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Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

nautil.us

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Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#31

Post by crististm »

nanijoe wrote: post #17
surfsvammel wrote: post #15

I 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

Playing against strongest players (or engines) demoralizes me. It makes me want to avoid the game. I find I need to play against a challenger that is better than me but one that I can beat about 30% of the time.

Back in the day I was pretty good at Warcraft 2 - solo and missions. I have a friend that never lost to me - not even once, although later I found I was close on two occasions to beat him. In the end I lost interest to play with him because in a way I would know the outcome.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#32

Post by danielbarla »

WalterBright wrote: post #30

I can't say I understand devoting such time to learning a completely useless, extremely narrow, skill. Learning mathematics is useful. Learning to play a guitar is useful. Learning to program is useful. I came to this conclusion in college. It was hard enough learning math, thermo, physics, etc., and seemed a complete waste of time to get better at chess. The former consumed my mental energies.

Chess is just about the most highly refined competitive intellectual task / "sport" you can ask for (by sheer weight of the number of serious players, and the level of play, though a similar argument can be made for Go). In and of itself, that could be an interesting concept to explore. And if we reject it, I suspect we'd also have to reject other competitive endaevours, like soccer, tennis, etc. To be honest, I sometimes do wonder why we as a species seems to be so intensely focused on silly, "useless" skills like running the 100m in under 10 seconds. I guess it's in our nature to be competitive.

(Obligatory "I didn't downvote you")

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#33

Post by patrickdavey »

pstuart wrote: post #10

I highly recommend lichess. Create an account and bookmark it and play endgames when you need a "distraction": https://lichess.org/training

hell yes, I've been playing those little chess puzzles for ages. Extremely addictive!. Neat that you can drop into the game and "continue" from a point when you're just _sure_ the computer has it wrong, only to find out that of course it was correct all along.

Yes, rate the training puzzles!

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#34

Post by patrickdavey »

I played a little as a child (enough to beat my dad, who was a complete beginner). I've become quite addicted in the last couple of years (and yes, I'm 40 now). While I agree with the sentiments that "it's a total waste of time and I should learn something useful", it's still fun to have a challenging distraction.

One thing I've found it quite good for is _learning to lose_. I _hate_ losing at games, even now, but, the nice thing about being a beginner chess player is that there are bazillions of people better than you to play against, and lose to!.

On the topic of improving, as others have said, the training puzzles on lichess are great. I've also got quite a lot of value out of [0] chessable.com . Nice little site, teaches you some basic openings which are really fun when people fall into the traps!

[0] https://www.chessable.com/

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#35

Post by _carl_jung »

WalterBright wrote: post #30

I can't say I understand devoting such time to learning a completely useless, extremely narrow, skill. Learning mathematics is useful. Learning to play a guitar is useful. Learning to program is useful. I came to this conclusion in college. It was hard enough learning math, thermo, physics, etc., and seemed a complete waste of time to get better at chess. The former consumed my mental energies.

Well, some people want to devote themselves to joy, rather than usefulness.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#36

Post by tomcooks »

person_of_color wrote: post #12
zawerf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Writing such a snarky comment? Oh yes.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#38

Post by thom »

pstuart wrote: post #10

I highly recommend lichess. Create an account and bookmark it and play endgames when you need a "distraction": https://lichess.org/training

Worth noting that lichess and all of the code behind it (some of which is algorithmically very interesting) is developed in the open[0], and Thibault Duplessis even regularly livecodes on Twitch[1].

0: https://github.com/ornicar

1: https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#40

Post by Yajirobe »

WalterBright wrote: post #30

I can't say I understand devoting such time to learning a completely useless, extremely narrow, skill. Learning mathematics is useful. Learning to play a guitar is useful. Learning to program is useful. I came to this conclusion in college. It was hard enough learning math, thermo, physics, etc., and seemed a complete waste of time to get better at chess. The former consumed my mental energies.

How are guitar playing skills useful if you don't plan to be a professional musician?
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