Talent? What's the difference.

I don't get some things. How can a 9 year old beat a GM. How can Morphy be a chess champion at the age of 9, aswell as kasparov, josh waitzkin, polgar, fischer(of course) and all the other great TALENTED players.

What makes me not talented in chess?
What is the difference between me and them? (Do they see things differently? How differently?)
Can I learn up to their point? (probably not)

How can we explain their TALENT?

Not understanding this, drives me nuts.

Just screw your nuts, couse that kid does not have'em and they don't bother him at all :)

Take it easy and teach your kid chess before he/she begins to talk. And here the talent will come..

Yes but all those so called great talented players all learned by themselves like morphy or something. Stupid and unfair.

The Polgar sisters were an 'experiment', in part, about the creation of genious.  It's an amazing story.

Talent is more than working hard.  It is working smart.  No matter how hard you work, if you don't know what to teach yourself, then progress will end.   Most players peak because they reach a limit of understanding the game, the nuances, the patterns.  An investment in a coach or ocassional lessons might go a long way to cracking a barrier.  You have find a person that can teach - many players cannot.

This 47 minute "My Brilliant Brain" video was linked to in another thread and is extremely interesting.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6378985927858479238

From a scientific point of view, kids are capable of learning and memorising at a greater speed and have greater retention than many adults. I believe this is due in part to our fixation on the here and now. Kids dont have that barrier.

Well I'm 20 years old so it might not be too late. I 've seen the documentary, it's really good, but it doesn't really explain my question on HOW it's possible. Thats what I want to know. It has never been proven that chess masters have a higher intelligence. I know you can learn a lot as a kid, but when I play against my cousin's, I beat their asses. Their 4 to 6 years old. I don't expect them to beat me though, but still, it makes no sense to me that one kid is extremely good at the age of 6 and most of us suck ass at the age of 6. Morphy and casablanca didnt go through ten thousand databases. They figured it out by themselves. What do these kind of people see? How do they look at a chess board. It's frustrating.

The how has more to do with the quality of the learning process. If you have chessmaster grandmaster edition, Josh Waitzkin talks about this very thing. It starts as an interest for them. They fixate on that interest and learn everything they can about it,. If they cant learn all on their own, then they go to where they can. In Josh's case it was the local chess club. He stated that he wasnt born with the knowledge. He aquired the knowledge thru the experience of his losses. He says you need to have desire, devotion, and discipline. 100% in all three. As adults we are distracted by a great many things. As kids we are capable, but not often encouraged.

i think part of it is just having a mind that is good at math...

there is a reason that morphy and the rest never made a living at art and that is because thier minds were wired in such a way that concentrating on the chess board was easy. the rest of us just have to work harder to get that concentration that they get naturally.

hmm some things are explained but it's still a little weird. Anyway, Jetsetter, I will consider your suggestion

When Dick Cavet interviewed Fischer way back when, Fischer said something that will always haunt me - Cavet asked him if anyone could be great at chess without just having a natural talent for it or something along those lines, Fischer said "You can be good, not great."

But damn, chess is ALL Fischer did/thought about 24/7, right? In interviews he said he had no home, just hotels, no girls, nothing but chess... Went to bed thinking about it and woke up thinking about it.  Chess chess chess

This is like asking why some people are taller than others.

Emmanuel Lasker learned Chess from his brother Berthold at age 12 many People tried to dissect Lasker for years he was a philosopher, a mathematician with a PHD and yet with all of his experience and knowledge Lasker spent 31 years trying to forget what he learned and read! Lasker explains this on page 337 and 338 of his book he says kept his memory in good order but he avoided adding any dead weight to it he says in the book it's method that counts.

Chess talent is a very specific talent, it's not related to math or anything else. You are born with it or you are not. Exactly like great painters or poets. Of course they learn, work a lot, etc. but without talent it's nothing, just an average painter, poet, etc.

sebas4life - Why are you obsessed with that idea, why don't you regret that you are not a great mathematician, poet, ..., maybe you have talent in something else. You like chess - OK, we all like it, but even 10,000 hours of study will not make us all super-GMs, I do not believe that. Not only should you have a great talent, you should start at 5-6 years old, preferably your father/mother  has to be a chess player, at the very least good club level, you have to get a very good  coach then, study and play a lot, be dedicated. Look at Magnus Carlsen, he just finished the high school, that's it, didn't go to the university. But he knew what was his potential at that moment, do you know?

Years ago many studies were done about spacial relationships and the ability to play chess.  Although I cannot quote from memory the gist of some of these studies concluded that it is the strong ability to recognize and manipulate spaces and the ablity to substitute one symbol for another that is closely related and found to be strongest in kids ages 10 or so. 

I think it's mainly about will, if you have the will you just need the right direction.

If things don't work, change.

Why would you expect different results if you keep doing the same thing?

It's not that I'm obsessed with chess. I just have a strong urge to know how it works. Why are there musicans who CANNOT hear anything, but the pieces they compose are amazing. It's the same with chess. How can you understand a game so incredible deep, that you only have to lay eyes on it and understand it completely. In the Polgar documentary, it is told that she just knows  what the right move is. Without calculations. She can look at a board for one second and she can fully set it back up again. I have this feature in chessmaster, but I have to look for atleast a minute to compose a board again. I have to look at wich files there are pawns, that's how I do it. Do I have to look differently at the board to understand the fundamentals better? How do these incredible players look at  a board. How do they see it. That's what I'm very interested in. I just read Visua Spatial abilties of chess players of Andrew j Waters (Georgetown University) and it's not like the best chess players are more intelligent or better in math. 

If someone shows you a sentence that takes you about one second to read, you would be able to put all the letters back in place, fully setting up the sentence. If you think of the placement of the letters relative to the placement of the pieces, you have remembered just as much information in re-setting up the sentence as Polgar has in re-setting up the chess board.

Notice you would be completely incapable of doing this with a foreign language sentence.

So how do you do that? Your brain is a very powerful computational device, but it has to be programmed. Your brain associates meaning to the sentence and of course the letters are grouped as words. You can remember one word and recall all the letters for it -- you don't have to remember each individual letter. The same is true for Polgar. Her brain has been trained to associate meaning to chess positions and cluster parts of it together (like letters forming words, the pieces on the board form units in the mind).

It's not necessarily that the master is smarter than you are (though it does take some amount of mental aptitude), but they are trained in chess the way you are trained in reading your native language. This is why it appears to easy to them to navigate a chess game.

The very best chess players of course have some natural ability to learn chess just like some people have a natural ability for language or math. These don't necessarily overlap.

This was extremely helpfull!!!!!! Thanks!

You have to practice each of the fundementals until you can adhere to them without thought. Those who are deaf, can still feel sounds. As children we can pick up things a lot faster than adults. If you could devote 100% of your life to one pursuit, then you would pick it up just as fast as well. Theres no magical trick. A part of that devotion is playing countless hours of chess games, so much so, you just know how to respond to every position you come across. An adult grandmaster who loses to a kid of a young age, has more to do with a natural tendency to see kids as not being capable of intelligent thought. Intelligent thought has nothing to do with age. If you dont respect your opponnenets abilities, then you are going to lose regurlarly. This applies to children opponnents as well. What doesnt get mentioned often is that the 9 yr old who beat a grandmaster, was a grandmaster himself getting there first norm. They take the time to study there opponnent's previous games, work on developing a solid repertois to take there opponnent out of their comfort zone. The grandmaster will do the same if they respect their opponnent. Then it comes down to who is successful in sticking to their game plan. I hope this makes sense.

Natural talent just comes... naturally :)

Of course, working hard and working smart will always take you farther than just simply talent, but there are people that don't really have to work and yet can hit master level on intellect alone. However, if you don't have a natural "gift", working hard will get you just as far as those that are fortunate enough to have talent.