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Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

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Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#51

Post by ycombinete »

mquander wrote: post #4

I 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…

I only picked up chess in my mid 20's, and fell completely in love with the game. At 32 now I barely ever play, and am far happier for it. Through chess, I came to a number of realisations about myself, and what I want from games/hobbies in general.

I moved to Dubai recently, and started attending local meetups here. I even started my own mini-club. I quickly realised that the guys I was playing with were almost all much better than me. That they put more time in, and they had more history with the game. From this I saw that, just in order to get good enough to have any fun at these meetings, I would have to put in more time and effort than I even had available to me. I found myself having less and less fun. Winning felt okay, and losing felt like dying.

I have since moved on to other board games. Competitively: Magic the Gathering. And many other Euro-style board games that are not based on such zero-sum 1:1 competition (e.g. Caverna). MTG especially has been a god-send for me, as anyone can win a magic game, due in a large part to the randomness that is an essential part of the game. On top of the randomness there is the theme that is built into every card, and every magic colour in the game. This balances out the pure calculation of deck building and sequencing play with a healthy dose of imagination.

I grew up eschewing randomness at all costs, being fiercely competetive and hating the idea of winnin/losing as a result of something as seemingly arbitraty as a die roll, or card draw (heck I even refused to play 30 seconds with a die). But I've come to love randomness. When I sit down to play a game of magic my skill level is highly important in the outcome of the game, but so are the cards which I draw. That means that people of all skill levels can sit down and compete with each other. In chess a 300-500 ratings difference basically means that one player has close to 20% chance of winning. For a game that I would want to pursue as an after work activity those odds really just aren't good enough for me.

1. So I guess I've learnt that I need to keep in mind that I pursue any hobby purely for enjoyment.

2. That it's easy to lose sight of that. That, for me, enjoyment must come from more than just winning.

3. That I can't get this from chess in the long run. That I am not willing to put the time and effort into any game where it is 100% skill vs skill, as this is too competetive.

4. The games I play need some element of randomness to bridge those skill gaps, and add flavour to encounters.

5. Theme is so important, to keep my imagination involved in the game, not just calculation. Why should I just move abstracts around a board when I can play against other people, while imagining a small family of dwarfs, collecting goods, tending their farm in the forest, growing their little family, and building their home in the caves they dig out of the mountain.

I still play the odd game of chess on lichess.com, but every time I do all of the above comes back to me, and I remember why I stopped playing chess.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#52

Post by philbarr »

icr0 wrote: post #18

I 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 mysel…

Openings are the killer for me - I can never remember them, and it feels like a cheat to just remember a particular opening and trot out all the same moves all the time anyway.

But then I lose because I've made an obvious mistake during the opening...

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#53

Post by lmm »

WalterBright wrote: post #45
danielbarla wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

I long ago lost the remotest interest in who wins a baseball/tennis/football/olympic game, as it's meaningless. I know people get all wrapped around the axle on who wins, and the ludicrous propaganda of "medal counts" in the Olympics. But it's not for me. I have found it interesting to write software to play chess for me. The last few times I tried to play chess, my mind would just drift off designing a program to do…

> The universe is full of puzzles that mean something to solve. Why not work on those instead? Why would those be less interesting than a contrived set of rules?

Because those rules are designed (often iteratively) to be interesting. They have exactly the right rate of progress/reward to be engaging. In some research areas today it takes two years of postgrad work just to get to the point where you're capable of doing original research - and there's no guarantee that you'll produce anything useful even then.

Acquiring mastery of a skill is a fun experience, and drives a lot of human activity. Certainly most e.g. programming language designers seem to enjoy the skill and craft of doing it; I'm not at all convinced that that's not the real motivation for that activity, however much people claim to be driven by practical value or monetary reward.

Ultimately meaning is what we make it. People tend to enjoy games because they feel that they reflect something meaningful; a game is a "toy model" of reality, but toy models can be useful. There's a reason we consider these games to be interesting challenges and measures of progress for the same AIs that we also want to be able to e.g. drive cars.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#54

Post by barry-cotter »

atupis wrote: post #28
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I've found fairly shocking as a parent of an 8-year-old: the deep commitment on the part of other families to really commit to a specific sport or hobby. I don't know if I just grew up in too small of a rural town to have access to these opportunities (or if they're even healthy). As an example, one of the girls on my daughter's volleyball team is on 3 separate volleyball clubs simultaneously. She p…

There was pretty good econtalk about this topic http://www.econtalk.org/david-epstein-on-mastery-specializat... . But generally there are these sports with very narrow skills like chess which you has to specialize very early. Then there is these sports with very width skills like soccer where generally get best outcomes when you specialize rather late like 16 year old.

It’s a wonderful episode and I’m sure it’s an interesting book but I’d take it with more than a pinch of salt. Most people can’t get to a world class level in anything, whether they specialise early or not. I’d be more inclined to read K. Anders Ericsson’s book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters, or both.

For most areas of human expertise we don’t have the kind of knowledge about what to do and why, or the coaching infrastructure for youth prodigy breeding grounds like sports or playing a musical instrument. The number of doctors who started preparing for their career in any real fashion before they were twelve might be numbered in the hundreds, ditto financiers. Most things you can start at as an adult.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#55

Post by lmm »

person_of_color wrote: post #11

Has anyone taken up a hobby for the sole reason of staving off a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's?

I've known mahjong players who claimed that was their reason. But while that might be someone's reason to start a new hobby, I suspect that few if any people would be able to sustain a hobby they didn't actually enjoy.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#56

Post by circlefavshape »

ycombinete wrote: post #51
mquander wrote: post #4

I 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…

I only picked up chess in my mid 20's, and fell completely in love with the game. At 32 now I barely ever play, and am far happier for it. Through chess, I came to a number of realisations about myself, and what I want from games/hobbies in general. I moved to Dubai recently, and started attending local meetups here. I even started my own mini-club. I quickly realised that the guys I was playing with were almost all…

1 and 2 ring very true for me. Playing something where you have to bring every ounce of your intellectual power to bear in order not to be humiliated just isn't any fun.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#57

Post by ArneVogel »

patrickdavey wrote: post #34

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, t…

You mention chessable so I would like to shout out my own project. I created listudy[0] that does a lot of the things that chessable does, but is also free open source[1]. On my site I use spaced repetition to memorize openings. Unfortunately there are not many studies on there right now but hopefully this will change in the future. [0] https://listudy.org/ [1] https://github.com/ArneVogel/listudy

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#58

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

gbacon wrote: post #47
person_of_color wrote: post #11

Has anyone taken up a hobby for the sole reason of staving off a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's?

https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/av... Flying as a Challenge If you go to the local general aviation airport, you'll find lots of guys in their 60s and 70s who are tackling challenges that are way beyond your own capabilities. Certainly these guys are much sharper and in better mental and physical shape than the average person of their age. Flying requires mental acuity and real-time decision…

I'm relatively young (31) and learned to fly last year. Out of all activities I've ever been involved in (sports, programming, executive life, teaching, etc.), flying has BY FAR made me most aware of my mental state and thought process. Nothing I've ever done has made me feel so task-saturated and consciously aware of how well (or poorly) I was coping with a cognitive task.

Not only can it sometimes be a very task-saturating environment (especially single-pilot IFR flying), but the added "nerves" of flying make it a perfect combo for you to become hyper-aware of yourself in a way that I hadn't yet experienced. The most interesting part of the whole ordeal for me has been to see my progression in terms of how my brain could handle the tasks at hand. At first, I remember intently listening to the weather report on the radio only to IMMEDIATELY forget the information I had just heard, such was my cognitive overload. Now, I can be in the middle of clouds, seeing nothing, punching information into the flight computer while hand flying the plane listening to ATC in one ear and talking to my passenger on the other. To have been acutely aware how slowly my brain adapted to the new demands I was placing on it was incredibly interesting.

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#59

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

atupis wrote: post #28
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I've found fairly shocking as a parent of an 8-year-old: the deep commitment on the part of other families to really commit to a specific sport or hobby. I don't know if I just grew up in too small of a rural town to have access to these opportunities (or if they're even healthy). As an example, one of the girls on my daughter's volleyball team is on 3 separate volleyball clubs simultaneously. She p…

There was pretty good econtalk about this topic http://www.econtalk.org/david-epstein-on-mastery-specializat... . But generally there are these sports with very narrow skills like chess which you has to specialize very early. Then there is these sports with very width skills like soccer where generally get best outcomes when you specialize rather late like 16 year old.

> sports with very width skills like soccer where generally get best outcomes when you specialize rather late like 16 year old

What? No. Are you from a country like the USA, where soccer isn't taken seriously?

Re: Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

#60

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ycombinete wrote: post #51
mquander wrote: post #4

I 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…

I only picked up chess in my mid 20's, and fell completely in love with the game. At 32 now I barely ever play, and am far happier for it. Through chess, I came to a number of realisations about myself, and what I want from games/hobbies in general. I moved to Dubai recently, and started attending local meetups here. I even started my own mini-club. I quickly realised that the guys I was playing with were almost all…

Protip: it's okay to play chess for fun. Winning isn't the goal.
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