Can an average person ever break 2000?

How did you know about my siding and lawn!

What movie? (I wanna be a geezer too!)

logan's run

Oh right, the thing with Farrah!

Hell, if you find a foolproof way to break 1000 and stay there, let me know.

In an otherwise equal struggle it may do just that.  But if you don't see a tactical shot and the kid does that's a game ender.  The kid could be dumb as a rock but sees patterns well

Notice each of your opponent's checks and captures.  Then when visualizing your intended move, make sure you wont lose a piece to one of those checks or captures.

If you don't have enough time to do that you need to play longer time controls.  In online chess you can use the analysis board to double check the safety of your intended move.

When your opponent moves, look at your checks and captures, can you win something?  If not, then bring all your pieces out and preferably toward the center of the board.

Doing this check is easy to do for 1 move, but it takes practice before you can do it for every move of every game.  Do it for every move and you'll stay well above 1000.

@Kingpatzer... 

For late mastery outlier my favorite example is I.F. Stone who was well into his sixties and suffering heart ailments when he retired from his great muck-raking journalism to go back to college and finish his B.A., -- eventually becoming an able classicist. At 80 he published: The Trial of Socrates -- a probing look at the political dimensions of Socrates's teachings and his relationship to the Athenian state. It's scholarly without being dull in either content or style -- a rare performance indeed. 

@Andy Clifton: 

Michael York -- Jenny Agutter -- Farrah Fawcett  

Run, runner! 

In the paradise of the future all life will be lived in a combination Vidal Sassoon salon/disco.   This is NO PLACE FOR THE OLD!

Well a career as an academic is based on accumulated knowledge, not on how sharp your brain is. A scholar might know loads of stuff on his field, but being utterly unable to understand something different from what he's already encountered.

Guys, 2000 isn't that high. The average person can reach it, it's just a question of how much time they spend. But if they spend the average time, they wont.

Are we talking about 2000 OTB or internet ratings ? 

At the time I.F. Stone attended school, he almost certainly learned the basics of Latin and possibly Greek, in high school, and he was a quality researcher, writer and analyist as a jouranlist. And while he was a poor student in high school, that doesn't mean he didn't learn the material only that he was a poor student.

That's why he was able to make a living at it. All that changed for him really where the subjects of his reporting. In my mind those are fairly related fields. 

 It is however, the best example anyone's actually produced thus far, but I think a fair case can be made that well-written research is exactly what journalists are asked to do every day. 

waffllemaster wrote:

Upgrayedd wrote:

Hell, if you find a foolproof way to break 1000 and stay there, let me know.

Notice each of your opponent's checks and captures.  Then when visualizing your intended move, make sure you wont lose a piece to one of those checks or captures.

If you don't have enough time to do that you need to play longer time controls.  In online chess you can use the analysis board to double check the safety of your intended move.

When your opponent moves, look at your checks and captures, can you win something?  If not, then bring all your pieces out and preferably toward the center of the board.

Doing this check is easy to do for 1 move, but it takes practice before you can do it for every move of every game.  Do it for every move and you'll stay well above 1000.

Oh, trust me, it's possible to do all the above and still be well below 1000. What can I say? It's a gift.

Don't know. Do we even know how close/far away is 2000 OTB to the standard live rating here?

But that's because the average person doesn't try enough to reach it. 2000 doesn't take a fantastic unachivable amount of knowledge.

How do you know?

The standard live rating on here is absolutely messed up. At around 1600 it starts to severely underestimate players. Many titled players have a rating around 1800.

Let me answer for him:

I have a IRL friend that is around 2050 FIDE. When I play against him I do see that he's on another level, but I also see that he doesn't have anything unattainable. He just has a better positional understanding and better ability to squeeze i.e. a single strategically dubious move from me it's my demise in the long term.

But it's not like he knows opening theory until move 25 or can calculate 15 moves ahead. What he has is something that can be achieved with experience, he has neither savant calculating abilities nor a whole database memorized.

Then when I did a couple of postmortem with a guy 2200+ FIDE that was another thing, here we get into "being gifted territory".

but the average person won't try hard enough to reach it ... so

ipso facto

case closed!

No, no that’s not that point at all. It’s all about whether the average person has the POTENTIAL to reach 2000, not whether they will or won’t try enough (though I agree the average person won't). Again, can the average sort of person, with hard work and dedication reach 2000? That’s how I see the main question anyway.

The standard live rating on here is absolutely messed up. At around 1600 it starts to severely underestimate players. Many titled players have a rating around 1800.

If that’s so then 2000 on here (live) must be way harder than OTB in real life.

but everyone can put in the effort, imagine that all chess.com members worked hard (this is possible, all of us have 24 hrs a day and plenty of resources can be obtained), will they all be +2000??

Clearly not possible because they would all be competing against each other with the same pool. Chess.com players however would be awesome against another pool of players though!

In other words, 'it's not that hard, I've just not done it'.

Of course you can understand their moves and they seem unobtainable but that's quite different from getting there.