Learning chess later in life

Yes, but I feel like this is a bit misleading. The difference is small, but it takes quite a lot of practice to form the proper calculation habits that allow you to avoid blunders. Maybe someone who started young wouldn't understand, but this takes a lot of work for adults, partly because it's very tedious, and probably not what made them interested in chess. Adult beginners tend to enjoy strategic ideas and find calculating boring.

When you play under 1500 many players mostly blunder peaces... So not so many long calculating ideas, by my opinion is very important to do adopted puzzles which will help you to improve you tactics skils.

Everyone finds calculating boring... I think that less than 1% players do hard calculating training where they will take half an hour to play one move like in real game... Correct me if I am wrong.

Best regards Ivan

I think kids are dumb, so they find puzzles less boring

Also kids are more obedient, so if a coach tells them to do training, they will follow those instructions... but with an adult beginner, they may decide to ignore you.

I realize most blunders are 1 or 2 moves deep... but still you see some players play for many years and continue to make these mistakes often. It's not the depth that makes it hard... I call it having good (or bad) calculation habits. They get distracted with their own ideas instead of checking if a move is safe for example.

That's my perspective on it. If you're a coach you might have a lot more experience than me.

I wold disagree on you on this one becouse when working with adoult beginner they are usualy determin to make progress and they are willing to do many puzzles and to work on becouse they are aware that if you want to be good in anything in life you have to work on it... So if i give for example adoult begginer homework from 100 puzzles he will do them, as for kids i don t even want to give them so many homework becouse they have school and so on.

About blunders in one move, think is that you can t calculate them, you have to reckognize patterns from puzzles and so on... Becouse if you dont reckognize instantly some tactical pattern it is not so easily to spot it "over the board", becouse to you it looks like blind spot and how many times you calculate it you again go over it.

Best regards

Haha, it might sound funny, but I've never considered if an adult were actually willing to do the right kind of training, and let's say, for 4 hours (or more) every day hmm...

I wonder how fast someone who begins at age 40 could get to the 1500-1600 range.

You are mixing this adoult begginer could improve much by 1 hour day training, and also kids begginers dont work 4 hours per day, kid that is above 2000 is something totaly different. 

Llama you are good player you know that it depends from person to person when will come to some rating i dont like to give general assesments on this one...

Of course 4 hours every day is a lot for most people, but I remembered a story about a retired man, age 65, who wanted to learn how to draw and paint. He didn't have anything else to do all day, so he took lessons and practiced 10 hours every day. After a few years he was very good, and his teachers said he improved as fast as anyone they had seen... but of course most people will not spend 10 hours every day

Chess is a little different from other skills because chess... how to say it... is timed. Energy and endurance are important unlike in art.

Anyway, now I'm rambling, just some random thoughts.

Yes, the rating and time required to get there is different depending on the person.

One thing that is hard in chess that for some persons time ,energy effort that they put in doesnt guaranty them sucess. Best regards  

It´s never too late to learn! Why should kids have all the fun? If you grow up in a household where several languages are spoken, then you'll probably become bilingual. If you grow up in a household where chess is valued, then you'll probably learn and become pretty good at that too. We adults simply need to put in more work to reach the same level, but I don't see why simply being old is any impediment to learning something new. Finding the time, however, is the hard part. Good luck  

I think many poker players even at higher stakes do not possess any great specific strategic understanding (like you need to play chess at a higher level), and also may tend to be weak at what we literally call "chess-like thinking", that is the ability to walk through various possible scenarios in advance (and at game speed). So it makes sense to me that studying chess would improve your poker results / help you move up stakes. Most poker players have innate and more intuitive soft skills that are hard to train for but perhaps easy to acquire (for some) through a lot of tough play. Young enthusiastic players tend to put in a ton of time and really build those skills and keep them sharp. I guess that's why, similar to chess, younger players do tend to fair better. But in poker "younger" could mean up to age 40 or 50, whereas in chess we're probably talking about a teenager or 20-something. 

I'm always suspicious of ideas like "learn chess strategy to increase poker strategy." I think it's much better to have your training match your performance as closely as possible. Don't learn to play the piano to increase your typing speed so to speak.

I'm older and new but excited to have something where I can start from Zero again!

@llama47 The Flight of the Bumblebee is unlikely to directly help your word count, but it''s not always about learning one skill directly improves another. Often the learning process itself, in a new field, helps you frame or see things differently somewhere else by introducing new ideas or new ways of understanding. I come across this regularly in my job as I work across several disciplines. I find some concepts are simply easier to grasp in some fields and once the basics are in place, eventually transfer over to the other areas.

Sure, learning some basics could be useful.

There's probably not as much to the "kid's minds are like sponges" thing as we older people tend to believe. It's not hard to devote hours a day to something if you have the time and interest. My advice for picking up the game is to find a subject to teach others, figure out how you can make a contribution, then jump in that way. The pressure to be precise and the motivation to do something constructive and helpful tends to chase away the doldrums of poring through lists of moves.

     Adults can learn things as well as children do, the problem is accessing the memories. Memories are a series of neurons firing in order. As we accumulate more memories, tracks of newer memories overlay parts of older tracks, diverging at some point to slow, confuse or sidetrack retrieval of what we are trying to remember. New tracks can suffer the same fate: the wrong neural path being taken at some branching.

     When children learn something, especially if they continue to access and build on it, it becomes etched more firmly into the brain and more easily recalled. All top grandmasters learned chess at an early age and continued to practice and study. An adult that starts chess can become a fine player, but can never equal someone with equal talents and chess education who started in childhood.

On the subject of age.  I really suck at 5min chess.  What I know doesn't fly up front fast enough to make the move timely.

My newest chess playing guide currently has a free promotion:

https://www.amazon.com/Chess-Express-Lyudmil-Tsvetkov-ebook/dp/B08T824KMZ/ref=sr_1_10?dchild=1&keywords=chess+express&qid=1615657481&s=digital-text&sr=1-10

Use this opportunity to download and read it.

Apart from the chess rules, there is plenty on chess openings, chess strategy and chess tactics.

The guide is for complete beginners, but some parts could be used also by more experienced gamers.

I would be very happy if someone could contribute meaningful feedback on Amazon, 

would be interesting to know what people think.

There are lot's of great beginner books.  Learn to Play Chess like a Boss by Patrick Wolff is very well regarded (although I haven't read it). Another good option is Learn Chess by John Nunn.

My first book was Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan, which I think is an excellent introduction to positional ideas, but it works best if you have some basics already. Also, it doesn't cover enough tactical ideas, so it needs a second book on elementary tactics IMO.

For a lot more detailed recommendations, have a look at RussBell's guide to beginner books