Great Chess Players... Born or Made?

Hey, 'looby, did you ever play baseball?

Some guys can just hit the curve ball.  We were all introduced to that damn' pitch at the same age, with relatively, the same amount of practice behind us.

Some guys can just hit.  Me?  I can't hit the damned thing, and I worked like hell at it.

What we can gain by hard work is what is called technique.  Great players go beyond technique and create new ideas.  Creativity is something you are not going to acquire with hard work.

Susan Polgar tells a slightly different story.  She says her parents started supporting her chess after she showed a talent for it.

I generally wasn't good at sports. But most of my sports activity had come in gym class (I almost never played outside of it), and there, sure, I would try to learn how to play better in my own right, but once the block was over I'd just move on -- it wasn't enough to just play it 5 or 7 times for the month. And then the next year I'd be about as bad as last time, naturally.

But if I tried to get to the "soul" of hockey as I do with chess, I'm not saying I could become amazing at it (I'm not even amazing at chess), but I could make it clear I totally knew what I was doing. I can tell there are all sorts of nuances like how to control the puck without losing it, when to pass, the best ways to shoot, how on earth to "be open," but of course I never dug deep with any of them (no motivation) so never became any good. But just like in chess, I would imagine there are many facets of the game that first look daunting, but can become much easier.

This is just my personal experience. The way I approached sports used to be the way I approached chess -- just play once in a while, and while doing so do the best I can. Once I started doing things in chess I was too lazy to do before, get books, really think about the game, only then the improvement came. I was an under 1000 player for several years until I started playing in tournaments, and I guess that gave me some extra motivation as I improved quite quickly, by myself, within a few years.

Again, I'm not saying practice will ensure you an elite level at anything. But I know from experience that there are some things that look impossible that you can in fact achieve and laugh about when looking back. 1300 level chess used to seem nearly impossible to me. 1500 looked as perfect to me as GM chess -- I couldn't tell the difference. I mean that literally -- I knew a 1500 player and that was how I felt! Disciplined practice is powerful -- more powerful than people give credit for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrH-tcDTU48

Alekhine believed the ideal chess player is born, not made. 

I have to disagree with this strongly. Note that this doesn't have anything to do with arguing "Practice will make a world champion." But I take it as an insult that you don't think people like me, who weren't GM at age 14, aren't because we don't have that creativity in us. Part of the reason I am able to play at the level I play is because I have to think creatively to solve problems -- chess is about solving problems, and every position is a puzzle. Sometimes you do need to reach out for your problem solving skills in order to help you consider the right move efficiently, rather than just thinking about which past idea to directly use, and even strong class players can certainly succeed in this sometimes. It's something any problem solver needs, not just the elite. Though a class player won't be creating ideas the world hasn't seen, the point is that he will create ideas he personally hadn't seen before. That's creative.

In fact, what we call creativity is probably just a lot of patterns drawing us to a different but influenced idea. I might come up with a new sacrifice that I haven't seen before, but it will be based on all of the games I have seen where it's ok to be down a pawn, maybe with a slight twist. What makes Tal want to sacrifice is his visions of past positions that have led to a strong attack and the position he is currently in looking remotely similar to some of them. Again, there will be slight twists, too.

Ok, I know that it seems like the two paragraphs contradict each other -- I didn't mean them to, but the point of the second paragraph was to show that to an extent what we call creativity, even creativity of the chess geniuses, can still be somewhat influenced by their past experiences. Some of creativity is of course to be able to modify existing ideas in a new way, and having an open mind.

Considering the Polgar daughters were an experiment, I think waiting for a sign of talent would entirely defeat the purpose of what they were trying to do. I'd rather hear an answer from their father.

@Elubas

I know what you are saying, my experience is similar with regards to chess, since I decided to make an effort to really study and learn, rather than just read or go over games without any understanding I know I see more ideas at the board now and think in a  much more focused way about what me and my opponent want to do in a position.

There is a parallel with learning a musical instrument, I have been playing the guitar for 35 years and I am pretty good (so I should be after all that time) but my main period of improvement came when I was a teenager and spent 6 hours a day practicing from when I was 14 until I stopped playing in bands in my early twenties. I sold my gear and literally never played at all for fifteen years, then I had a Blues Brothers moment 'hey let's get the band back together' and bought a couple of guitars and an amplifier. Starting to play again it was weird, I could still remember every song I learnt from twenty years ago and once the callouses came back (ouch) it was like I had only stopped playing for a month or so.

My point is that the intense practice I had put in for several years gave me the foundation to pick the instrument up again and get back to my old playing level in a matter of weeks. Some of it is muscle memory but a lot of solo playing in particular is about knowing scales, modes and just good old licks in various positions on the neck - what in chess terms we would call pattern recognition. Knowing these patterns is what allows musicians to jam over unfamiliar chord changes as long as they know what the key is, similar to how a chess master can win many games against weaker players by referencing similar positions in their memory.

You do wonder how accurate Susan's memory is of what happen when she was 4 years old.   But most of the facts aren't in controversy.  Laszlo wanted to train her in mathematics.  One of the problems was that Laszlo's program required the child be interested in the subject.  Once Susan found a chess set, he couldn't get her interested in anything else.  It was either chess or no experiment.  Laszlo says she was ordinary and Susan says she had a talent for chess.  As to who is correct, we need to clone Susan and find out if growing up normally she would have had a talent for chess.

Yes, maybe all three of these daughters would have been great at chess in an ordinary life -- pretty darn unlikely though. Just because they are related to each other doesn't necessarily make it more plausible that all three of them would be good -- it's pretty easy to find "opposite siblings" if you will. 

Obviously this kind of experiment could never prove things for absolute sure -- I guess you can just believe this to be simply a coincidence, but it would be quite a large one.

As for what happened -- maybe you know more about this than me. From the sources I have read I vaguely recalled a subject simply being picked, even before the kids were born. Indeed, I thought that at some point at least Mr. Polgar simply said "I'm going to have a few kids, and they're all going to be chess masters." I think he cited some reasons why he thought that would be a good pick.

Yeah, and each one, despite genetics and training, ended up with very different strengths and progressed at different rates.  IIRC Sofia quit early but her sisters said it always came easier to her.

Although yea, it does seem to indicate that a lot of work at a  young age is a good way to get a title.

The point, which you addressed in your last sentence, is that they all were able to get pretty darn good under that regimen. Reasons for different strengths could be explained in different ways, maybe talent, maybe on each individual's future outlook. But again, that's not the point.

Three examples:

Mozart (a composer) wrote his first opera when he was 12 years old. It is still regularly played to this day. When he was 14, he was present as a listener at the performance of a choral Mass in Venice of which the sheet music was kept strictly under lock and key; nobody outside the cathedral had ever been allowed to see the music. He went home and wrote the whole thing down from memory; every movement, every instrument, every voice part.

Gauss (a mathematician) at the age of 7, when confronted with a problem set for the whole class which had been intended to keep it occupied for the whole lesson, solved it within seconds (add up all the numbers from 1 to 100). He had instantly recognized the short cut to the solution. Legend has it that he got caned for his presumptuousness. (Anybody who wants the solution - send me a note! ;) )

Magnus Carlsen (a chess player) learnt chess at the age of 5 from his father and shortly afterwards lost interest in the game. Three years later he became interested again and sat down alone with a chessboard. He played the games with his father from memory over again (after three years!), asked himself why the moves had been made, and looked for better ones. One presumes that he found them.

That these gifts (which here definitely have to do with pattern recognition and application) are inborn, is undoubted. The thing is that nothing special would have come of them without the following years of extremely hard work. What´s really important: the ability to sustain interest during these years (or even decades) must also be inborn; if you´re not consumed with a passion for the subject of your gift, you´ll remain brilliantly mediocre. It´s the way your brain´s wired. If you don´t have both attributes - the intrinsic gift, plus the capacity to flog yourself to attain perfection - you´ll never be a genius. There are thousands of failed born geniuses who are nothing but failed prodigies, who are even complete failures in their lives; there are likewise hundreds of thousands of passionate and gifted amateurs in every field who, despite constant study and striving, never produce anything above average. And another thing - if you don´t start at a very early age (in these three fields at least; include languages and sport): it´s too late; the learning window closes.

Conclusion: Chess geniuses (like all others) are both born AND made; one half of the equation isn´t enough.

Disagree slightly with the sport bit. The human brain is different to the body. I think it's possible to start out a bit later in boxing for example and still become great.

I would agree that you have to be born to be a good player. Fetuses would be at too harsh of a disadvantage.

True; but if you haven´t practised eye/muscle coordination in one form or another from an early age, you´ll never be a Muhammad Ali.

Quote from Wiki:

"Clay was first directed toward boxing by Louisville police officer and boxing coach Joe E. Martin,^[13] who encountered the 12-year-old fuming over a thief taking his bicycle. He told the officer he was going to "whup" the thief. The officer told him he better learn how to box first."

Maybe. But still you'd never find cases like Bernard Hopkins (who started very late, but became World Champ) in chess.

Josh waitzkin is another obvious example: Became Tai Chi Push-hands double WC despite having started around age 20.

But anyway, we're getting off topic.

lol

That's called "lazy, but smart enough to make it through basic schooling without much effort", not "prodigy".

I know from first hand experience. I sat in my math classes reading chess books. I never turned in homework. I made perfect scores on test and quizzes to pass the classes. I thought I was so smart. I told myself, "I could be valedictorian if I worked my hardest, but I'm not interested in that."

Then I went to university, and failed. I had to learn the value of hard work, the hard way. School isn't forever and the real world is totally different. My advice, work hard to do the very best you can do. You will be surprised how average you really are, and how much hard work it takes to be successful at anything meaningful.