FACT: You can't improve at chess

Well, I don't think we're actually in disagreement.

I consider analyzing your games and/or identifying your mistakes to be a form of studying, as well. We can call it "self-study", for example. Reflecting on your previous moves and trying to find improvements.

But many players won't even do that. They'll play a game and then, win or lose, they'll play another game - and they won't give a second thought to the game they previously played ... which often ensures that they'll keep making similar mistakes into the future, because they aren't taking the time to learn from them and/or aren't bothering to try alternate things.

I guess that's true lol just depends what you mean by studying

I just don't like saying the term cause emost people that by opening up a book instead of analyzing your own games books can be fun to read tho

The funny thing is some people say you should analyze only your loses but it should be losses plus wins it really only takes like two to three minutes of analyzing (I don't even do that usually I analyze every few games cause half the time I goof off anyway ) I kinda try to figure out what I'm doing wrong mid game but that's hard to do for most people

Like just look at the obvious stuff you do wrong and try to figure out how and why it went wrong

Like was it because of a blunder ,did you resign to early(most people ) ,time management ,tilt ,playing too fast and just hanging pieces in the opening(also poor time management knowing when to think also means knowing when to play slow and when to play fast ),is it pattern recognition

Mostly just not listening to dummy stockfish and actually realizing you messed up on your own at least at first

(Not trying to coach you btw )

Yes, I think the term "study" might scare people off, or bore them. But I believe there are many different ways to study chess.

As long as you're learning or discovering new ideas that you can implement into your play, I'd say you're studying chess ...

I guess "not traditional " studying lol though most people (especially the usa ) are used to a more traditional form

Right, most people get scared when it comes to the word "study" but the real issue here is love, if you love the game, you'll study it, and you'll slowly improve. One of the best ways to study is to go over your own games, they teach you what you know and don't know and where you need work etc.

Yha, I think you're correct. I hover under and around a 500 rating. Have been for about 2 years. I watched every video I could. If I did study chess It would do nothing for me because I'm barely able to beat other beginners. Even when I do try my best to implement fundamentals, I usually get out played.

Improvement is not linear in anything your trying to learn it's just more noticable in chess

the OP is correct, some people are able to improve overtime because they have a natural ability to get to that level, then they plateau. Practice will only make you better up to a limit imposed by your genetics.

Nope also the fact that many many people learn ches wrong and therefore plague earlier then they should therres too many factors it's like saying "im not good at adding a+b " even though you can its just easier for you to add A+B+C " your logic is if you can't do a+b that's your limit which is not how people learn it's more like a lot of A a decent chunk of C and some of B plus people have different learning styles .... Intelligence is only one of multiple factors

IDK what y’all think I gained 250 elo since new year because I started playing regularly. Earlier I used to play twice a week and was stuck at 700-800 for 1 year. You can always gain elo.

idk, I'm better at bullet chess than when I first learned the rules.

Maybe he’s thinking of The Bell Curve, a flawed wok of scholarship that manipulated data to achieve the predetermined conclusion that Anglo-Americans are intellectually superior.

The Bell Curve was published in 1994 and received a great deal of criticism at the time. One of the authors, Charles Murray, had been pushing anti-tax, anti-welfare, anti-immigration policies with shoddy scholarship since the 1960s. The thickness of the book, which is well-written despite flaws in the scholarship, gave comfort to a lot of racists as it seemed to justify their views: Black people and immigrants are pulling the nation downward.

Perhaps folks in Britain ignored the book because its focus was on US data.

The belief in "natural chess ability" is, IMO, complete nonsense.

No infant is born with a latent chess Elo. Chess is simply: a learned skill.

I view it as comparable to learning a trade, like carpentry. Or perhaps like learning a foreign language ...

In either case, there are steps you can take to improve your learning. If we hit a plateau, it's because we've stopped learning, or stopped learning properly - not because of a limit imposed by some undiscovered "chess genome" in our DNA ...

I finished my PhD in 1994 and was teaching courses on race relations in the US. The book was relevant to my work. I read a portion prior to book publication because it appeared as an article--either in The Atlantic Monthly or The New Republic.

Divya Deshmukh, rating increasing steadily since 2012, with a plateau for the period 2020-2022, then increasing again: https://ratings.fide.com/profile/35006916

I started at 600 in 2018, and am now 1900+