks, checks, and checkmating patterns needs to happen first! Then learn about pawn structures, piece activity, rook lifts, rank infiltrations, outposts, etc, etc.

From what I see you tend to clog up everything - rather, it's often better to open lines and diagonals for your bishops and work toward tactical play - instead of hoping that somehow you can make it out of your self-inflicted mazes.

Study some of the old masters - Janowski, Tal, Tarrasch, Capablanca, Steinitz, Morphy etc. until you understand why they make certain moves - there's a long-term strategic purpose.

Keep it up!

It depends on a lot of things... "normal" people aren't motivated to work on any hobby day after day for 10 years (whether it's chess or anything else). So when you say "everyone that can do this" you're already excluding the great majority of people on the planet.

Not even close, lol.

And most people stop improving after 8-10 years of work... there's really no such thing as improving your chess for 20 years. Sure you can learn new things, but your rating will barley improve. Just look at any top player's rating graph. They're a GM after ~5 years, and add their last few 100 points during the next ~3 years. After that they might improve only 50-100 points.

From age 18 Carlsen has gained fewer than 100 points... and he's a professional player who has said in interviews he thinks about chess all the time every day.

Another example of an adult improver to show it is possible (and why it is difficult as an adult): Michael de la Maza spent 2 years practicing tactics 6+ hours a day.  At the end of that, he competed in the under 2000 section of the World Open and placed high (winning if I remember correctly).  So in a little over 2 years, he went from ~1300 USCF to 2000 USCF.

The reason you do not see many adults doing that is seen in his example.  He was unemployed during those 2 years and studied chess full time (with no other responsibilities).  That is similar to why kids see that kind of improvement and adults rarely do.  Unless you are independently wealthy, you are going to have other responsibilities as an adult and cannot spend 8+ hours just studying chess.

He stopped playing after that tournament.  He was asked if he would continue to see how far he could go and he said that the next level would require him spending a lot of time learning strategic concepts and opening theory and he did not have the desire for that.  He wrote a book and that was that.

Low rated players and young people tend to think GM is possible for anyone, but they're wrong.

And anyway, the average age of the top 10 chess payers is below 30... so you're right that sports aren't a good comparison, because age hurts you MORE in chess than it does in sports

Nope. I've known people who began chess as an adult, were reasonably intelligent, hired multiple coaches, read books, went to OTB tournaments, etc.

The ones I know peaked around 1800-2000. Not one of them became a master much less a GM.

In any case, whenever these topics come up, there are usually a lot of ignorant people claiming GM is possible, but not a single person is ever able to name a modern day GM who started as an adult. They have to go as far back as Chigorin.

Oh ok, didn't know you were a troll. I haven't been following the topic closely.

Thanks for letting me know.

Don't take my posts as claiming an adult beginner can become a GM, but there are a few that have done exactly that.  There was an article on Chess Life a while back about a guy who started chess in his 40s and earned the GM title in his 60s.  I cannot recall his name.

Since this topic comes up often, and no one has ever mentioned it, I think you might not be remembering correctly.

For example Kauffman became a GM late in life by winning the world senior championship. He probably got some Chess Life attention... but of course he was an IM since forever. I've never heard of someone starting at 40 get a title, much less GM.

I'll try to find the article, but another example is Yoshiharu Habu who switched from Shogi to chess and scored 2 IM norms quickly.  Some will say, "but he was a Shogi champion", and that can be a fair point, but the games are not the same.