I have to admit that Chess is one of those games that I am always hoping to learn to play well and am always reminded of my dumbness every time I try it.
On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
221–230 of 342 posts
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#222Some "suggestions" that helped me get from 1000 to 1300 very quickly:
- Castle very early
- Resist taking pieces for no reason. To take is a mistake
- Use your opponent's time to plan your next move
- If you stop hanging pieces you will automatically be >1200
- Save your bishops, bishops > knights in most endgames
- For every hour you spend analyzing your past games your rating will go up by 10
- You won't improve by playing blitz. Go for 15 + 10 time controls
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#223Two small notes, this seems not to be an official rating. The 1750 is reached at chess.com it seems. I play at lichess, where I am around 1700. My official rating is currently 1437, my highest rating ever was 1583 two years ago. So there is definitely inflation at lichess, and I would assume there is inflation at chess.com. So claiming 1750 ELO when it is not an official rating seems somewhat risky. Another note, he…
My lichess rating is 300 better than my chess.com rating.
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#224Highly, 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…
> Talent is somewhat important but nowhere as important as training.
Generally agreed on your post but I don't think I agree with this. You aren't making it to GM without an extreme amount of talent. Training is likely to be required too, but I'd say it's much more likely that an extremely talented but untrained person could make GM vs an not-so-talented person with rigorous training. Basically I'm saying that the vast majority of people would never be able to become a GM regardless of training.
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#225Two small notes, this seems not to be an official rating. The 1750 is reached at chess.com it seems. I play at lichess, where I am around 1700. My official rating is currently 1437, my highest rating ever was 1583 two years ago. So there is definitely inflation at lichess, and I would assume there is inflation at chess.com. So claiming 1750 ELO when it is not an official rating seems somewhat risky. Another note, he…
I remember seeing stats where someone took the ratings of different times vs FIDE rating so had to look it up again.
It's a bit old so not sure if this is exactly true anymore or even if their analytics were correct.
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/fide-ratings-vs-che....
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#226Some "suggestions" that helped me get from 1000 to 1300 very quickly: - Castle very early - Resist taking pieces for no reason. To take is a mistake - Use your opponent's time to plan your next move - If you stop hanging pieces you will automatically be >1200 - Save your bishops, bishops > knights in most endgames - For every hour you spend analyzing your past games your rating will go up by 10 - You won't improve by…
> Save your bishops, bishops > knights in most endgames
That's funny because I found the opposite to be true if it's a single bishop / knight endgame.
> You won't improve by playing blitz.
It will just take longer. A single five minute game a day over coffee will work, if that's all the time you have for.
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
OP here. Yeah, the best advice I know for making anything a daily habit is to make it an emergency. It comes first. So, you get some negotiable time, the first thing you do is (chess) and then you figure out the other things later.
The downside is of course that sometimes the other important things are hard to maintain. But this is how you do it.
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
T90official is also suuuuupercool! He also started as a pretty mediocre player and now deserves his rank among the best players! He shares a lot of his secrets and is also #1 commentator now for AoE II:DE related games: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZUT79WUUpZlZ-XMF7l4CFg Also watch his Twitch account. Spirit of the Law is also a great resource: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChzLZJo-SxuPHz-oYKAIC_g
T90 to me is such a confusing phenomenon. I've never understood why a low-rated player who (to me) did not have a particularly entertaining personality was the most-subscribed AoE2 player on twitch. Is he actually good now? How high-rated is he compared to Daut and Viper and so on?
He already beat Viper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tkf-BMMq-8
T90 is doing great. Also improved massively his commentator skills. Give him a try! :)
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#229I 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…
Hey - this is pretty amazing. I have learned a lot about AOE from watching L_clan (mostly L_Clan_Chris but others as well!) replays back in 2004-2008 when I was playing a lot of Age. Never had Zone access, so we lived in a little bubble in our university of LAN AoE players with outside ideas, build orders etc. coming from watching pro replays.
No twitch obviously and very few blogs going around for strategy as well. It's amazing to see how far gaming has come in 15 years.
Re: On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that almost everyone should be able to achieve a solid 2000 elo rating, with enough dedication over the years I think you are massively underestimating the natural range of human intelligence. I don't think the average IQ 100 individual could ever reach an ELO of 2000 regardless of how much they practice, and half the population has IQs of less than 100.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888814 > GM Hikaru Nakamura famously took the Mensa online IQ test and scored a very average 102 His elo peak rating is 2816. Just one example for an extraordinary strong player with average IQ (there are many other examples). I don't think that a high IQ is required to become a decent chess player (like 2000). It may help though.
> GM Hikaru Nakamura famously took the Mensa online IQ test and scored a very average 102
Nice clickbait. It you watched him take it on stream, you'd know that he was goofing around with his chat and ran out of time b/c he didn't know it was timed.