Is it impossible to excel in chess without a CHESS-COACH?

With so many chess books and training sources around, why is it that many people emphasise on having a chess-coach?

I have heard it again and again and again that it is a MUST to have a good chess coach if you want to have a very good rating or become an IM or a GM or even an FM.

But they charge lot of fees. Some people cannot afford it. So can these people never fulfill their aim?

I think that if a player has good determination and is ready for hard work, then he can surely do it wothout a chess-coach.

What do you say?

Can anyone please give me an example of someone who has succeeded without the help of a chess coach? any self made IMs or GMs out there.........?

WINNERS are too BUSY to be SAD,

too POSITIVE to be DOUBTFUL,

too OPTIMISTIC to be FEARFUL,

and too DETERMINED to be DEFEATED.

Do you think that the first GM on this earth had a coach. Well, I would like to quote from the book "The Blind Side" of which a movie with the same name has also been made. The quote refers to the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

"Courage is a hard thing to figure. You can have courage based on a dumb idea or a mistake, but you are not supposed to question adults or your coach or your teacher. Because they make the rules. Maybe they know the best or maybe they don't.It all depends on who you come and where they come from. Didn't at-least the six hundred guys think of giving up and joining with the other side.I mean The Valley Of Death! That's pretty salty stuff. That's why courage is tricky, should you always do what others tell you to do. Sometimes you might not even know why you do something. I mean any fool can have courage. But honour, that's the real reason you do something or you don't. Its who you are and maybe who you want to be. If you die trying for something important then you have both honour and courage and that's pretty good. I think that's what the writer was saying, that you should hope for courage and try for honour and maybe even pray that the people telling you what to do have some too".

Having a good coach isn't necessary for improvement to take place, but it will usually speed up the process. And I'm pretty sure Bobby Fischer never had a coach.

Really? I know he studied a lot by himself, but I assumed he also had many come on go tutors on his way up.

About the OP, I think if you have the right material, you can improve by yourself up to NM level, although probably slower than you'd do with a good coach.

Yeah, maybe. I've just heard a lot of people say he did it all by himself.

It depends on the person. Some people learn better on their own.

Hmm. His assistance was not on par with Soviet GMs', that's for sure.

Jack Collins was considered to be a " coach " of Fischer's I believe when he was just a boy. After that I dont know of any coach Fischer ever had/worked with.

I made NM all on my own and never had a coach/teacher in chess. It took me 11 years however and I think the time may have been much less with a good coach/teacher.

Is it impossible ?  My answer would be no.

Rex, what do you need in order to become a GM?

It's just like the other fields of life. You can learn any subject without going to school , or having tutors, but its easier with the right teacher. Also the more advanced the level of the subject is, the more difficult learning it without any help. 

Imagine it like studying math. Basic math is not that difficult to learn by yourself, but it is more likely to you will make tons of mistakes, and lose too much time if you are learning advanced math with no help whatsoever. And in some cases, you will never be able to learn it beyond a certain level by yourself.

Of course there are some people who are born with a natural talent to it at different degrees. In most cases, even they require the help of other people for reaching their full potential. There might be few people reaching very high levels without being coached, or without even studying as much as others, but they are not good examples. Because we only know that those people were talented enough to get better than most of the other people, without knowing  if they really reached their full potential, if they could have exceeded their current level using more efficient study methods. 

To summarize it, yes you can get very good at something without being tutored. If you can't find/afford somebody to coach you, how much it would help you on top of studying by yourself becomes irrelevant anyway. Just do best you can, and enjoy it.

Very few of the people with a chess coach will become any kind of master.

Unfortunately the opposite is also true.

If private lessons are out of your price range, have you considered a chess club? I don't know about your area, but over here most clubs offer free group lessons to members.

Unless you have enormous natural talent it is unlikely that you will reach master level chess simply "on your own".  As it has been said, many people who have the money and time to get high level coaching never make it, so how much harder would it be training by yourself?

I watched you tube vidoe the other day of Bobby Fischer being  interviewed, in which he was asked if a regular person could become a great chess player with study.  His answer (paraphrased) was, "no, but you can become a pretty good one."  The highest level players have a natural talent with the game, which they develope with vast amount of hard work.

There probably are master level players who have not been coached.  But just as the best athlets have coaches, trainers, work out partners, etc, so do chess players.  Even when you get past the level of needing a "teacher", the very high level GMs have training parters, sometimes called "seconds", as in the old dueling traditions, who help them get ready for matches, develope theory, etc. 

Although Fischer played at a very high level very early, he most certianly did not achieve his success "all by him himself".  Even Fischer used seconds to train,  Larry Christiansen for one.

Fischer's first teacher was his grandfather's cousin Jacob Schonberg, who was instrumental in fostering the importance of the game to him. From this training he was able to beat the other young'ns around, and his mom asked the newspaper for help. Through the editor, Fischer was introduced to Carmine Nigro, who coached him for several years at the Brooklyn Chess Club because his own son had no interest in chess. Nigro convinced Fischer to join his first tournament when the kid had decided it should be a spectator sport. Fischer also received street-smart training, and was never far removed from the hustlers of Washington Square park (once remaining in the downpouring rain to finish a complicated endgame). When he joined the Manhattan chess club, which was at the time the best chess club in the country, he received further coaching from Harold Sussman and Hans Kmoch (pawn power in chess), and participated in many un-official tournaments. It wasn't until the spring of 1956 when he met another coach, Jack Collins, and took advantage of his enormous library to further educate himself. - from "Profile of a Chess Prodigy" - Frank Brady

Fischer may or may not be having a coach. But, what's important is that Fischer played too determined to be defeated, even to the extent of sacrificing his Queen (from "The Game of the Century"). Little did Byrne realised that his noncommittal opening move will lead to such a precise game. Fischer's game plan(s) still can't be replicated by gaint chess engines.

I am sure this discussion about having a coach or not is leading to the question, "Do you play by the Book" ?

I thought so too. When Fischer had finished with Larsen, Larry was barely a master, about to enter 10th grade as I recall.

If Christiansen  had worked with Fischer later on I guess I missed that news.

Fischer was inconsistently consistent to WIN.

People may hold passionate beliefs about Fischer. The best decision makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. Four basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth of reality, and balancing. Playing disciplined chess is a system of techniques, because these techniques are very much interrelated. To perform either process adequately we must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination of the game.

But the biggest problem of Chess is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our games are to be accurate we have to continually revise them. The world itself is constantly changing. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the bad players of chess. Rather than try to change the game, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the game than would have required to revise and correct it in the first place.

Presently, standard chess is evolving more like a team play. A game of total dedication to truth also means a game of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our game is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other chess players. Otherwise we play in a closed system - within a bell jar, rebreathing only our fetid air, more and more subject to delusion. This is where a coach certainly comes handy.