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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

#291

Post by newen »

XCSme wrote: post #166
sandworm101 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Such controversies have been replicated even in the lower-stakes world of junior play. Sarah Longson, a former British ladies’ champion who runs the Delancey UK Schools’ Chess Challenge, said at least 100 of 2,000 online participants cheated. I would say 5% is pretty bad. Assuming there is an advantage to cheating, the higher up the ranks you get the greater the likelihood that you will face an undetected cheat.

I think that the big difference between chess and other competitive video games is that in chess you have to do all the steps as the computer says, not just a few of them. In high-level chess one good move is not enough to win a game, you have to consistently find the best move. In a game like Counter-Strike or League of Legends it is pretty easy to just use the cheat a few rounds, or just parts of a round to gain an…

You can do similar things in chess too. Just play your own game until you reach a tricky position where you ask the computer what to do. As long as you don't make massive blunders, you would win more games than you would without a computer. It's a lot harder to get caught for cheating online if you play like that. Playing the exact moves that the computer plays throughout the game is the easiest way to get caught cheating. Also, insert standard statement here about cheating being bad etc.

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

#292

Post by gameswithgo »

freeflight wrote: post #251
gameswithgo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a test in isolation cannot be bullshit. when people talk about iq test many people imagine the person believes an iq test is a rigorous measure of all intellectual talent. or course it is not that. but it is also wrong to suggest it has no meaning at all. it does have some predictive power. imperfect measures are not always useless, which is goof since all measures have some error.

> a test in isolation cannot be bullshit. A test trying to measure something we can't even properly define is kinda flawed in it's whole premise. As such the best an IQ test can do is measure how well somebody prepared for a test like that, but it will struggle to properly catch any knowledge or skill domains not covered by the test, of which there are a lot.

IQ tests correlate with things. Thus it captures more than just how good someone is at the IQ test.

You can say "There is this test, and people's scores on this test correlate with various things like, income, marital fidelity, religiosity, incarceration rates, job performance". We call this test the IQ test.

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

#293

Post by sebmaynard »

bvcvbuiy wrote: post #170
llarsson wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly why I would consider 2 hours daily to spend on mastering a game a luxury. Before kids? Sure. After the kids are old enough to basically be on cruise control? Likely. But now? Not even close.

To be fair, pre-lockdown I use to have an hour long commute and that would allow me to study Japanese close to two hours a day and still let me a lot of time to look after my baby once home.

I have 4 boys, 2 of which under under 5 months; I dearly miss my 1 hour drive to and from work, with podcasts, tech talks and thinking space.

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

#294

Post by palae »

unholiness wrote: post #253
sharedfrog wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there is definitely inflation at lichess I don't think it's inflation. Lichess simply uses a different formula (Glicko-2) than either chess.com or FIDE.

Glicko is just ELO with an uncertainty factor that speeds up down how quickly your rating changes if you've played fewer games. Actually, FIDE's implementation of ELO also has an approximate version of this, increasing its "k" value for new players and decreasing it for some thresholds of games played, ratings, and player age. Both these adjustments just affect how quickly your rating would change if your win rate ch…

> New players start at 1500 ELO in both Lichess and FIDE

I've never played otb, but on the FIDE website, they have a initial rating calculator (https://ratings.fide.com/calc.phtml?page=initial) which seems to depend on your opponents' ratings and your performance, but not on the number 1500

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

#295

Post by devmacrile »

cambalache wrote: post #239
david927 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> That's funny because I found the opposite to be true if it's a single bishop / knight endgame. No matter what you found, it has been statistically proved that a Bishop (against a Knight), and especially a Bishop pair is stronger than a Knight/Knight or Knight/Bishop .

If we are talking blitz though there is an argument to be made for the trickiness of the knight's geometry. Forks abound and no time to calculate.

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

#296

Post by gknoy »

> I put blunders and mistakes from my games here

When talking about drilling with Anki, the author notes that they show the position where they made a mistake. When learning a game (Chess, Go, computer games) how do you identify where that mistake is? How do you develop the skill to recognize where the mistakes are?

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

#297

Post by mrpotato »

prune2000 wrote: post #10

You should use lichess.org instead. You would have unlimited tactics per day which come from real games played on the website, endless number of studies made by other players on opening theories, free analysis of your games, and all these statistics about your progress and more! Like "do I win more often or not when Queens are traded?". Good luck!

> Like "do I win more often or not when Queens are traded?".

Could you point me to where/how I can do this? It is definitely something I'd like to see! Thanks

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

#298

Post by noir_lord »

gknoy wrote: post #296

> I put blunders and mistakes from my games here When talking about drilling with Anki, the author notes that they show the position where they made a mistake. When learning a game (Chess, Go, computer games) how do you identify where that mistake is? How do you develop the skill to recognize where the mistakes are?

Have the computer score every move to a depth of 16 ply(moves) then look for radical shifts in the scoring.

A sudden swing from +1.4 to -4 means there was a blunder.

You set the ply shallow because no beginner is seeing more than 8 moves ahead, most masters can’t in most positions.

Fritz and scid etc also have mark tactical exercises modes that so the above automatically.

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

#299

Post by newen »

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…

It's a good argument but also consider the alternative that Waitzkin might not have enough talent and he is saying that to protect his ego.

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

#300

Post by lubesGordi »

I've been studying chess for the past year as someone much older than 21, and I find it's pretty interesting! For one thing, tactics and calculation for sure will be varying considerably between players of different skill levels. For me, it can take forever to calculate 3 moves ahead because I lose my place as I go. I think for good players, they can see it almost instantly, subconsciously. And I think that is where the chess prodigy comes in. From the beginning, the chess prodigy probably gets their subconscious in tune with moving the pieces and can see tactics and N moves ahead almost instantly. I'm curious to see how much better that gets for me over time. If I practice a bit every day, how fast will my calculation get? It's probably logarithmic but still... Anyone have experience getting good (~1700 or >) as an adult?
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