Documented: Beginner to Master in 4 Months! It's hard to believe

Just searching around the Web on chess related stuff, and I found this amazing nugget:

"Battsooj Amina of Mongolia went from beginner to master in four months! This is rather unusual as the 14-year-old girl gained an incredible 850 Elo points from 1458 to 2309, from mid-May up to this month."

That's just freakin' unbelievable to me!  It's been drilled into my head that you have to put in 10,000 hours of quality time into making Master, along with imbibing and absorbing thousands and thousands of patterns from the openings, middlegame, and endgame to achieve chess mastery.

And this teen-age girl goes "blip!" and makes Master in 4 months!  That just blows me away.

Altogether now, "You go girl!"

Elo 1450 is not beginner.

Good case to point out how "beginner" means different things to different people.

I saw a guy go from no games played to 2100 after 2 tournaments... but obviously that doesn't matter because he was a 2100 player to begin with. If the girl got to 2300 legitimately, then it doesn't really matter because even though her rating was 1400 her actual strength was 2300.

And the 10,000 hour thing is so silly. I wish people wouldn't buy into something so obviously facile... and in any case in the context of chess "master" would be something like the GM title, not the FM title.

"Elo 1450 is not beginner."

Chin of Quinn, you are right.  Of course, you are right.  I just used the verbiage from the article that I copied and pasted.

But still, it's a very remarkable achievement, don't you think?

We have to see the tournament history or the rating graph. What I'd look for first is a plateau ( a slow incline is fine too). If a person plays many games around the same level then it's not only their rating, it's their actual playing strength. Then you measure from that point to the 2300 mark and look at the time.

What I expect to see no plateau and/or inactivity. Then she comes back to tournament chess and shoots up to 2300. All it really means is this player was underrated. They didn't gain ~1000 points worth of ability in 4 months.

You want to check FIDE's rating graph for him, not the USCF.

A guy i know after 1 tournament was rated 2158

My first coach was rated 215something after 21 rated games.

Had a guy play in one of the tourneys I ran that had a provisional rating of 2326 after 9 USCF games. Highest rated player he beat was in his 1900's. Provisional ratings with all wins can give really high ratings.

Not sure how strong he really is but he also likely had a ton of experience outside of normal rated chess.

Ok, so I'm looking at her FIDE graph and she got her first 1400 rating Jan 2014. This is just an initial rating you get after your first tournament (obviously this is not her first time playing chess though).

6 months later she played in 1 tournament and her rating when down a little. I can see 3 of her games from that tournament, and one is a loss vs a 1900... but she was completely winning against the 1900 before blundering her queen. Even though her rating went down for that tourney (FIDE says only 2 games were standard time control), I think it shows she was better than 1400.

After this she played in no tournaments for 1 year. So this is 1 and a half years after her initial 1400 rating with only 2 rated games in between. Over the next 4 months she shoots up to 2300.

Eight months and three tournaments after this she falls below 2100, and FIDE says she's currently rated 2190. Looks like she played some games this month, but FIDE isn't showing the effect of that on her main page yet.

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So it's more accurate to say that she went from an initial and unreliable rating of 1400 to an overrated rating of 2300 18 months later. Maybe she almost got lucky vs that 1900. Lets be generous and say she was more like 1600 and went to 2200, and lets be generous and say even though 8 months later she was ~2200 that she was 2200 strength at the time she went up to 2300 so being generous we have a 600 point increase in 18 months. Very fast improvement, but a believable rate you see in some talented young players.

You could also point out  that from her first tourney to her last tourney is a time span of 3 years and she went from 1478 to 2190. ~700 points in 3 years if you think the initial rating was accurate. The 2300 in 4 months is just a click bait title by a reporter who doesn't know how the horsey moves.

Magnus Carlsen went from 900 to 1900 in one year, and from 1900 to around 2250 (!) on the following year - this is well documented and does reflect genuine improvement. 

Kramnik was "a first category player" (about 2000) by the time he was seven. This is also pretty amazing. 

I would go and talk about Capablanca, but you get the idea. 
These things do happen, and when they do - it's a bit like a new star that starts to shine in the skies of Bethlehem...