How good at chess could you become without playing a single game?

I was just thinking about it, because my faults at chess are that I play too much and analyze too little. Now imagine a player who never played a game of chess in their lives, but they read the rules and they analyze grandmaster and non grandmaster games daily, they read chess books, do tactics and lessons, learn opening, middle game, endgame, etc. So they basically do every method of studying that the best players do except for actually playing. How good could they become? Now while "good" is a very unclear term, I think in answers, you should refer to rating. Imagine, after 5 years of intense training, but no playing, they come on chess.com and play 50 bullet chess games, 50 blitz, 50 rapid, 50 daily, and 50 daily 960 games. How good do you think they would be in terms of rating?

I think they would be fairly good. Maybe 1600-1800? Just a guess.

I think a bit less because in the openings, they might not know what to do when the opposing player goes off of the mainstream opening, but other than that, 1600-1800 sounds like a fair estimate

Actually pretty good for you are very very smart. You can memorize chess openings; do thousands of tactics and puzzled; analyze thousands of games just like they do at the top levels. Perhaps a rating of 2000 could be reached

1000-2000

I wouldn't be sure that they would be that good because they might not have good time management (too slow for blitz or too fast for fast chess).

They could play against them self too.

good point. But they would quickly learn this. I expect they would be very good at correspondence chess though as they would have more time to recall what they have learned from their studying as they would probably take their studying at a slower pace so that they could learn more and would prefer to have games at a slower pace as well so they could play at their maximum

Not as part of their studying if this is what you mean, as technically you are still playing a game of chess even if you are playing yourself.

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On chess.com 1800.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140627052239/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman16.pdf

 

Hahaha my old friend, U are still here ?!? Recovered from a hospital ?!? I can bash U now! 

 

My best shot will kill U. 

I am not exactly the biggest fan of DeirdreSkye, but I nevertheless ask you to reconsider.

You would not be able to absorb all of that information about chess without applying it. So not good at all.

Master level player Milan Vukcevich was first introduced to chess tactic problems and for several years was unaware that it was actually a complete game.

Vukcevic learned chess at a very young age, he did play a lot, and back in 1955 he became Yugoslavia's junior champion, aged 18. He became IM when he was 21, so he was more than "Master Level". He gave up on competitive chess later, due to his profession (he was a prominent scientist, nominated for a Nobel prize in chemistry). But true, he became famous after becoming one of the top three chess composers- you can find a lot of his compositions in FIDE albums.

I think that you can only really learn how to escape blunders by playing so I can't see them being better then 1200 at the beginning though they would improve quite rapidly

Learning how to move the pieces is an improvement that cane done without playing. But improvement without playing is limited