Will Just Playing Help Me Improve

Lespaul_Lover wrote:

Question for those of you who play OTB very regularly. I recently joined my chess club and some of the guys there told me that if I just came to club and played chess every week I would improve. I am just wondering how the general populace of chess.com feels about this idea! Thanks for reading 👍

If you write down your games and review them carefully afterwards, and learn from your mistakes, you may well improve.

Yeah, annotating your own game is among the best improving practices!

But it is not so much a good method to resolve blundering.

Try to find the best move you can, every time, work really hard at preforming well (I don't mean winning games, but playing to your potential). Make zero "obvious" mistakes. The goal is every mistake you make you can say "I really tried my best with that position, so this is a useful mistake I can learn from." And never "I got lazy or tired or frustrated and I didn't try my best with that move."

Then yes, you'll improve... not all the way to 2500 with only this, but if your chess.com rating is even somewhat accurate, then you stand to gain many 100s of points from just playing and trying hard.

if you play at anything you'll improve it's just common sense

I hate to give such a simple and blunt answer, but here's what I got:

It largely depends on your age.

If you're an older player, just playing won't improve you, and you will need to work very hard to improve your rating. If you are a younger player, working hard will be useful, but the most important thing by far would be to just keep playing. Younger players learn and improve more naturally, and more quickly, and if you're on the older side, you will probably need to study, do a lot of tactics practice, get coaching, etc.

What's the age at which a "younger player" becomes an "older player?" I don't know. Somewhere between 18 and 30, probably, but hard to say.

Playing will certainly help; it's just that you're not going to gain 300 points by just playing without studying, the way a 12 year-old might. So it's just important to figure out what your goals are, and how much you're willing to put into it to achieve those goals.

I don't agree with dpnorman in any way. For a start, younger players learning faster means that they'll learn both the good and the bad faster. If they're doing soemthing right, they'll learn it faster. If they're doing something wrong, they'll develop a bad habit much faster.

That's not even the main reason why I don't agree. Basically, just the whole concept of not improving from playing alone if you're above a certain age is ridiculous unless you're talking about well over double the age of 30.

Not improving from playing alone if you're already a very experienced player makes perfect sense, but what dpnorman said makes no at all.

Does kicking a ball help you play football? Yes, up to a point.

Damn norman.  You are burying your own potential with your fear.  I thinkif  you believe you can improve, you will.

Now which sounds more poetic?

Though I agree there is a barrier, I think you are overestimating.

I tend to agree if your young it helps a lot. The brain being a spunge at a young age.

Sooner or later, you will reach a point where improving requires study. 

If you're asking this question, then chances are you haven't reached that point yet.  

Even so, you will still learn faster from play + study than from playing alone. It's up to you how serious you are about improving, there's nothing wrong with just playing for fun. 

Try and find a mentor in you local club.

@ChessOath I'd like to know what your experiences on the topic are.

Because I played a number of tournaments at a certain chess club in Baltimore, until it died recently. That club had a large number of constant regulars, who played every single weekend, and an even larger number of guys who came once or twice a month.

A lot of the regulars, i.e. the guys who played every single weekend for years, were over 30 years old, and while some of them improved a little at the beginning, they almost all hit plateaus and didn't break them. Ever. Despite logging hundreds of games each year. In fact, many of them regressed and were sitting at their rating floors.

Most of them didn't study chess seriously during the week. So this is more or less a perfect demonstration of what the OP is asking about. I don't want to give specifics here, but if asked I can send PMs to show what I'm talking about.

If they had studied, who knows what would have happened! All I'm saying is that there's a point you reach eventually where you need to study more to improve. And if you don't study, you plateau. In fact, you can even plateau if you do study, which has been my situation for the past year. It just shows how tough it is for non-kids to improve at chess. But just be realistic about your expectations.

My experience is almost none existent. My "opinion" (everything I said was really just obvious facts) comes from me not being a complete moron.

I've read enough of your nonesense posts in the past to know that nothing good will come from reading any more of this post than I've quoted, so I won't. I've got better things to do than read your crap.

I think the point ChessOath is trying to make is rubbish in = rubbish out so improvement depends on the quality of the opposition and or study material.

some tough talking there Chessoath.

a kind of tai-chi response there from dpnorman, brute force versus sheer subtlety, this could be a good contest.