Can Anyone Become Grandmaster?

I'll get some people pissed when I say, yes hard work is important, and is necessarry, but so is talent. People who don't believe that some people have talents that others don't, are just plain stupid.

I'm guessing that your particular talent, lies outside of anything remotely connected to diplomacy, reasoned argument or thinking.

What do I win?

This is actually a very astute and salient observation. I don't know if it is genetics, how they were raised, environmental factors, or what, and it's likely some combination of all of that; but, a key observation is that some people just enjoy hard work much more than others. They have more than discipline, they have a real internal desire to pursue the effort that drives the realization of their potential. 

There are some people who, when they've finished their homework, they start looking for other problems to do for fun. Then there's the average person who finishes their assingment, and starts looking for what's on TV. 

Now, I don't know that I believe in 'talent' as some abstract thing apart from the combination of training and innate potential; however, I do believe that all 'talented' people share this characteristic of enjoying what they are talented at so much that even practicing the most mundane aspects is more interesting to them than just about anything else in the world.

And that can't be faked.  

It's just that they love their subject of study, so the hard work is enjoyable to them, and not a grind like it is to other people. That comes from talent. Even I enjoy studying some subjects more than others, so I put more work into em.

when nigel short was a kid he seemed somewhat interested in chess. his mother brought back a book about alekhine's best games from the public library. he read the book through the morning, ate lunch and dinner with it. he finally put it down late in the night and complained of a headache. now was this kid actually trying to be a grandmaster??

however, there is another aspect to this. some people are good at making on the spot observations whereas others prefer to work on hard problems, let them sink in, work towards a solution. i guess both can be called talented. i know people of both categories.

andrew wiles, the guy who solved fermat's last theorem is definitely the second category, whereas a public speaker or clever politician is the first category since they have to keep reacting to public opinion which is actually fleeting.

You guessed wrong [mod edit]. I've just lost patience with people here, who keep insisting that everybody has the same potential in every subject, in spite of all the evidence, and explanations to the contrary.

MOD COMMENT: personal insults have no place here. If you've lost patience with comments in the forum, might I suggest taking time to enjoy a game of chess? 

I find this thread to be overall boring, pointless and rather depressing if you read too deeply into it.

I would sate myself with the knowledge that I will never be a GM - I have other areas where I am far more prominent.

Everyone is smart in some factor, be it social intelligence or musical intelligence... becoming a GM requires a certain minimum of brain activity in certain parts of the brain. Not everyone is suited for that. I would still say, however, that not becoming a GM isn't the end of the world. Take Silman, for example - he became an IM and is now leading a rather happy life teaching people. Or Dan Heisman for that instance.

Chess is our hobby, not becoming GM doesn't tell that much about your overall intelligence. So don't beat yourself for that... I know how it feels. When you feel beaten, you start to feel that you must insist you are, indeed, intelligent. Don't - it's pointless! Go do something you excel at if you want success.

Oh, and people like Tal or Carlsen are different cases altogether. Carlsen for example was born with the mental capacity of a borderline genius, and was tutored from early childhood to play chess. No wonder he hasn't the need to study as much as some others. Nature isn't fair.

Age has a lot to do with it. I am in my 30s and know I would never be fluent in a new language, say, Japanese. Even with exceptional hard work, I could be pretty good at best, not like a native speaker. Children's brains are more pliable and still forming, and can pick up concepts more easily. Is there an example of a single GM who didn't start as a kid? I can't think of one.

Botvinnik, Rubinstein, Lasker, Tartakower were some GM who didn't start as a kid

A lot of people start out playing as children, but never even approach GM though, so starting out young isn't the only requirement.

I'm sure with enough work and opportunity for immersion upon could achieve fluency, or near fluency in a new language.

There's ample evidence that people who learn languages later in life (after about age 20-25) for the first time will almost always remain distinguishable from a native speaker even with a lifetime of total immersion. There are some idioms, expressions, pronunciations, or what-not that will keep them flumoxed for life. 

And, as I pointed out before, chess has a great many similarities with language: at heart it is a semiotic puzzle. 

And I think that is precisely the reason that people who learn as adults don't become GM's -- instead of directly encoding semiotic relationships, we learn rules to guide us through those semiotic relationships, and we can't ever do anything to change that.  
 
And, btw, that is a concept that is not lost on GM's. Kasparov is quoted as saying "For me, chess is a language, and if it's not my native tongue, it is one I learned via the immersion method at a young age."

 

OK, the analogy with language has been used by at least two more grandmasters, GM Anand as well as GM Rowson that is, so let's elaborate on that:

Anand told the press that in order to ever become fluent, you have to speak the language a lot, that is to practice chess a lot!

Rowson told the readers of "Interview with a grandmaster" that even in grandmaster level, there are different levels of fluency, but he also confessed that Kasparov's one is out of reach for most "average" grandmasters!

Imagine how inappropriate is "academically" both the student's understanding of the abstract language of chess, as well as the quality of its practice , when:

a) they have never been in a formal "language" school

b) they have been practicing the language for years with people who are self-taught "speakers" of it

Bovinik : won a game vs Capablanca in simultaneous event, at the age of 14 ; 5th of the USSR championship at 16. (source wiki). I doubt anyone here has won his country's championship at that age (not junior, the real one).

The other ones are from before the Cold War (ie the beginning of serious chess).

In their book, 'The Mammoth Book of Chess' (I think it's called) John Nunn, Graham Burgess, and John Emms address the question of whether it's possible for an adult to pick up the game and become a GM. I recall their answer being something to the effect that while some GMs didn't start playing chess seriously until they were well into their teenage years, they know of no one who became GM by waiting longer. They then go on to say that despite this, it's still very possible to become "good" at chess (whatever that means).

Perhaps it's still theoretically possible for adults to become GMs...except it still took even the best players years to get to that point (10 years is a very rough figure I heard somewhere). And that's 10 years of playing seriously, studying, constantly scrutinizing your own games for your mistakes...essentially doing nothing but chess. How many people past the age of 20 have time for this sort of thing?

Yes, it may be possible for an adult to become a grandmaster. But that person would be exceptional. The old Soviet Union included chess instruction to its children. It selected the best and brightest (most talented) players for extensive training. Even then, very few managed to earn a grandmaster's title. 

Yes, everyone can get good at chess. Not everyone can become a grandmaster. Everyone can learn to lift weights or run faster. Not everyone can become an Olympic weightlifter or track star.

No you're wrong. It's totally possible to learn a new language up to native speaker level, in only few years of efforts and starting as an adult.

I know it because I've done it.

You could distinguish my accent, but that's a totally different thing; most native speakers would not be able to change their own accent if they tried, and it would be pointless anyway.

Apart from the accent, my pronunciation is technically correct. And that is because I learned the IPA. You break down the language into phonemes, you practice with these phonemes until you master them (doesn't take long), then you look up the IPA for a word you want to pronounce.

Idioms and expressions? Spend few years watching a ton of films, having conversations with natives, and why not, even internet forums help (not this one though, most people here don't even know the difference between loose and lose).

You wouldn't be able to come up with an expression I've never come across before. Unless it's a regional saying of your area or it's limited to a particular group of people. Again: nothing that would distinguish me from a native speaker, fo shizzle.

Now I will admit that learning Japanese will present additional challenges. Different alphabet and lack of entertaining material to practice your Japanese with. Unless you're into cartoons of giant robots, that is.

But learning a new language as an adult and up to native speaker level is totally possible.

All threads are good and bad. They are long but short......

So, apart from the fact that you can be distinguished from a native speaker because your pronunciations involve an accent you can't change, you can't be distinguished from a native speaker, and so that means that what I said is incorrect. 

Got it.  

There are always specific reasons why we win and lose our games of chess. When Grandmasters lose or win the specific reasons into how and why they lost a particular game (are fundamentally the same and conform to the rules of chess and logic) is due to more and higher complex reasons because they view chess positions more accurately and respond to them much quicker. Which means they make less mistakes compared to the average player, have better scanning and searching skills. better board vision, better tactical vision, know how to open the game up quicker and more efficiently. It comes down to specific skills they simply have that we dont have and they've honed it to the point that they are above average and can't be beaten by the mental skills by over 80%-90% of the sample competing in the overall pool. The research on the brainscans of Grandmasters is very interesting and cant be disregarded as a valid point of view in my opinion because someone like Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov would have very different "chess brain" wiring that have been built over a lifetime of hard dedicated chess thinking and chess brain cell growth. I think everybody has the potential to gain a Grandmaster chess brain but it is definitely intertwined with the rules of reality. For example if someone had Anterior grade amnesia (a disease that effects ones ability to create and store new memories) it would be like someone in a wheel chair who cant move their legs trying to win gold in olympic swimming.