i talked to my friend, he didn't really start playing serious chess till he was 18 (in terms of before that he didn't know openings or stratagey, now his 19 and a half). in a year and a half his rating went from around 1300 to 2000; correspondence chess and on playchess.com his bltiz is currently 1709 and his standard is 1900. so thats defintely a pretty big improvement to make in a year and a half. mind you he studies pretty hard like almost everyday.
i talked to him today and he disputed Anand's comment that "if your not a grandmaster by the age of 14 you should just forget about it."
now me and my friend are a bit confused did Anand mean if your not a grandmaster by age 14 you should forget about becoming a grandmaster or you just will never be a great grandmaster and that you should forget about playing for the chess championships and in those high caliber tournaments.
my friend seems to think that their most be a handful of GM's or IM's out their who only started playing chess later in their lives.
theirs got to be some out their... does anyone know of any others that might be?
Originally posted by ArrakThere's a definite point to be observed here. Sure, children seem to absorb material and skills very quickly, but there is a explaination for this that leaves out the age of the learner, and it is one that seems obvious to me. Time! I work full time, have two kids, and my parents are going crazy. Do I have the time to study anything effectively? No, of course not. Children, however, have all the time in the world to dedicate to a chosen subject. They have no responsibilities, no pressures, and truckload lots of free time. Put me in a situation like that and I promise you that my chess game will improve dramatically regardless of my age.
....mind you he studies pretty hard like almost everyday.
It is still true that adults often have a web of misunderstanding to unravel before true learning can take place and children certainly have the advantage of a clean slate. However, I don't believe that it would take that long for an adult someone to learn new skills if they actually had the freedom to study those skills full time.
If anyone wants to back me financially in this, I will gladly conduct experiments on myself to prove my point. 🙂
but still learning anything as a youngster helps but it dosen't mean everything. for example my dad and my mom spoke broken english before moving to canada, they learnt it in high school but they wern't comfortable with speaking it and they had much difficulty at first. but after 15 years living in north america they can speak english just fine and very fluently. so whos to say you cant learn to play chess very well as an adult!?
and what about all those smart people who go to school and study law, engineering and biologists. each year at school gets a bit harder and your always cramming something new into your brain. if theirs grandmasters by the age of 14, but i doubt their would be a 14 yearold who could be a laywer.
but then again chess is a sport and try to name me any professional athelete who learned the game after the age of 18. i can gurantee you their arn't any professional athletes like that, or are their?
then again some of those quadrapelegic athletes that lost their limbs and then start playing wheelchair basketball and some make it to the olympics.
Yet another important point here is that regardless of supposed intelligence,people learn new things and ways of doing them at different speeds of information intake. The total hours time available to learn chess to the higher standards is relevant to how good most players can become. Obviously starting from scratch with chess at age 4 or 5 gives such a child a huge time advantage in terms of the total study time available,however later in adult or near adult life it is still possible for some people to almost make up for those missing years of chess study, although this in reality is actually quite rare at the very highest or near highest levels of chess play.😉
This is exactly the phase i went through when i first started guitar. Will i be a rockstar? Am i too old to play heavy metal? YES, there is a big advantage starting young, but who cares? That's them. You're obviously not young, and you seem to sound bright to me, your games arnt to shabby either(i would be the worst player here) But you are still old enough to be a brilliant chess player. Go on prove me wrong, thank me when you reach 1800 elo.