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On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

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Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#201

Post by francisofascii »

tikej wrote: post #105
sedivy94 wrote: post #31

Highly, highly recommend "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix. Like wow.

It is a cool series but nowhere near real description of chess. Of course it’s ok, but it’s worth to remember, that in order to get to the international level you need excellent coaches and years of brutal many hour practice. Talent is somewhat important but nowhere as important as training. To have more objective outlook at “chess prodigy” story it’s interesting to look story of Joshua Waitzkin. He is a great and ta…

For those who might be unaware, the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer" is about Josh Waitzkin.

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#202

Post by LanceH »

blub wrote: post #115

I would recommend chess for kids/teens, because it's an interesting way to teach certain self-control and tactical/strategy concepts which can be applied in real life. As an adult, chess is a time sink with very little upside if you want to be at least decent, especially at longer time controls. I've been playing chess for more than a couple of decades, but recently decided to stop partly because of the pandemic, but…

I like that kids (or adults) playing it have to learn to handle the ego check. There is no blaming randomness, teammates, or that the other kid is bigger/faster.

One other nice thing about chess versus other board or computer games is that whatever you put into it will still be useful twenty years from now. The game isn't going to change between now and then.

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#203

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

blub wrote: post #115

I would recommend chess for kids/teens, because it's an interesting way to teach certain self-control and tactical/strategy concepts which can be applied in real life. As an adult, chess is a time sink with very little upside if you want to be at least decent, especially at longer time controls. I've been playing chess for more than a couple of decades, but recently decided to stop partly because of the pandemic, but…

What about Blitz chess?

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#204

Post by aerovistae »

Pelic4n wrote: post #35
windowshopping wrote: post #28

I did something very similar with an old strategy game called Age of empires II. Over the course of two years I went from a 1300 rating to 1850. I don't play chess, so it's hard for me to compare the scales, but I will say the highest players were rated around 2600. I think being 1850 put me around 90-95th percentile for active players-- there were less than 50 players over 2300, and only a few hundred over 2000. My…

That's amazing. I love that game dearly and have been playing on/off for more than 15 years, so I get routinely obsessed with it, play a lot a few weeks, get good against the AI (usually using cheese like huskarl spam or massed mangudai), then get my ass handed to me online & ends up quitting. Then I don't play for a year or so. At which point were you able to reliably not fail the boar lure ?

While I disagree with the other comment gatekeeping RTS's, which can be played however you want (my father pauses the game in between every action in order to keep up with the gamestate), I do agree that ~15-25 games of dedicated boar lure practice, just restarting the game after each attempt, should be enough to get it right in tandem with watching some videos on how to do it.

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#205

Post by xuki »

dreamer7 wrote: post #139
xuki wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who could never break 1750 on Zone, hat off to both of you. Even though I no longer play, I did follow the scene closely for a while until a few years ago. To my surprise DauT is still a top player, although one of his teammate is clearly the indisputable No. 1 by a distance compare to anyone else.

To me, DauT is the Mikhail Tal of AOE while Viper is Bobby Fischer. I've watched endless videos of DauT and Viper playing AoE. ZeroEmpires has done a lot to popularize AoE streaming. Here's his YouTube channel if anyone is interested - https://www.youtube.com/user/ZeroEmpires

Nilpferd is my favorite: https://www.twitch.tv/nili_aoe

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#206

Post by aerovistae »

jaggederest wrote: post #97
windowshopping wrote: post #28

I did something very similar with an old strategy game called Age of empires II. Over the course of two years I went from a 1300 rating to 1850. I don't play chess, so it's hard for me to compare the scales, but I will say the highest players were rated around 2600. I think being 1850 put me around 90-95th percentile for active players-- there were less than 50 players over 2300, and only a few hundred over 2000. My…

If you're ever stuck on Rails stuff or want suggestions about where to go next, feel free to ping me, email in my profile. I've enjoyed tutoring/mentoring a lot over the last few years, would be a privilege to do more. That goes for any anonymous readers, as well. Anything from a one liner email all the way up to screensharing, helping people to learn is a gift.

Thank you very much for the invitation, really appreciated!

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#207

Post by aerovistae »

fakedang wrote: post #80
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree and also feel like I've learned valuable lessons from SC2. It sucks to give a game up though :/.

I play Starcraft for the story only, and I loved it. Still play the campaign from time to time. I feel like a savage amongst civilized men on this thread.

This was how I played AoE and StarCraft as a kid! I think the vast majority of players play them this way, actually. If you're in the competitive multiplayer scene, it's easy to forget there are millions or tens of millions of single player / campaign-only players.

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#208

Post by aerovistae »

_the_inflator wrote: post #36
windowshopping wrote: post #28

I did something very similar with an old strategy game called Age of empires II. Over the course of two years I went from a 1300 rating to 1850. I don't play chess, so it's hard for me to compare the scales, but I will say the highest players were rated around 2600. I think being 1850 put me around 90-95th percentile for active players-- there were less than 50 players over 2300, and only a few hundred over 2000. My…

Hey there fellow AoE II player! Cool, to hear from some decent player. What time did you play? Around 2002? Since I was a 2k player at the time, let me assure you, that the top dudes at the time (Koven, Sheriff for example) were already so called pro gamers who got payed/sponsored and they were exceptionally good. The true story is, that many folks above 2k+ did what was called "points trading" back then. Koven once…

Much more recently, actually-- I peaked last year, in 2019. The game is alive and well in the Definitive Edition on steam, and players are still pushing the skill envelope. The meta has changed a lot with all the new civs they've added (they've doubled the number of civs overall).

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#209

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

cupofcoffee wrote: post #69
llarsson wrote: post #4

Cool that the author does this, and has found a method that works for them! However, to be able to spend 2 hours a day on this seems like an indescribable luxury to me. And the quote about netting about 1.5 ELO per day sounds like a linear growth is assumed, which I can assure will not be the case past the initial massive improvements one gets from "not knowing the rules" to "actually starting to get it". I love solv…

Can you please tell us more about your day to day life and why 2 hours of free-time is considered a luxury?

If you have a full-time job, family, friends, exercise, and have a hobby or two already - I'm not sure where you come up with two hours of free time per day after that.

Are you literally scheduling everything you do? Are you sleeping less than 6 hours? Obviously, there's probably 2 hours per day in small intervals where I'm not maximizing my day.

Because of this, I recently picked up guitar, and this is nice for the random periods I'm free, because I feel like picking it up 4 or 5 times a day for 5-10 minutes still allows me to make a lot of progress, be creative, and learn a lot about (and appreciate) music.

Chess is also something you could do this with, but I feel like at that time scale it would be harder and less rewarding, and this is still about 1/4th of the two hours mentioned.

Edit:

I probably spend 30 minutes on HN per day, which is mostly a waste. But this is also in small intervals.

Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

#210

Post by loupgarou21 »

fabian2k wrote: post #75
mrslave wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick second endorsement for this absolute gem of a website: lichess.org. I've gone from a player who can't beat the computer on level 1 (estimated ELO 800 LOL) to winning 50% of matches on level 3 (est. ELO 1400). Still pretty poor, but so is my study effort. And I'm OK with it. My colleague from another time zone struggled to recommend a book for my level and kinda laughed (albeit politely). But now we can play a…

I would strongly recommend to play against real humans, not the computer. The computer with a handicap just plays in very weird ways, and that is not really helpful for learning. I also played the computer at first, and level 3 is the first level where it actually puts up a fight. But it plays very weird combinations of strong moves and then completely blunders at times. The problem is that it blunders in a very non-…

I only very recently picked up chess and spend most of my time playing against the computer. lichess's computer plays really, really weird at low levels, not human-like at all. Chess.com's computer plays a bit more human-like, at least up to 1100, which is the computer level I'm currently playing against, but still not like a real human.

I would compare it as: lichess - best move, best move, best move, completely random move that does absolutely nothing chess.com - best move, good move, best move, blunder that seems patronizing given previous moves

I've only played a handful of games against real people online, but those games weren't anything like either lichess or chess.com's computer players.

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