
Learning Chess at 40 (2016) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/73/play/learning-chess-at-40-rp
======
mquander
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 started playing again after a
few years of drought. My strength was about 1950 USCF. In the Bay Area 80% of
the players I play in tournaments at that strength are kids -- the median age
is perhaps 11.

At first I thought it was shocking that they could be 1950 at 11 years old,
and I was like 1200, or whatever. That's a pretty huge gap in what you might
think is "talent". But then I started looking at the tournament history of my
opponents. I was astonished to find that the majority of them had played
_substantially more total chess_ at age 11 than I had managed to play by my
late 20s.

For example, here is someone I have played several times:

[http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?15250088](http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?15250088)

He's 10 years old and 2055 USCF. He has played in 175 tournaments in the past
5 and a half years. That's almost three per month, every month! If you don't
regularly play in chess tournaments, they are frequently a serious commitment
-- the better part of a day, or for big ones, multiple full days. Perhaps his
average tournament might involve 10 hours of serious chess. How many adults
work so hard on their hobby? Is that degree of return on investment even
surprising? I've only played in 129 tournaments since 1992 and I am the same
strength.

The player above is not at all an outlier in this regard. I never yet observed
a kid who achieved an impressive degree of skill in chess without spending
this kind of time. So while I continue to be impressed by the dedication and
ability of young kids who are really strong, I stopped thinking that they are
magic learning machines whose age makes them unreachably capable. The author's
daughter at least has regular coaching, which I suppose the author doesn't
have. Does he even spend more time on the game than her? I bet he doesn't.

~~~
zawerf
A famous competitive programming prodigy is tourist[1]. You can find his
rating graph starting from 2006 on topcoder when he was just 12 years old:
[https://www.topcoder.com/members/tourist/details/?track=DATA...](https://www.topcoder.com/members/tourist/details/?track=DATA_SCIENCE&subTrack=SRM)

He's now indisputably the best competitive programmer in the world. But it's
comforting to know that he too had to slowly grow over many years starting
from a mere mortal 1200 rating.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich)

~~~
soup10
Never really liked the structure of Topcoder and similar competitions most of
the "skill" is just memorizing the algorithms that show up frequently and
practicing typing out the solutions fast. A great mathematician would be able
to finish a math exam quicker and more accurately than a student. But someone
that spends all their time practicing speedrunning math exams would smoke him,
only a fool would say the speedrunner is more talented at mathematics than the
mathematician that understands the material deeply and has innovated and
contributed to the field.

~~~
icr0
Topcoder is kinda flawed, but competitions like the IOI and ICPC are quite
legit. In addition, `tourist`is the top performer on codeforces as well as
basically any competitive programming site

------
icr0
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 myself in my opponent's
position and looking for his tactics

1600-1800 i have no idea, just practice i guess

John Bartholomew's strategy videos and Saint Louis Chess Club opening videos
were probably the best resources for me to learn

~~~
philbarr
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...

~~~
have_faith
It's more important to remember the theme of an opening than the specifics of
the multiple lines sprouting from it. For instance some openings revolve
around having a bishop on a strong diagonal and an important central square or
two to hold. If you remember these themes a lot of the available moves become
(relatively) easy to work out, because you know why the moves are made in the
first place. The best thing you can do is find resources that cover the themes
as much as the lines/moves themselves, some of the Lichess studies are good,
some just cover moves though which isn't helpful.

I've played a lot of people that go down 12 moves of an opening they
remembered only to falter as soon as their memory runs out. It's very common,
and you will always run out.

------
patrickdavey
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, the nice thing about being a beginner chess player is
that there are bazillions of people better than you to play against, and lose
to!.

On the topic of improving, as others have said, the training puzzles on
lichess are great. I've also got quite a lot of value out of [0] chessable.com
. Nice little site, teaches you some basic openings which are really fun when
people fall into the traps!

[0] [https://www.chessable.com/](https://www.chessable.com/)

~~~
jammygit
I never played against good chess players really I once went 8 years without
losing while playing every chance I got. Now that I’ve found good players to
play against, I'm honestly scared to play because I’m sure to be worse than
somebody. I would honestly appreciate some elaboration on how you learned to
lose.

I’m not an amazing player at all, just sheltered.

~~~
patrickdavey
Somewhat tongue in cheek, but, learning to lose is easy, just play online and
you'll get plenty of practice ;)

I think just losing regularly helps to make it easier? Maybe. I still don't
like it very much! Good luck :)

------
cubano
Learning chess is a very time consuming skill. I don't think there is any
other way besides playing lots of games against players better then you, or to
endlessly drill problems, to get any better.

I am not sure how this fact lines up well with a 40yo lifestyle. This is
usually the time of life where you are raising kids or making career moves, so
I am not sure just how many available hours one has for study.

------
WalterBright
I can't say I understand devoting such time to learning a completely useless,
extremely narrow, skill. Learning mathematics is useful. Learning to play a
guitar is useful. Learning to program is useful.

I came to this conclusion in college. It was hard enough learning math,
thermo, physics, etc., and seemed a complete waste of time to get better at
chess. The former consumed my mental energies.

~~~
Yajirobe
How are guitar playing skills useful if you don't plan to be a professional
musician?

~~~
pessimizer
You can entertain people around a campfire. Or even on plastic benches on a
concrete patio outside of a Nowhere, Arkansas highway gas station that sells
milkshakes.

------
thom
I have loved chess on and off all my life, but it is an extremely harsh
mistress. I'm going through the same thing, trying to become a more reliable
teacher for my kids right now, but it's a fraught process.

Chess is an utterly unforgiving game: I have played many more hours of things
like Magic: the Gathering in my life, the creator of which quite rightly
understood that adding variance to a game means lower skilled players actually
have a chance (and some actual fun) against higher skilled ones. Navigating a
child's demands that you "play your hardest" against them can be quite
difficult. The thing I hate most about chess is that you can play well,
perhaps for _weeks_ in a correspondence game, and then one mistake undoes it
all, with no hope of coming back (but then again, never resign).

The lessons you need to learn are all very valuable: the pure skill of
calculation is extremely difficult but if you can teach yourself to
concentrate, visualise positions and juggle the variations, I think these are
actually brain powers you can take into other aspects of your life.

The rote learning aspects aren't that fun, but again, being able to memorise
literally hundreds of branching openings not only buys you free wins, but
teaches you a lot of patience and general schemes for memorization (or so I
imagine, I am terrible at this, especially on shorter time controls).

Learning to lose is very difficult, but the one kindness chess does is that
there is (at lower levels of play) almost always a reason your lose.

The interplay of tactics and strategy is very satisfying, knowing when to use
your instinct or general heuristics, instead of when to brute force calculate
a move, is again the type of skill you find yourself more aware of in other
pursuits.

The best thing about learning chess in 2019 though is there is so much great
content. Thousands of hours of stuff from the St Louis and Atlanta Chess
Clubs, coverage of every major tournament on Chess24 and myriad Twitch
channels, and games of every possible skill level, variation and time control
at your fingertips. ChessKid is also an excellent app + educational
environment for kids.

------
pstuart
I highly recommend lichess. Create an account and bookmark it and play
endgames when you need a "distraction":
[https://lichess.org/training](https://lichess.org/training)

~~~
thom
Worth noting that lichess and all of the code behind it (some of which is
algorithmically very interesting) is developed in the open[0], and Thibault
Duplessis even regularly livecodes on Twitch[1].

0: [https://github.com/ornicar](https://github.com/ornicar)

1: [https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2](https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2)

~~~
pstuart
I discovered lichess when I was looking for JS framework for a project and
found mithril.js, where they referenced it as a successful user of the
project.

------
swang
this is the same with poker. lots of resources and more opportunity to play
the game.

in the early 2000s internet poker starting getting more and more popular and
more and more knowledge was made available because of the internet. more and
more players trained on the internet began showing up to live tournaments.

a lot of the "live" pros hated the way "internet kids" were playing poker but
at the same time those internet kids had probably played more hands than most
of the live pros did.

in a live setting you're lucky to get 30 hands an hour. probably more average
would be 10-15. meanwhile players online were getting anywhere from 75-90
hands an hour.... per table. okay players probably could get to 4 tables with
no trouble while at the extreme end there were people 24-tabling. 24*75 =
1800. that's about 60 hours at best for a live player.

------
akjsdnajksdnjk
I was never able to "get" chess.

I know the rules, I can methodically scan every position, but I feel that I
can never really think more than one step ahead. I just start feeling
restless, get overwhelmed at the board and my processing slows to a crawl.

I might look calm and focused on the outside, but inside I'm fidgety and
thinking "what the fuck am I looking at? how can I ever think of a larger
strategy when I can barely think of a move that doesn't get my pieces killed?"
It feels like I become a very slow triply-nested for-loop.

I work at a FANG and am very good at my job, so don't need the validation.
Still a bummer. Wish I was better.

~~~
tudorconstantin
Chess excellence depends very much on experience: the more you play and train,
the better you get. See, people say it's the mind game, but it only depends on
the intelect as long both players are similarly experienced.

Also, a game of chess is long and can get boring: in the beginning of a game
people usually play "by the book", trying to adhere to some basic principles
(control the center of the table, pull out your pieces into play, protect your
king by castling, etc).

In the middle of the game, as long as you managed to avoid losing any piece so
far, is where the actual play takes place, when you try to gain material
advantage and this is where I spend most of my thinking fuel.

The end of the game, again, depends very much on training and experience,
because there are known strategies how one should play with pawn and king
against king for example. Of course, some of the strategies are obvious, like
promoting your pawn to a queen and mate your opponent, but others are not,
like gaining the opposition to be able to promote/block the pawn.

I don't have too much patience playing whole games myself, but I like training
my mind by making chess puzzles/tactics daily, which I'd recommend you try
yourself: your offered a position where you know that after a few moves you
have to end up in advantage.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11653538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11653538)

------
scoutt
> As we get older, there is one thing at which we get worse: Being a novice.

Personally, I love being a novice. I intentionally seek it since mid 20 (being
~40 years old now), by learning a new game, mastering a microcontroller or
programming language, etc.

I still don't notice a "slow-down" in my learning process... but maybe because
learning is a process that I train continuously?

What I do notice is a _mechanical-learning_ slow-down, for example, if I pick
a new videogame, it takes a while until I "catch-up" with aiming, or button
sequences, etc.

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

~~~
gbacon
[https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-
retirement/av...](https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-
retirement/aviation)

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-making that seems to keep pilots young. A lot of
older folks seem to be preoccupied with trivial matters, such as organizing
their junk mail or minutia within their childrens' lives. Old pilots don't
seem to be subject to these preoccupations and the topics of their
conversations have more in common with young pilots than with other old
people.

The very process of training to be a pilot is challenging and inherently
motivational. The FAA sets up milestones and checkpoints: Private Pilot,
Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot, Multi-Engine Rating, Helicopter Rating,
Seaplane Rating, Airline Transport Pilot. A desire to excel was probably a
factor in your ability to retire young. If you have that desire, the FAA
rating system gives you a lot of opportunities to improve and prove yourself.

One of the tragedies of getting older is the narrowing of one's activities. An
elementary school kid will write poetry, paint, play music, do math, write
prose, etc. An adult will do three or four things that he or she can do at a
professional level of competence. These are the things for which an adult
draws a paycheck or these are the things that the adult finds rewarding
because they can be done so well.

Learning to fly is an opportunity to go back to elementary school. No human is
a natural aviator. Everything has to be learned, which by itself is
stimulating.

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
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.

~~~
person_of_color
How much does it cost to learn to fly?

~~~
gbacon
Depending on rental and instruction costs in your area, how frequently you are
able to fly, and how much time you spend studying and preparing, total cost to
obtain an FAA private certificate will be somewhere in the range between
$8,000 to $12,000. You'll pay as you go per flight hour rather than writing a
single check up front. People have been burned writing checks up front, so I
wouldn't recommend that you even consider it.

Under Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) Part 61, a student pilot is required
to have a minimum of 40 flight hours to take the practical exam ("checkride")
but also an endorsement from your Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI) that
you are ready. I have heard that the U.S. average is 70-something hours. An
alternative is FAR Part 141, which has a highly structured curriculum that the
FAA approves. Part 141 programs have lower required minimums for flight hours.
Part 61 flight schools have more of a mom & pop feel.

Elsewhere I wrote a detailed breakdown of the possibilities for Part 61
training that may be useful to you.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/HuntsvilleAlabama/comments/6u1ytj/w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HuntsvilleAlabama/comments/6u1ytj/whos_driving_up_north_for_the_eclipse/dlrze6x/)

A decent approximation of your cost function under Part 61 is

    
    
        cost = dual_hours * (ac_rate + cfi_rate) +
               solo_hours * ac_rate +
               medical_exam_fee +
               written_exam_fee +
               checkride_fee +
               gear
    

You have choice of your aircraft rental rate (ac_rate above). Choose the
cheapest available and that can carry both you and your CFI along with
required fuel. The Cessna 152, a two-place slow trainer, in my area rents for
just under $100 per Hobbs meter hour "wet" (fuel included) but only has 574
pounds of useful load. Your or your CFI's size may push you into a Cessna 172
or Piper Cherokee. The Hobbs meter ticks only while the engine is running, not
by wall clock or wristwatch time.

Your next great influence is over total flight hours that you will require,
solo and dual (i.e., with a CFI). Flying frequently will minimize forgetting
and retraining. Be diligent about required reading and study that your
instructor will assign. Rehearse maneuvers, checklists, procedures, etc.
("chair flying") at home before and after lessons, on bad-weather days, and
whenever you can.

Being a member of AOPA can get you a discount on your knowledge test
("written") fee. Gear may include a headset, view-limiting device (hood or
foggles), E6B, plotter, flight bag, and Electronic Flight Bag software such as
DroidEFB or ForeFlight. If you're concerned about cost, borrow or buy used.
You can get a decent headset new for under $200. Foggles, E6B (a circular
slide rule), and plotter each go for less than $30 new.

The checkride fee you're probably stuck with ($400 to $800) because an FAA
contractor known as a Designated Pilot Examine (DPE) will have to conduct your
checkride and judge whether you performed the required tasks and maneuvers
according to the Airman Certification Standards (ACS), and there are only so
many DPEs per geographic area. You may be able to shop around for the medical
exam fee ($100 to $200), but similarly you have to visit a physician with the
Aviation Medical Examiner (AME) designation to get your medical certificate
("medical").

Good luck! Pilots always love talking about flying, so come back with more
questions.

------
bluewater
[https://www.chesstactics.org](https://www.chesstactics.org)

I believe I picked up on this site from HN years ago and I found it to be a
great resource. Easy to digest a lot of the basic concepts to improve your
play.

------
gdcohen
I wonder if learning to program at age 40 vs age <10 would be similar?

------
jammygit
I played chess constantly from 5 until 25. I don’t feel like I have time for
it these days and I miss it. I can promise that my concentration and ability
to visualize has decreased since I stopped playing

Edit: I never played online which might be a problem. Not having a physical
board and another human present really throws me off, or else I wonder if I
would still play

------
surfsvammel
I am going through this very process at the moment. Picked up chess for the
first time three months ago and trying to learn it. Studying hours per day. It
is kind of an experiment. How good can I get in a couple of months at the age
of 37?

So far, it seems, not that good... Chess is a lot tougher to learn than I
initially thought.

~~~
nanijoe
how are you learning though? Who you play against is pretty important. You
need to try and play against the strongest players you can find. Dont be
afraid of losing to them

~~~
crististm
Playing against strongest players (or engines) demoralizes me. It makes me
want to avoid the game. I find I need to play against a challenger that is
better than me but one that I can beat about 30% of the time.

Back in the day I was pretty good at Warcraft 2 - solo and missions. I have a
friend that never lost to me - not even once, although later I found I was
close on two occasions to beat him. In the end I lost interest to play with
him because in a way I would know the outcome.

------
acollins1331
I've started relearning chess after having played it a bit with my dad who
learned from Microsoft chess. I came back and was ranked around 800 in
December and have increased to around 1300 on lichess. Making sure to try to
figure out what my opponent is wanting to do on his next move (to stop my own
blunders) and learning the most common variations to an opening for each white
and black contributed to a massive increase in rating. I imagine more focus on
not blundering and learning some of the opening traps I tend to get caught in
will probably get me to 1800 online.

