Has anyone taken up a hobby for the sole reason of staving off a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's?
Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#12I have some personal experience that gives me a different perspective. I learned chess when very young (~5) but I failed to be a successful prodigy -- my rating capped out around 1100 USCF. Every few years I would pick the game back up and play a few tournaments, and each time I improved a bit. I love chess, but it's never been anything like the central focus of my life. In my late 20s I moved to California and also…
A famous competitive programming prodigy is tourist[1]. You can find his rating graph starting from 2006 on topcoder when he was just 12 years old: https://www.topcoder.com/members/tourist/details/?track=DATA... He's now indisputably the best competitive programmer in the world. But it's comforting to know that he too had to slowly grow over many years starting from a mere mortal 1200 rating. [1] https://en.wikipedia…
What a waste of brain cycles.
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#13I was never able to "get" chess.
I know the rules, I can methodically scan every position, but I feel that I can never really think more than one step ahead. I just start feeling restless, get overwhelmed at the board and my processing slows to a crawl.
I might look calm and focused on the outside, but inside I'm fidgety and thinking "what the fuck am I looking at? how can I ever think of a larger strategy when I can barely think of a move that doesn't get my pieces killed?" It feels like I become a very slow triply-nested for-loop.
I work at a FANG and am very good at my job, so don't need the validation. Still a bummer. Wish I was better.
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#14I was never able to "get" chess. I know the rules, I can methodically scan every position, but I feel that I can never really think more than one step ahead. I just start feeling restless, get overwhelmed at the board and my processing slows to a crawl. I might look calm and focused on the outside, but inside I'm fidgety and thinking "what the fuck am I looking at? how can I ever think of a larger strategy when I can…
Chess excellence depends very much on experience: the more you play and train, the better you get. See, people say it's the mind game, but it only depends on the intelect as long both players are similarly experienced.
Also, a game of chess is long and can get boring: in the beginning of a game people usually play "by the book", trying to adhere to some basic principles (control the center of the table, pull out your pieces into play, protect your king by castling, etc).
In the middle of the game, as long as you managed to avoid losing any piece so far, is where the actual play takes place, when you try to gain material advantage and this is where I spend most of my thinking fuel.
The end of the game, again, depends very much on training and experience, because there are known strategies how one should play with pawn and king against king for example. Of course, some of the strategies are obvious, like promoting your pawn to a queen and mate your opponent, but others are not, like gaining the opposition to be able to promote/block the pawn.
I don't have too much patience playing whole games myself, but I like training my mind by making chess puzzles/tactics daily, which I'd recommend you try yourself: your offered a position where you know that after a few moves you have to end up in advantage.
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#15I am going through this very process at the moment. Picked up chess for the first time three months ago and trying to learn it. Studying hours per day. It is kind of an experiment. How good can I get in a couple of months at the age of 37?
So far, it seems, not that good... Chess is a lot tougher to learn than I initially thought.
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#16I have some personal experience that gives me a different perspective. I learned chess when very young (~5) but I failed to be a successful prodigy -- my rating capped out around 1100 USCF. Every few years I would pick the game back up and play a few tournaments, and each time I improved a bit. I love chess, but it's never been anything like the central focus of my life. In my late 20s I moved to California and also…
A famous competitive programming prodigy is tourist[1]. You can find his rating graph starting from 2006 on topcoder when he was just 12 years old: https://www.topcoder.com/members/tourist/details/?track=DATA... He's now indisputably the best competitive programmer in the world. But it's comforting to know that he too had to slowly grow over many years starting from a mere mortal 1200 rating. [1] https://en.wikipedia…
sometimes I read this guy's wikipedia page for inspiration
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#17I am going through this very process at the moment. Picked up chess for the first time three months ago and trying to learn it. Studying hours per day. It is kind of an experiment. How good can I get in a couple of months at the age of 37? So far, it seems, not that good... Chess is a lot tougher to learn than I initially thought.
how are you learning though? Who you play against is pretty important. You need to try and play against the strongest players you can find. Dont be afraid of losing to them
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#18I started chess at about 900 lichess, and plateaued at 1800(10+0 rapid).
What got me from 900-1100 was playing carefully and evaluating my move before I played it(can this piece be taken/is there a mating strategy for my opponent), to prevent blunders
What got me from 1100-1400 was learning two solid openings (Ruy lopez for both sides/ Grunfeld against 1.d4)
1400-1600 was doing hella tactic puzzles, and putting myself in my opponent's position and looking for his tactics
1600-1800 i have no idea, just practice i guess
John Bartholomew's strategy videos and Saint Louis Chess Club opening videos were probably the best resources for me to learn
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#19I have some personal experience that gives me a different perspective. I learned chess when very young (~5) but I failed to be a successful prodigy -- my rating capped out around 1100 USCF. Every few years I would pick the game back up and play a few tournaments, and each time I improved a bit. I love chess, but it's never been anything like the central focus of my life. In my late 20s I moved to California and also…
This is California you are talking about.
They get the best of everything, least they can do is be good at their meaningless pursuits.
Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)
#20this is the same with poker. lots of resources and more opportunity to play the game.
in the early 2000s internet poker starting getting more and more popular and more and more knowledge was made available because of the internet. more and more players trained on the internet began showing up to live tournaments.
a lot of the "live" pros hated the way "internet kids" were playing poker but at the same time those internet kids had probably played more hands than most of the live pros did.
in a live setting you're lucky to get 30 hands an hour. probably more average would be 10-15. meanwhile players online were getting anywhere from 75-90 hands an hour.... per table. okay players probably could get to 4 tables with no trouble while at the extreme end there were people 24-tabling. 24*75 = 1800. that's about 60 hours at best for a live player.