10,000 hours

I was playing an opponent rated about 1150 and noticed he had played some 11,500 games and had about 170 in progress. I went to the player tables and ranked players to see the top thirty movers. Apart from Caissad4 rated over 2000 and certainly a good player, all the rest were rated below 1700.

In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Allegedly this applies regardless of natural talent. I suggest that this site refutes his claim in a readily demonstrated way, assuming that most games on the site consume at least an average of one hour playing time. If you assume less time that just alters the number of games required. I am fairly confident that there are many players who have accumulated the requisite 10,000 hours on this site alone. Those with most moves should in any event be relatively high rated. They aren't.

Of course, the refutation has been argued by others. For instance:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/22/daniel-goleman-focus-10000-hours-myth/

I have to say though that I find this disappointing. I had looked forward to inevitably mastering the universe and finally defeating all you top players who presently kick sand in my face; now it looks like that may be harder to do.

Originally posted by finnegan
In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field.

Do not confuse practice with good practice. 'Practice makes perfect' is incorrect. Only good practice makes perfect.
You can play Chess without giving it much thought, for as many hours as you like and you will never achieve mastery. If however, you spend 10,000 hours studying chess using recommended study methods, you will have a very good rating by the end of it.

This applies to physical activities too. You can go ice skating every week for years and still be only able to do very basic forward skating. But take proper lessons, and within a few lessons you will be doing things you never achieved during years of just playing about. But even with structured lessons, it takes time to achieve mastery.