Older Players Playing at Top Level and Improving Older Players

I'm glad I took the time.  I like you, you're funny.

Thanks for the citation; that's a great story, and I'll use it.  Very apt.

First, "prodigy" is a meaningless word.  People have developed a horrible fatalist mentality when it comes to intellect.  If you care to look into a different --and sicentifically supportable view of learning and brain plasticity--, I advice looking into Carol Dweck's work or reading Waitzkin's "The Art of Learning," which talks about Dweck.  Are prodigies good because they are prodigies, or are they called prodigies because they are good?  Laszlo Polgar, the father of the world-class female chess triumvirate, is a psychologist, and his landmark paper on genius being created, not born, is made manifest in said daughters.  I think it is said that so many children beomce what they are told they are (and can't do anything about), and then become because of it.  I was one of those students who was said to be "retarded" when I was in elementary school.  Fortunately, I didn't believe it, and I went on to study in top universities.  I beg reconsideration of this perspective.

On the bit about Korchnoi and Vishy, I think you missed the main idea in the start of the thread: cognitive scientists think that the slowing of neurons is among the reasons for losing ability to perform tasks later in life, and I am making the stretch, suggesting that chess is one of these activities.  If that's the case, then ability developed in youth has nothing to do with not losing the ability later in life, especially considering that other top players faded long before these two.

I disagree. I've made an effort to find good chess literature and I'm not that impressed with what I've found. I'm studying Nimzovitch's "My System" at the moment and some seems high quality, some trash, most somewhat in between. Yet many praise this as "the best". (Not everyone - hicetnunc was highly critical of it in another post, and he strikes me as a wise person whose views are to be taken seriously.)

The only book I actually own is "The Mammoth Book of Chess", and it's no page turner! Not a bad encyclopedia, but tedium sets in if I spend more than a few minutes with it.

I studied physics in my yoof up to MSc level and that's beset by the same problems - Feynman's Lectures on Physics gets praised by many, but it's very much a mixed bag. To study physics you need many other textbooks, a University course, and lecturers/tutors/coaches.

I'm tempted to give up on chess improvement because it's so difficult to see an enjoyable way forward, and I'm not prepared to hack through the jungle of chess as I once hacked through the jungle of physics. Life has to be easier than that, especially in retirement!

hicetnunc and I are friends, and I take him seriously.  There should be no confusion there.

I'm probably not going to make to much headway with someone who thinks "The Feynman Lectures" is a mixed bag.  It certainly isn't for every university classroom, primarily due to the fact that I don't think 99% of students entering the university physics introductory classroom are not conceptually and mathematically well prepared --and don't even get me started on the general inability of incoming students to develop problem-solving strategies.  It's actually kind of funny that you mention this, because I've had a lot of arguments with physics department faculty members about whether intro physics (honors) courses should be taught using them.  It's okay to disagree on this, I think, because every physics department I've been involved with has been split on the topic.  However, I have a small moral victory, in that half of my undergraduate honors physics class used "The Feynman Lectures" to learn from, and only did the problems from our class textbook, while the other half did not.  Of us, 21 out of 25 went on to PhD prgrams in physics (the other 4 went intoother doctoral programs) and only 3 of the 26 or 27 other students not using "The Feynman Lectures" went on to PhD programs.  In my very humble opinion, knowing "The Feynman Lectures" means having the foundation necessary to easily manage the most difficult physics problems face in later courses.  For whatever pedagogical failings it has, I think supplements can be very, very easily constructed.

I am interested in what chess book titles you'd say are trash.  I am curious as to whether I've read them and whether I'd agree.  

I learned only the basic rules of chess in my youth from a library book, and over a lifetime have played only a few dozen OTB board games with putzer friends who had to be reminded about en passant and castling.

When I was 54 I started playing, off and on, on this site - which has become somewhat of an addiction. I started out sub 1000 and am now at 1400 (in standard!) - this through just playing and glancing at a website and "Mammoth Book" for tips now and again. So you can improve, a bit, post 50!

I'm trying to do some studying after a 'orrible descent to 1300. I'm back to 1400 through doing *some* analysis, only playing when fresh and undistracted, trying to read some books, forcing myself to do *some* Tactics Trainer,...

So I don't think it's that tough to improve after 50 - I've done mostly wrong things and still improved, a bit!

People who (can) read Feynman books seems genuinely interested in physics, rather than getting cheap answers to their next assignment problems. MAybe it is the reason why they succeed more.

Yes, I've heard this rationalization before, though my experience argues against it.  A better argument against the effectiveness of "The Feynman Lectures," and the one used against the empirical data presented from my entering physics class, was that people using the texts will work harder to understand them, and so we would have done even better if we had exhibited the same effort with pedagogically superior texts.

The only way to resolve this is for someone to conduct studies on the texts, and compare the outcome with control groups.  However, that's never going to happen, because the texts do need a supplement --I don't argue that--, and the group of subjects for such a study would all have to have commensurate (and sufficient!) preparation in high school.  You'll only get that kind of group of subjects if you conduct the study across Ivy League Schools, top tech schools (e.g., MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, etc.), and the top undergraduate departments with comparable programs to the former two groups.  It will never happen.  However, if I end up teaching a university physics course or two, I will probably use "The Feynman Lectures" and create a supplement, supposing I have a well prepared class of students.

All of them .

No, seriously, I'm not saying that chess books are trash as regards the knowledge they are conveying. I don't know enough to say that. All the ones I've encountered have trashy aspects. For instance, you can't just read them. You have to get out a board, and translate the algebraic notation into moves on the board, to get anything out of them. Maybe Chess Mentor is the answer?

Even excluding this "set up" problem, I don't find reading chess books to be a great experience. I could be reading Karl Ove Knausgård or Charles Dickens instead. But it's, perhaps, rather unfair to expect chess writers to match the best novelists for reading enjoyment.

Then again, I find actually playing chess to be (mostly!) fun. And I find it the best "active" mental complement to novel reading and listening to music, when I don't feel like writing.

And it might be an even better experience if I cut down on making daft mistakes, and just get better at the game. So perhaps I just have to go through the pain of doing some reading & studying to make playing more fun.

For instance, you can't just read them. You have to get out a board, and translate the algebraic notation into moves on the board, to get anything out of them.

Mal_Smith: A number of chess books also appear as e-books which allow you to read the text and click through the moves as you view the position on the computer screen.

Actually, that's probably going to hinder people, if they play through the moves.  I am not sure what my officical USCF strength is right now (but we will find out by the end of this year), but I am getting to the point where I can read a chess book without making the moves on the board, and it concerns me that ebooks would allow you to see the moves played out without a physical board, because that might promote laziness.  I love IM Rensch's advice: try to visualize the position after one move, two moves, and if, OOPS!, you don't get it, try to visualize it again, and again, and again, until you see it.  I think my laziness, in not wanting to get out a board, has been a tremendous benefit to me (as IM Rensch would probably agree), but I don't want to speak as an authority, certainly.

Milliern: There is something to be said for visualizing moves from books, but that skill comes slowly and would make books close to useless for novices.

There is something to be said for people playing moves over on a physical board. In Yusupov's orange books he insists that the reader use a real chess set for his course.

But if Mal_Smith is going to dismiss most of chess literature because he has to set up the pieces on a board, I say let him try an e-book.

I think the jury is out on the effects of computerization of chess play and study.

However, it may be much tougher if an older player didn't have some younger experience to build upon as our 87 year-old friend did.

I said this earlier because just about all the stories I'd seen of players getting serious about chess later in life were people who had played when they were young.

The only exception was a chess.com poster who had started in his seventies and then given up because he had studied for several months, hadn't improved and felt too sad and frustrated to continue.

I know I am grateful I played when young, now that I've returned to chess in my sixties.

I would be happy to learn that experience when young is not a decding factor, but I'll sure bet it is an advantage.

For one thing, there is the neurological process of synaptic pruning and myelination that occurs in one's teens to mid-twenties which gives those young memories extra protection.

First, "prodigy" is a meaningless word.  People have developed a horrible fatalist mentality when it comes to intellect.

Milliern: You can say that again. I'm glad we are beginning to see pushback on that attitude.

Some years ago I read an article by a mathematician about grad students giving up on math because they felt they couldn't be geniuses.

I don't think I count for this thread but I turned 33 a few months ago and only started playing Chess seriously about six months ago. Tops. I learned the moves very young - around four years old - but life dragged me in a different direction for a few decades lol. I've been playing and studying nearly non stop for the last couple of months, started playing rated OTB games, and am just completely enveloped by the game. I'd like to reach 2200+ at some point in the future and get where I think I would have been already if I had been in this game right from the get go. 

Again, I do notice that this thread is mainly talking about seniors and beyond making huge strides in their ratings but I also know that it's unusual for someone my age to get to 2200+ so I thought I would throw my two pennies out there. 

I've made quite a bit of progress so far. I haven't played much in the last six weeks as I've been studying day and night but I was already over 1400 on FICS, 1800 on Chesscube and 1300 on ICC ...standard ratings. My ChessTempo standard is nearing 1600 and my blitz is around 1485. Friends who I used to go blow for blow with OTB are just a cakewalk now, regularly resigning in under 30 moves. It's been a blast. 

Warbringer: I think yours is an interesting case too. And congratulations on your progress!

Mikhail Chigorin, the Russian grandmaster from the late 1800s, learned the moves at 16 but didn't start active play until he was 24. Still he became one of the top players in the world and only lost by two games to Steinitz for the world championship in 1889.

Since then, however, all world champion contenders started serious play as children or teens.

The pragmatists have a great view on this: knowledge is not abstract, it is a behavior, lending much more cash value you to the adage of true knowing being equivalent to doing, which is really the importance of tournament play over taking tests out of chess books.  Particularly, Dewey held the belief that knowledge is a behavior, not some idealistic abstraction that exists in the mind but cannot be exhibited in the world.  All of these people in Schools of Education in the university talk Dewey up and talk about how they love him, but they don't believe him and they don't take him seriously, obviously.  If they did, they would not be obsessed with "(arbitrary!!!) standards" and "standardized testing."  Such a shame.

I think anyone who learns how the pieces move after the age range of 18-22, at the very latest, may be in the same boat, because neuroscientists say that the reverse engineering process of brain development, where neurons are winnowed away, ends for most people between about 15 and 22.  In children who live in war zones, where the brain is in a constant state of awareness because of fight-or-flight biological mechanisms, the winnorwing process ends younger (and the brain actually deteriorates, because, as it is a known fact of the biological sciences, growth and development of cells cannot occur in these states, at least not on large-scale).

Therefore, I realize you think people late in life are at a particular disadvantage, so far as learning chess, but a 25 year-old who first learns chess has approximately the same difficulty in cutting neural pathways the way that much older players do.

It leaves the question: does it help someone to learn very basic things, like how the pieces move, whenever a child, and then beginning to play, say, after retirement?  I suspect the answer is yes.  having developed basic hardwiring at a young age is an overwhelming advantage.  Here is one piece of evidence: http://p-r4.blogspot.com/  This fellow claims that the progress he made was made within a year.  I don't buy that.  I started playing chess at 25 (i.e., learned how the pieces move) during a year off from PhD studies in physics, and I spent 15+ hours per day studying --and that's coupled with the fact that I have been paid by university cog sci departments, so that they could study me, because of my exceptional ability to learn--, and I gained 300 points both of my first two years in the USCF.  Gaining more than that, I am nearly 100%, is impossible for an adult first starting to play chess as an adult.  This fellow admits to learning the basics as a kid, and then wants to attribute his 700+ point gain in one year (as an adult) on his intellect (or, maybe, study strategy).  

You definitely count.  In fact, your account is interesting with regard to whether learning basics as a kid helps cut neural pathways for when developing knowledge much later, as an adult.  I am confident it does.  I learned how the pieces moved in November of 2007, and a friend, with some amount of experience in chess as a child, decided to study with me and go to tournaments.  (We ended up making a chess team and playing in the Pittsburgh Chess League.) Anyways, he studied much less than I did --that probably goes without saying--, and his rating jumped up considerably higher than mine at first.  I think some of the tests I took in the first month said I was 700 and he was 900.  About 2 months into tournaments, I was 1100 and he was 1250, but I caught up to him very quickly.  All that is to say, it seems like an advantage to have learned stuff in youth, but it is really hard to judge how much, exactly. 

Chess is one of the great practical laboratories for studying human learning.