How long to reach certain "Points" in your potential

When I say potential I mean the point where you are at your best and cannot be any better at chess at any other point in your life. 

How many games do you think it would take to reach say, 50%, 70%, 80%, 99%, etc, of your potential? 

By 500 games how close do you think you should be to how good you can be?

How many games should it take you to be able to maintain a higher than 1200 rating in blitz if you are an average player?

That question has no answer.  Playing better isn't a function of the number of games you've played.  It takes practice over time.  Plenty of people play for many many years but don't get better.  Some practice a lot in a short amount of time and see improvement.

Similarly playing at 1200 doesn't take a set number of games, but a set of skills.  Basics like tactics, developing your pieces, and not hanging pieces mostly.  If you don't want to learn, you can happily play 10,000 games and not get any better (I know a few people with over 50,000 blitz games who have stayed at the same level for years).

I agree that the question has no answer. Also, I was at an OTB tourney a month ago and the arbiter talked about a player in his 50's who suddenly reached his potential and went from about 2100 to 2300 despite having been at 2000ish for decades. So you never know when your potential will make such a jump.

Waffle guy is right. You have to want to learn to get better--simply playing a lot of games is not enough.  You have to be willing to take the advice of someone who knows chess very well and you have to be willing to undo old habits.

If you are not advancing it means you are doing something wrong. [unless you are sick/disabled etc]

This is true, because on FICS I saw a player's profile which had something like sixty thousand games played and they were only rated in the 1200s. Seriously.

Maybe the 50'000 blitz games were a stubborn, determined effort to prove that 1.f3 and 1...f6 are the best opening moves

It's like that "you have to do 10'000 hours of X to be a professional at it" nonsense. 10000 hours of rubbish will equal 10'000 hours of rubbish. It's like Emanuel Lasker's saying that 10 hours of properly tutored instruction is better than 10 years of trial and error.

I have noticed this in duplicate bridge tournaments. Most players are "intermediate" and they make the same mistakes over and over and over again and if they desired to play better they could get a whole lot better in say 3 months.  Yes, they play at a low level making the  same mistakes for tens of thousands of hands. 

I think you need to study, not simply playing.

Similarly, OTB games are useful only if you analyze them, possibly with your opponent or with somebody stronger than yourself (an engine is pretty much useless imo).

There's no answer to when you'll reach, say, the 99% of your potential. But like all the other things in life you'll be experiencing diminishing returns.

Serious players have a coach, and they change the coach in different stages of their chess lives.

The coach will analyse with them their mistakes in OTB, prepare the opening repertoire, tell the player where he is lacking, and what he/she should study.

Computers also if stronger than humans, cannot substitute a coach.

And in the end the coach will also tell them when it is time they pass to another coach.

Those players reach their true potential, the others are just playing for fun. Watching videos, reading a book from time to time, practice 10000 TT positions, is just for fun, it cannot substitute the real effort of a systematic study under a coach.

There is a player on here who started a VERY popular thread on New Year's Eve who has played 8758 games and counting. His highest rating is 811.

Unless this very low number represents his maximum potential (something I highly doubt), this means that in over 8700 games he has failed to learn some crucial skills that would take him to the next level.

However, I'll bet that with proper study and analysis, he could probably gain hundreds of points in a couple of months.

This is the guy who resigns when someone trades pieces, MSteen? If so, the barriers to his improvement are laid out for all to see.

But that 811 doesn't care about the Chess hierarchy.  As for a book recommendation I'll recommend The Improving Chess Thinker, which lays out the common mistakes people ranks F through Expert make broken down by chapter.  If you analyse a game and your notes and variations mostly relates to the class C then you make class C errors, and know where you need to go next. 

Yeah, that's him. I'm not sure, but I think he also tends to resign when he has black. His is an interesting approach.

A book that claims to cater to people from class F to Expert?

Immediately blacklisted.

Dan Heisman is a well-renowned coach and author and the book has excellent reviews. 

http://www.chessville.com/reviews/TheImprovingChessThinker.htm

It's to fix problems in one's thinking and isn't just about acquiring knowledge. 

Yeah but do you guys really believe that someone at the 1200 level really needs to spend that much time reading books and studying? I think that until you reach a certain level, the best way to improve is to just play a lot of games and think really hard about your moves.

If you agree with that, then there should be atleast a very rough number of games that it should take you to break 1200 blitz rating. The average blitz rating is 1135 right now. Theoretically if enough games were played by the average player, their rating should improve and surpass 1200 by a certain number of games. I think I agree that there was no answer to how many games it takes to reach your potential since you need more than games to reach it, but at a certain level I think it's all you need. 

I think it's very tempting to dismiss this point by saying that we can't know, since everyone is different; but there must be an answer to this question if you agree that games are all you need till a certain point since it's just a mathematical average. It may be a very difficult question to answer though. 

bump