Can intelligent person suck at chess, forever?

As an intelligent person you should know that before you played chess you had the potential to be a GM or suck at chess.

In fact you existed both as a GM & a Patzer until you measured your playing ability - then you found out you re on the "I suck" end of the scale.

As many people have said , stop playing so much fast chess. join a couple of groups that play Vote Chess matches and listen to the thought process of the higher rated players. Tactics trainer is a good idea aswell

You're definitely not alone there.. I have problems with that too.. It's easy to zoom in and overlook outside influences.

I can't say for certain, but it really seems to me that part of the problem with remembering the calculation once you step back to look at something else might have to do with how you connect everything.

For instance, the sequence 1.e4, e5  2.Nf3, Nc6 is probably fairly easy for you to visualize and remember.  The key there in my opinion, is that you're very familiar with the starting position.  You have a frame of reference to relate the movement towards.

As things progress the pieces can tend to become a half-hazard jumble.   It frequently isn't very similar to the starting position at all.  The mind needs another reference to relate everything towards.   This pattern recognition starts to happen naturally with a lot of frequent repetition.. (f3 knight being pinned by the a bishop on g4, King on g8 covered by pawns on f7, g7, and h7 etc...)  However getting this pattern recognition by rote repetition isn't very efficient, and it's usually only related to a section of the board that tends to repeat.

I'm a big proponent of studying the pieces in isolation.  Drilling into your head how any one piece can move to any other square in the shortest amount of time.  Combined with different ways of visualizing the moves, particularly the knight.  (For instance, most people view the knight as an L.  Some people see the move as a move up or to the side from a diagonal adjacent to the knight.. Still others view it as a square of the opposite color on the outside of a 3x3 square.)  It may seem silly to practice visualizing piece movements in different ways since they all amount to the same move, but I've found it cements the imagery of the chessboard into your head.  Furthermore it allows you to intuit rather than calculate how all the pieces are connected.

Combined with a framework of the board, so that you automatically know where b5 is without thinking, you can see it.  A person should be able to calculate sequences more accurately.  As to considering how all the squares relate to each other, as I mentioned earlier I visualize from the inside out.. The center acts as my point of reference..  That's my preference but so long as you are able to relate all the squares to a point of reference you should be able to place them without thinking.

I'm certainly no genius nor master chess player, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but this is what I've found to be true for myself in terms of board visualization and calculation.

In order to improve you must start playing longer games or even better 3-day Online Chess

Studying the opening certainly isn't harmful..  I don't think anyone thinks that.. It's excluding tactics/endgame in favor of the opening that's harmful.  A person can spend an hour learning opening principles and be 75% as good as a person who spends 50 hours memorizing the best variations of an opening line.  Unless the person with more opening knowledge manages to checkmate the king or get a decisive material advantage.. 49 more hours spent practicing tactics or basic endgames will amount to more.

As you mentioned in a previous post tactics infiltrate the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame..  Any chess player of moderate skill would be most helped by a study of tactics.  Though even then I would not exclude opening or endgame study.

With fischer, I'd say he did purposefully study rook endings.. He may have studied them because he lost..  But studying rook endings is exactly what he was doing when he went over why he lost.

Also as to whether you want to play against the computer or yourself.. If you're playing a position that's definitely winnable, you want to be playing against the strongest opponent you can find.  You don't want to rely on your opponent making a mistake.  You should understand what those mistakes might be (i.e. losing the opposition) so that you can take advantage of the situation if you find yourself on the losing end.  But always assume perfect play for your opponent, and practice accordingly.  Though in my opinion one should never give up regardless of the situation, unless there are outside circumstances which dictate a resignation.

Fischer was absolutely self-taught.

You can learn as much from books as from a teacher.

The only issue is that books can't teach you when to play a good move, but then again neither can teachers.

Is it really possible after playing 2 hours of straight bullet chess to look yourself in the mirror and say that you learned something?

Yes, you have learned how to play a fast game.

I was always puzzled by people who were in a hurry to settle for less...

Intelligence is mostly a very good thing to possess. (Sometimes...it is painful, as if you happen to have a stupid boss or co-workers!)

The motivation...hard work and the attitude...goals, planning, positive thinking...they can take you a long, long way.

Just think about all the intelligent people you know who are lazy and/or have a bad attitude. Unless they get it handed to them (inheritance, nepotism, cronyism) they are not going anyplace.

What I just said is true for chess, as well as life in general.

There is NO intelligent people on chess.com e4n only egoists...

I look at your profile, and you already played thousand of thousand bullet and blitz game, way more than longer time control. It's adviced that a new player to chess should play more games at longer time control. If you are just a new player, and you play lots of blitz, you will develop bad habits, like superficial play and lack of patience, you will not also develop your calculating skills.. I suggest reduce your blitz(or totaly avoid it at the mean time) and don't play bullet until you are already good at longer time control. The good thing with longer time control, it will help you develop your calculating skills, because on longer time control, you calculate more and deeper,your chess planning will be also developed on longer time control,you will be able to explore more the inner thinsg in chess on longer time control.

netzach:

I'm pleased to see that you used the correct word: egoists. Most people in the USA say: egotists. And, they don't have a clue as to the difference. Well done!

Tnx. Never done learning ! 

Wrong. Read Brady's Endgame, and you'll learn that he had two teachers: Carmine Nigro, and later John Collins, who taught lots of other great young players of that generation.

Actually with his sentence either word would have worked.

Egotist - arrogant boastful person

Egoist - self-centered or selfish person

Considering everytime I hear a person use egotist they are refering to someone who talks themselves up, I'd say most Americans I've heard use the word use it correctly.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/egotist?s=t&ld=1031

Yeresov is more often wrong than right. He plucks statistics out of thin-air...

An egotist talks a lot about their self. An egoist is extremely self-centered.  Of course, some people are both.

They are not interchangeable words. I haven't heard on TV or in real life in decades, the word just used: egoists. That's usually what they mean, but they say: egotists.

I stand uncorrected. Not that I am an egoist, it's just that you are in error.

Americans can talk themselves up all they wish & I fully realise the value of self-confidence & attitude. 

Still remains however that you all basically suck at chess compared to the smaller EU countries where it has been part of their lives for generations. Needing to recognise  therefore that you have lot's to learn still about the game. Apparently this is not happening via the methods ( books/videos etc ) championed on here.

Why is that so ?

How can he be incorrect when he phrases it in terms of his own experience?  In his experience you are wrong, in your experience you're correct.

You're uncorrected, but he's not in error.

Anyway, at first I thought it was a trivial thing to be pleased over... but I suppose I'm pleased when esoteric moves are played in some esoteric game sometimes hundreds of years old, so I can't really judge