Does studying GM games really help?

You could have removed all 'not's too, to make the entire comment favourable to you.

I love how you put the word "study" in quotes.

Why would an amateur study the pros?  I know right?  Makes no sense.  I like your hard hitting, no-BS style maskedbishop.

yes.

>My opinion is that study can get you to somewhere between FM and IM,<

No, that's not true. If it was, we'd have a lot more higher-rated players.

I know the retort is "people aren't studying properly" but who ever says that is just kidding themselves. 

Studying GM games - don't bother. ENJOY them. But if you want to actually get better at chess, put the GM games AWAY.

Yeah, this you said right. Actually if someone does not play any games to execute his study then all studying is nonsense. Its like studying year long and not giving exam, like programming a file GBs big but not willing to save it. You can read volumes on climbing a tree, but what if you just don't climb it? Climbing won't improve this way.

But, born genius, or egoistic fool, what about proving other things you said? It's like saying "You don't have to earn money to spend it. You don't have to acquire knowledge to use it." Not unless you're willing to make 30 move long analysis. Just study right way, and rating will improve. Else your life is doomed if you carry on your beliefs.

Try this:

1. Study appropriate master level games. You can't understand modern GM games if you cannot understand old master games. Try Logical Chess Move by Move, or start with Anderssen and Morphy and work your way through chess history.
2. When you study, cover up the moves and do your own analysis until you feel you understand the position, then guess the next move played. When your move is different than the one played, redo your analysis and figure out why your move was not played.
3. Spend at least 4 hours doing this every day.

If you don't have the time or desire for that much work, you will have to spend money on a good coach. You will still have to work hard, but it will save you a lot of time.

Post #105 is an excellent example.  Unless you have a particular interest in that specific opening, their middlegame play (and especially that King Walk) is largely unintelligible to the hoi polloi, like most of us.

Not that's there's anything wrong with studying (or even memorizing GM games).  Feel free to knock yourself out doing it.  

But it's just one of MANY study tools, some of which are likely more effective for you.  Nuff said ?

I never said you did remove anything. I simply told you to quote the rest. What you quoted has been what I have been saying though. Studying.... just studying and nothing else is useless. But, studying and playing the ideas you learned is what you do. Just because you are too dense and irresponsible to have it work for you doesnt mean it doesnt work. According to your logic, if I take the MCATs over and over again, without reviewing the material and my previous tests, I could become a doctor... LOL 

It's one of master traits to analyze every legal move. Yeah, it's strange move when everyone'd play Nc6+ he sacrificed his rook. And sacrificing another rook. It's too hard. Even I don't understand much after running Stockfish 5 on Auto Analysis. You can still understand and learn this combination. I know the problem: Moves are too unnatural to understand even by analysis. It's not like the puzzle where you just see the move and understand it. So try to understand it partially now and rest later.

If you want golf analogies, my golf improved more after 2 hours of study with a qualified coach than 5 years of regular practice (and another decade of irregular play before that).

Hitting a few hundred balls vs hitting tens of thousands. It's the coach that made the difference. The study of the swing, and correction, not practice.

It's pretty cringeworthy when people think they're an expert on something they know nothing about.

You're obviously just a troll though so this is a waste of time.

That rule is almost as inaccurate as your other posts.

Maybe the OP has some point depending on which GMs are followed. For example the games of Kasparov are so confusing that you might not get much at all from them. That I can understand. Kasparov himself said that studying the games of super GMs was like studying rocket science before algebra. 

But there are the games of older GMs like Tartakower, Stenitz, Alekhine and others that are often good to look at even though they can still be complicated to most players. If you can get annotated games then it might not matter who is playing because you'll have some guidance.

It is said that Carlsen didn't do this stuff much at all but he was completely surrounded by experts in the field and always had the technology and resources to learn in an organised fasion that most people simply don't have. I mean there's probably a lot more worth in some GM telling you how to approach a position than reading some 100-year old book about it.

Yes but you need to build a solid knowledge base first.  GM games are great to see how that knowledge is implimented in practice while helping to integrate it into a thinking system. 

Reading 100 year old books is ridiculous, except to get a feel for the history of chess theory.

Sometimes I think threads like this may yield some insight into why kids tend to improve faster than adults. Kids just take in information about something that interests them, while a lot of adults have to constantly assess the value of a simple activity that increases one's culture and understanding of the game. Master games are a bit like the katas of karate. The point of the lesson might not be entirely clear at the beginning, but if you keep practicing, more and more will be revealed.

If you need to constantly assess everything in terms of absolutes, chess is probably not the best game for you. You will endlessly be frustrated. Studying beginner games instead of grandmaster games will not be of much help.

Bobby Fischer didn't think so, and he knew more about chess than you.  He studied the old masters back to at least Staunton, and probably La Bourdonnais/McDonnell too.

Whose game is that btw?

I think you should get Lucas Chess, because it does almost everything.

The point is that when the old books were being written, chess was going through a reaction to the era of violent tactics. This means that, in most of the old books, a lack of understanding of tactics is displayed and there is too much overt reliance on positional principles. This is not necessarily good for chess so reading these old books can do more harm than good, unless you take them with a big pinch of salt, DaMaGor.

Staunton was an exception to the rule. But of course, you took my remark out of context, like people do.