How to learn chess as an adult (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#181

Post by johngossman » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:00 PM UTC

Good article. A lot of the comments here give bad advice though, which isn’t surprising because they show a lot of common misperceptions about chess. Jeremy Silman has written a couple of books about what is actually important. Quickly, what worked for me when I started playing on chess.com at age 40 after not playing for over twenty years. My rating at age 17 was 1450. Restarted at 1200, and barely progressed at first. If your rating is different you may need different things. Again, Silman is good on this. What worked:

1) eat. I would start playing in the morning, do okay, then lose a bunch. Finally, realized my blood sugar level was a major contributor to my elo 2) study tactics. Chess Tempo is great. Lots of good tactics books. Especially study spotting threats 3) Study basics of positions: best places to post rooks, bishops, control of center. But tactics more important. 4) don’t spend much time on openings. Learn the basics of a few common ones. Games will quickly diverge from openings. Because GM games so often depend on openings, amateurs (like me) tend to overpivot on this. 5) After playing, load your game into a chess engine and analyze what went wrong (if you played perfect, analyze what your opponent did wrong). Until about 2000, whomever makes the fewest mistakes usually wins.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#182

Post by erfgh » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:04 PM UTC

sjducb wrote: post #133

ShoneRL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it does to a certain extent but most of my experiences were with Chess, Football and Boxing. People say Chess is a sport but it's not really physically-exerting like some other sports or even healthy at all. In terms of other sports, I think football (soccer) is a sport you don't really have to be 100% at, since that sport is somehow globally recognized and profitable so even subpar players can live well of…

I think you have to be very good at football/boxing to make a living off it. A subpar 3rd division football player is a better athlete than anyone you have ever met in your day-to-day life. Chess supports maybe 30 full time competitors, whereas football supports a few thousand. However millions more people try to be footballers. Your odds of success are probably better with chess. All three of those sports destroy yo…

Football is very different because you don't have to spend as much time. Professional players train for 1-3 hours per day and that's it. The remaining time of the day they do nothing at all because there's no point to physically exert yourself more, you'll just get injured for no benefit. Also, you have to be 100% rested when game time comes which means that 2-3 days prior to the game you take it very easy during training, or even don't train at all.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#183

Post by erfgh » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #160

ShoneRL wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I absolutely understand your point, I also feel like it's sometimes beyond someone's control to get sucked into something. I started playing with friends on school breaks and soon I was joining a Chess club with them and soon I was googling ways to get better and soon I was skimping out on social interaction because I felt it was better to stay home and play online chess because starting up a game was far easie…

Even if I dont completely agree with your negative take, I appreciate the point your making. "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." applies to a lot of things. How worth is it for me to spend my evenings honing my programming skills, instead of traveling, seeing the world, falling in love? At the end of the day, there is no preordained path…

If you spend the same time studying programming that you need to spend to become a good chess player then you will likely become a professional programmer which means you will make a decent living in most countries of the world.

Also, you can build interesting systems that actually improve peoples' lives whereas in chess you just sit on your ass calculating and memorizing stuff that affect nobody at all outside the game.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#184

Post by Zyst » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #141

chongli wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow the link to the data analysis [1] you’ll see that the argument is based on higher rated players. Low rated players have much higher variance in their rating and can improve by quite a lot, just by learning to stop blundering. That’s basically the situation you’re in. Getting to 2000 rating is going to be quite a mountain to climb for you, unless you’re very young. [1] https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_d…

But that’s not surprising at all if you assume every player has a ‘ceiling’ performance they can attain, isn’t it? Higher rated players tend to be closer to their potential than lower rated ones, leaving less room for improvement, in any sport. They also will be more likely to get worse over time because, the nearer to the top, the more roads lead you downwards. You’d have to pick a very peculiar metric to measure pe…

I play competitive games in tournaments. I would disagree with your characterization.

Yes, people have a skill ceiling. However, it’s not something you’re ever going to get to by just playing most games.

People naturally improve at games when they start playing. Some factors being more familiarity with the game, and making less mistakes. However, people will stall out at different ratings at that point.

However, if you do deliberate practice in the game you will absolutely continue to get better. If you’re practicing specific scenarios, have focused areas of improvement, coaching, analyze your own replays, record your practice, and watch it: You will improve.

Yes, abstractly a “skill ceiling” out there exists for you, but you’re extremely unlikely to ever reach it in a game of skill unless you’re trying to go pro in it.

If putting time in were all that were required to reach your skill ceiling, we would have way more League of Legends Grandmasters. Unless you assume the people that go pro are all just more talented, and that their practice doesn’t make a difference.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#185

Post by ShoneRL » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:23 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #160

ShoneRL wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I absolutely understand your point, I also feel like it's sometimes beyond someone's control to get sucked into something. I started playing with friends on school breaks and soon I was joining a Chess club with them and soon I was googling ways to get better and soon I was skimping out on social interaction because I felt it was better to stay home and play online chess because starting up a game was far easie…

Even if I dont completely agree with your negative take, I appreciate the point your making. "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." applies to a lot of things. How worth is it for me to spend my evenings honing my programming skills, instead of traveling, seeing the world, falling in love? At the end of the day, there is no preordained path…

If you say it that way, nothing is worth talking about in life and nothing is worth doing because we all just die and end up wherever as is per the usual nihilism doctrine. The quote I cited, indeed, potentially applies to a lot of things but hey, we are talking Chess.

I appreciate this community since I can voice out things that people might be contemplative about and my negativity filled post was really just no false positivity comment about the reality of Chess in a random world country which I experienced time and time again.

The OP is "How to learn chess as an adult" and as I saw it, my first question in my mind was "Why should you learn chess as an adult?" and then I saw the lengths this person went to improve and while I don't want to be a toxic or negative bub about it, I also feel like I can contribute to this discussion by sharing my own opinion since I directly have a lot of experience with Chess. Now, I don't say that in an elitist way, I don't claim to be an expert but I feel like this blog post and similar posts are quite misleading and might trap uninformed people into thinking that Chess is something really worth learning as an adult or just increase the bias that Chess is some unique sport when it's just really a overrated game, kinda like Monopoly or any other game.

I spent a lot of time on Chess and I am glad to have provided some information on what it was like for me, because I think that it's really valuable for someone to read this and take away whatever they can from my experiences. I don't claim I have it all figured out, but generally, I suggest to keep Chess in moderation and no, you don't need to get better at it because it doesn't really get more fun.

Have a nice day! Thanks for reading.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#186

Post by mabeale » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:35 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #55

Great article. I got into chess recently, and I can only recommend the "Learn chess with Dr. Wolf" app. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-chess-with-dr-wolf/id135... It's got a beautiful UI, and it's a conversational chess tutor that goes over the basics, tactics, advanced strategy and with whom you can play and will point out mistakes and blunders for later review. Perhaps it is too basic for anybody that has a fe…

It is a nice app but it had too many bugs for me to consider renewing my subscription with it. It would sometimes make suggested moves that were just completely wrong. I did provide feedback on some, which they agreed were bugs.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#187

Post by nebulous1 » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 1:39 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #98

washmyelbows wrote: post #18

"Only about 10% of players ever gain more than 100 points, and only about 1% of players gain more than 200 rating points given years." This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study, just some light YouTube watching. 500->800 felt like all it took was learning a few openings and not blundering pieces. 800-1050 felt like it came mostly from getting…

I’ve known this guy off and on for years. When we first met 15+ years he was slightly better at Go than me, which was middling amateur. All the Go books say if you want to be a pro you have to start as a child. But he studied, and studied, and last I knew he was 3 dan, which is about the point you can entertain the idea of becoming a pro (if I just worked harder). Kids have a lot more free time to sink into a singula…

> but there are people who can blow right past them

Ultimately, I think this is what's often downplayed in these conversations. Just because your friend was able to excel at Go in those 15 years, doesn't imply that any other specific person would be able to do the same, even with the same study. You'll find many people who attempted this but simply couldn't get past a lower plateau.

So, when you say "if you can make the time, it’s not impossible", I'm not sure that that's true. My suspicion would be that for a significant portion of the population, it would in fact be literally impossible. (edit: I was reading a different thread where somebody was asking about becoming a FIDE CM, that's what I was referencing here as being impossible for many, I don't know anything about Go ranks).

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#188

Post by xrd » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

johngossman wrote: post #181

Good article. A lot of the comments here give bad advice though, which isn’t surprising because they show a lot of common misperceptions about chess. Jeremy Silman has written a couple of books about what is actually important. Quickly, what worked for me when I started playing on chess.com at age 40 after not playing for over twenty years. My rating at age 17 was 1450. Restarted at 1200, and barely progressed at fir…

How do you load your games into a chess engine? Where do you play that allows you to export games? And then are you loading into another site or using a local application on your laptop as the "chess engine?"

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#189

Post by NickC25 » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

bnralt wrote: post #161

mgaunard wrote: post #77

I like casual chess; as soon as it gets into blitz and studying openings and patterns I tend to lose interest, that sounds like work, not fun. It's like studying the meta instead of actually playing.

This is how I feel as well. I did a little studying, but it not only felt like a treadmill, I actually felt like I was using less of my critical thinking skills the more I studied. Stuff like memorizing openings, memorizing the best move a chess engine would give you for certain situations, stuff like grandmasters memorizing entire games - this all seemed to be pretty common. I didn't see the point in putting in work…

I'm 1700-1800ish lichess (Crazyhouse and King of the Hill). I agree with this, but with one caveat. I memorize a few openings just because games can get crazy sharp pretty quickly, and there are a few patterns or move orders in the opening to memorize just so you aren't mated quickly.

I don't memorize games several moves deep, just 3-4 maybe 5 depending on the opening, which especially in Crazyhouse as there are only probably 3-4 good openins.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#190

Post by cjonas » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

johngossman wrote: post #181

Good article. A lot of the comments here give bad advice though, which isn’t surprising because they show a lot of common misperceptions about chess. Jeremy Silman has written a couple of books about what is actually important. Quickly, what worked for me when I started playing on chess.com at age 40 after not playing for over twenty years. My rating at age 17 was 1450. Restarted at 1200, and barely progressed at fir…

Interesting you put "eat" here as your first item.

I don't care much about my rating (I play chess to escape stress; not create more of it), but over the last couple years since I started playing, my lichess rating (fluctuating between 1200-1400) appears to have a very strong correlation with my mental health.

Of course it's obvious if you think about it, but it's very odd to have this accurate of an indicator with historical data.

Of course this only really works if you don't actively study to try and get better :)