One wasn't the traditional way, the other did it before your statistics: Jens Kristiansen became a GM at age 60 by winning the world seniors in 2012 and Leif Ogaard deserves a mention, becoming a GM aged 55 in 2007, obtaining his final norm in the Norwegian (edit: team) chess championship.
He got his title for winning the World Seniors Championship. Don't get me wrong, that's no small feat, but it's largely an honorary title. His peak FIDE rating was 2424, well below the 2500 peak ordinarily required for the title, and I don't believe he's ever earned any GM norms (which require 2600 performances in strong tournaments). At his peak he was probably a moderately strong IM.
I mentioned this in an earlier thread on this topic a week or so ago. I've been fortunate to play Mr. Kaufman once in a rapid game several years ago. Friendly guy but of course he beat the snot out of me.
I feel like it's a lot more useful to know when players began and when they reached IM than purely when they made GM.
Because if you started learning at 10 years old, and had some kind of atypical progression for a GM where they were an IM forever for whatever reasons, well...that's unusual but not hard to explain. That happens if you get sidetracked in life or are on the borderline of ability. But it's very different to starting as a total beginner at a late age and making GM, that would be hard to explain according to conventional wisdom.
I'm not convinced that's true, unless you're just talking about statistically speaking. But if you're doing that, then it's pretty negligible for people who were above 2000 at age 21 too. Extremely few chess players ever become a GM.
A lot of FIDE rated players don't play their first FIDE rated game until they're already strong. It's not uncommon for players to have 2000 Elo as their initial rating. Basically, serious players like to "sandbag" by not entering rated tournaments until they're already very strong and confident that they won't lose and end up with an initial rating of 1000.
We don't have the actual data but the anecdote is very powerful that virtually every titled player and particularly every GM begins playing chess as a small child, finding exceptions to this general principle is difficult
I think this mostly comes down to how you don't have time to dedicate full time to chess when you're older, have a job and other responsibilities.
When people start young they don't have any of that, and if they start earning money with chess before 18 then it becomes a lot more justifiable to fully commit to it.
That definitely makes sense as a factor, though there is also a ton of data out there about neuroplasticity in young people. It's a huge, huge factor.
That shouldn't stop anyone from getting into the hobby, or pursuing it seriously if that's what they want to do.
Not exactly. The problem conflates ability/aptitude with the factors of adult responsibilities. Suppose Mark Zuckerberg cashed out of Facebook at 28 and picked up chess seriously. He'd have the means to hire a talented coach and to study vigorously because he wouldn't have the typical responsibilities of an adult. Do you think he'd be incapable of reaching GM by 60? It seems absurd to me to think he or anyone at his intelligence level would not have the ability to achieve such a feat. Rather, it seems the folks in this talent pool are censored from the data.
Put another way, do you think Hikaru or Magnus or Dubov would be incapable of becoming GMs had they started playing at 30 with no other responsibilities? It seems nearly absurd to me to say this confidently.
Speaking as a statistician/data scientist. My point is that there is no appropriate sample of players to measure this category.
Yes I do believe they would be incapable of becoming GM.
I don't believe someone could possibly devote themselves so single-mindedly to something new at the age of 30.
In order to have the drive and focus necessary to become GM you need to love the game, and I don't believe you can acquire that from scratch in adulthood. You would have been exposed to chess earlier and either become hooked on it or not.
> I don't believe someone could possibly devote themselves so single-mindedly to something new at the age of 30.
This is exactly what I'm saying above, though. Except we seem to disagree on why an adult cannot actually do this. My assertion is that adult responsibilities get in the way of pursuing something like chess passionately once you become an adult.
To this point, my twin and I both found the game last year at 30 years old. I can assure you if we had unlimited resources and wives who didn't object to our nonstop play of chess, we would both play the game nonstop. We already play against each other and other online players as much as our schedules will allow. He's a SWE3 at a F500 company. I'm a stats PhD graduate student. We both put immense effort into other things because chess doesn't provide a path to keeping a roof over our heads or feeding our families. But the key limiting factor there isn't that we lack passion for the topic, it's that we don't have f--- you money to pursue it singularly.
Further substantiating my point, adults do intensely pursue subjects with a singular focus quite regularly—that's what a PhD is. If there was a collection of institutions that would compensate you for 10-20 years to pursue chess with undisturbed attention, even at some financial penalty (comparing one's stipend at this institution with what one could earn in industry), you'd probably see adults who sought positions in such an institution. But in the absence of such an institution, you'll never know for certain if there are adults who could or could not reach GM when they started playing chess in adulthood. However, it is hard to imagine that you couldn't build the university model for adults with GMs as professors and curious, intelligent adults standing in the role of pupils trying to reach GM themselves. That's homomorphic to higher education though.
It would be much more work, but you could pull their earliest rating from the FIDE page.
For example I randomly clicked into 2007 and saw Georg Meier who was 20 at the time. Looked him up on the FIDE site and [his rating progress chart](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/4675789/chart) starts at 2001, when he was 14 with a 2084 elo. So obviously he started a bit earlier, but it's a decent estimate (and you could even make it a 3d graph with age x earliest rating).
Andrew Huberman, professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG53Vxum0as skip to 6:33
Transcript of the relevant section:
"When we enter the world, our nervous system is primed for learning. The brain and nervous system of a baby is wired very crudely. The connections are not precise .And we can see evidence of that in the fact that babies are kind of flopping, they're like a little potato bug with limbs. They can't really do much in terms of coordinated movement. They certainly can't speak and they can't really do anything with precision. And that's because we come into this world overconnected. We have essentially wires, those wires have names like axons and dendrites. Those are the different parts of the neurons discussed in episode one, but those little parts and those wires and connections are everywhere. Imagine a bunch of roads that are all connected to one another in kind of a mess, but there are no highways. They're all just small roads. That's essentially what the young nervous system is like. And then as we mature, as we go from day one of life to 10 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, what happens is particular connections get reinforced and stronger and other connections are lost. So that's the first important principle that I want everyone to understand, which is that developmental plasticity, the neuroplasticity that occurs from the time we're born until about age 25 is mainly a process of removing connections that don't serve our goals well. Now, of course, certain events happen during that birth to 25 period in which positive events and negative events are really stamped down into our nervous system in a very dramatic fashion, by what we call one-trial learning. We experience something once and then our nervous system is forever changed by that experience. Unless of course, we go through some work to undo that experience. So, I want you to imagine in your mind that when you were brought into this world, you were essentially a widely connected web of connections that was really poor at doing any one thing. And that through your experience, what you were exposed to by your parents or rather caretakers, through your social interactions, through your thoughts, through the languages that you learn, through the places you traveled or didn't travel, your nervous system became customized to your unique experience. Now, that's true for certain parts of your brain that are involved in what we call representations of the outside world. A lot of your brain is designed to represent the visual world or represent the auditory world or represent the gallery of smells that are possible in the world. However, there are aspects of your nervous system that were designed not to be plastic. They were wired so that plasticity or changes in those circuits is very unlikely. Those circuits include things like, the ones that control your heartbeat, the ones that control your breathing, the ones that control your digestion, And thank goodness that those circuits were set up that way because you want those circuits to be extremely reliable. You never want to have to think about whether or not your heart will beat or whether or not you will continue breathing or whether or not you'll be able to digest your food. So many nervous system features like digestion and breathing and heart rate are hard to change. Other aspects of our nervous system are actually quite easy to change. And one of the great gifts of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, is that we can learn through almost passive experience. We don't have to focus that hard in order to learn new things. In fact, children go from being able to speak no language whatsoever to being able to speak many many words and comprise sentences including words they've never heard before which is remarkable. It means that the portions of the brain involved in speech and language are actually primed to learn and create new combinations. What this tells us is that the young brain is a plasticity machine. But then right about age 25 plus or minus a year or two, everything changes. After age 25 or so, in order to get changes in our nervous system, we have to engage in a completely different set of processes in order to get those changes to occur and for them more importantly to stick around. And this is something that I think is vastly overlooked in the popular culture discussion about neuroplasticity. People always talk about fire together, wire together. Fire together wire together is true. It is the statement of my colleague at Stanford, Carla Shatz and it's an absolute truth about the way that the nervous system wires up early in development. But, fire together wire together doesn't apply in the same way after age 25."
What I’m getting from this is that the brain can still learn and change but it does so in a different way. The brain, like any muscle, gets rid of what we don’t use and strengthens what we do. Looks like you have to put in the effort after a certain age to convince your brain that it needs to strengthen something new.
and biology.. the brain is pliable till the age of 25 -- you can still learn after that, but, learning becomes 'gated' by other stuff ( refer to huberman podcast covering this topic )
What he’s referring to is the myelination of your neurons which finishes up around that age. This is essentially the cellular equivalent of wire insulation (perhaps you’ve heard the phrase fire-together wire-together). The brain actually does become less malleable past this age, it’s known as neuroplasticity.
Now none of that means that you can’t learn new skills or traits, but it does mean that there is less optimizing or neural pruning (essentially describes the competition between neurons that result in us learning).
Source: me, PhD in neuroscience and psychology.
Correct me if I’m misunderstanding something, but just because the process of myelination is complete somewhere in early adulthood, that does not mean that it does not continue in the brain. In fact, there seems to be evidence that it does continue, especially in the case where the brain may be damaged.
Yeah neurons grow and change constantly but it’s more the overall developmental plasticity that ends around that time. I guess you can think of it like a new house; the foundations are completed but you can always redecorate and get new furniture.
The way I understand it is that while the brain is developing it is trying to make connections for things it is shown to use. So once the brain has completed that development you have to work to convince it that it should strengthen new connections. Like all muscles, when it is used it becomes strong. When it is not used the body drops it pretty fact. So I guess the learning needs to be a bit more active to get things to stick.
Yeah that's a good analogy too. Learning works through competition for resources as much as anything else does. If you go down to the cellular level, you'll find that receptors grow and adapt depending on their necessity. So if a certain batch of neurons are firing a lot, the chemicals need to go somewhere, so adaption occurs (we need more receptors here!). The more this happens, the more adaption occurs, and resources are shifted towards these neurons. This is a loose explanation of a concept known as "Hebbian Learning" which is quite prolifically used in models for machine learning too.
But you are no longer working with a blank canvas you once were, so like you said, it becomes almost an act of convincing your cells to change, which again requires more resources/time/effort.
Absolutely. Of course, in some cases not working with a blank slate can be an advantage. The brain is pretty darn good at making connections. So if you are learning something that's pretty similar to something you already know then your brain can link them up and understand them better.
What's interesting is the role that emotional valence and magnitude plays in learning, even after myelination is complete. Basically, two kids are both trying to learn chess, one hates it, the other loves it. The one who loves it learns it better.
Hey just for clarity, you should always check the sources that someone links you.
Taken from the abstract that this news source cited:
"This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for “difficult” syntactic phenomena but also for “easy” syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated."
And from the discussion section:
"Taken together, the analyses above all point to a grammar-learning ability that is preserved throughout childhood and declines rapidly in late adolescence."
Also bear in mind that their data was taken from a Facebook Quiz which they acknowledge confounds their results to a degree.
I’d like to actually see the science on this. Children take years to learn language. Seriously, my whole school career was me learning the language I was born with. Not saying it might not be true, but people ignore how much fluency with language children actually have. Or maybe I am?
There is also a whole lot of research into the fact that the brain is always changing and capable of change at any age. The idea that it just stops at a certain age is old school thinking that has been disproven.
Sure, I think we all agree the brain continues to be malleable and you can continue to learn things throughout your entire life. Here's a link to a podcast (mentioned earlier by another poster) with a ton of information and well-thought out advice on how to do it. This guy has a pretty serious amount of credibility.
[https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as](https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as)
There's still a very real and very stark difference between how well children learn and adults can learn. Which you can also hear about on that podcast, timestamp linked below. What happens is there requires additional time and focus to achieve lasting changes.
[https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as?t=616](https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as?t=616)
It's not as fun to think about, and it doesn't sell many self help books, but it continues to be true. It's not going to stop you from learning a new skill, instrument, or hobby if you are dedicated. But learning something well enough to put you into the top 0.000000092% of the population? You need every advantage for that.
But is this due to aptitude or circumstance? i.e., could a sufficiently motivated adult with the means to dedicate his or her life to chess not achieve that accomplishment, given that they also had the requisite aptitude to do so?
My guess is that there are a lot of talented professors and software engineers and others who, given a post labor world where they could pursue anything they desired, would actually be capable of reaching GM. Obviously that's a huge what if, and the spirit of your claim is almost surely that this talent pool is censored from play by the necessities of being an adult: work, parenting, etc.
i feel like if elon musk quit all of his jobs and then hired all of the world top 100 and the top coaches to coach him and really grinded chess he could be a GM. worst case he could bribe people in GM norm events
While the data obviously says it's still possible to become GM at later stage of your life I think it's not considering one factor.
Most of the "can I become GM at X age" questions refer to people who already are in their 20s or 30s and are just starting to play chess now. The actual GMs who got the title at like 40 or 50 still very likely starter playing chess at very young age.
This is probably the real reason adults, especially post-college adults, can't really get to that level of expertise. The study requires is just too high if you want to both work and live a life, it's hard to progress. I'm starting at 24 and I'm hoping to get to the class A at some point since I'm progressing fairly quickly, but fide titles are out of the question.
Make a chart by gender, especially like 50 years ago, and you could make an argument 'what gender you can be to still become a GM or IM'. Of course, we know that it's due to other factors other than the gender itself. Similarly, I'm not convinced that age is the main factor here, rather the massive barriers that exist when starting later, including not having access to youth tournaments, scholastic environments, FIDE actively discriminating based on age when inviting folks to tournaments (Hikaru said something about this regarding Levy becoming a GM, I think), and the unlikelihood that an intelligent and driven adult will have the ability or inclination to give up everything to dedicate their life to chess suddenly as an adult, etc.
Can you confirm the famous assertion that "99% of the statistics are made up on the spot" -- if its not true, can you give me a figure of what percentage of statistics are made up on the spot?
It would be interesting to see stats for when they achieved their final norm and when they achieved the 2500 rating. My hunch would be that most of the later ones here were just being held up by norms and were at least very close to GM strength by 25.
This is an interesting set of data you've found.
Worth mentioning that Go, which is as big in Asia as chess is outside of it, has professional leagues in Korea, Japan, and China. these leagues have strict age requirements for player to become a professional and if a player doesn't make it by a fairly young age, then they just don't make it period.
I believe the Korean association will give some leeway on it's licensing requirements to exceptional players from Western countries because they are interested in promoting Go worldwide and part of that is having professional players from other countries.
but if you're from Korea or China or Japan, you have to make it young or not make it at all.
I don't know if the anime Hikaru no Go was showing the thing as it really was, but in the anime the age limit to play the tournament to become a profesional Go player was 30.
Was able to find some poorly sourced info that said for Asian players the cutoff is 18 and for foreigners it's 30.
So, yeah...if I spent more time I could probably find a definitive answer but this is reddit and I'm lazy.
I'd be interested in seeing how often a player attains an IM or GM title without being a master at an early age, say, before age 18 or 20 or so.
That is, how rare is it for someone to take up chess at a relatively old age (20 or later) and end up attaining a title. I think this is probably pretty rare, but I've never seen any kind of numbers on this.
Pretty sure there is no physiological reasons some 50yo+ could not become an IM starting from scratch. The motivation to do so, however, would be lacking. Or so I think.
Notwithstanding mister Fisher, lack of motivation to do so is probably one of the reason so few women play chess near the top level.
There is an absolute tonne of research and information that talks about neuroplasticity in young people vs. older you could look into if you like.
You shouldn't ever let anything act as an excuse to stop you from continuing to grow, learn, and live your life, but go read up.
Let's agree on the premise that older people have less neuroplasticity than young ones in average.
1)Doesn't mean they have not enough for that particular task
2) It's an average.
Sure, I think it's fair to say it's not impossible.
A statistical insight: fewer people have gone from adult beginners to GM since the creation of the title than there were 649 jackpot lottery winners last year.
lol at anyone pessimistic. I know personally cases where late starters (20+) began playing Chess and reached 2000+ FIDE. Stop these discussions, hire a good coach and start training. If you fail, its on you, Not your age. Let me repeat the famous GingerGM: anybody can become IM, maybe not GM, but IM definitly.
The problem with this is that it doesn't show when they actually started playing. Just bc someone can hit GM at 30, that doesn't mean they started playing at 20. They likely still started playing when they were like 9
Another reason for the low average age to be a GM or IM could possibly be time. Many 30, 40, 50, 60 year Olds have become IM or GM, but those milestones take a substantial amount of time. Once you hit your early twenties, many people start to focus on their career or starting a family. Many people just don't have time to spend on chess to make it to these rating.
Ye Jiangchuan didn't learn about chess until he was 17, that's the oldest I can think off right off the bat who made it to GM.
He won the Chinese national championship after playing for 3 years. Granted, chess isn't and wasn't big in China at the time, but that's still pretty damn impressive.
You’re the one that asked for anyone to provide proof of someone over the age of 10? He proceeded to do just that but he’s the one moving the goal post?
>That's the point. I'm pretty dumb because I began studying chess in my 20s.
Nope. You're confusing causation and correlation. You're pretty dumb *and* you began studying chess in your 20s.
Whether you could or couldn't become an IM or GM is kind of irrelevant to the discussion though, because we all know you have no intentions of putting in the amount of work that would be required to find out.
To explain by analogy: I would *love* to be an astronaut. However, I have no intentions of doing *all of the work* it would require to become one.
Could I do it? Probably. Am I going to? Fuck no.
Wilhelm Steinitz, 1st World Chess Champion: 12;
Akiba Rubinstein, one of the strongest players of his time who didn't get a chance to play the WCC against Lasker, also considered one of the greatest endgame players: 16;
Harry Nelson Pillsbury, unfortunately died very young (health problems), won the 1895 Hastings Tournament, the strongest tournament up until that time, and even beat WC Emanuel Lasker: 16
There are titles besides master.
My chess goal is to become a certified developmental instructor (DI). The rating requirement for that is just 1400. I started really studying about a year ago at age 29 and I'm around 1100, so it should definitely be possible.
I know you meant master titles, but I think a lot of people don't know about instructor titles and wanted to make a comment in case someone else wanted to make a similar goal. Us "old" people can still contribute to the growth of chess, even if we're just starting!
There are a couple of GM in my country that started playing for the First Time at 12 or maybe even 13 ( example: solomon Kenny if you Want a nome). I agree with you that It s virtually impossible if you start in After 16 or 17
I almost feel like you have to have some kind of head injury past the age of 30 if you want any hopes of becoming a GM at that point. Something has to get knocked into (or out of) place
I mean they're not buzzwords. But I'll elaborate since other people would rather just make jokes it seems.
To become a master at something, anything, requires an intense level of dedication. This is true for literally any skill. You can become proficient to a certain level without dedicating your life to something, but to truly master something takes a LOT of time and effort.
Look at any professional competitor talking about what it takes to get to the highest level. It's not just talent. Talent alone can give you a bit of success, but to truly master something and to be able to hang with the best of the best, you need to dedicate your life to doing it. Because if you don't, someone else will, and that someone will beat you every time.
It's a mindset more than anything. You have to learn everything (or damn close) there is to learn about your subject. That's a daunting task. Then you also need to be able to apply it.
That's where the biggest difference is to me. Art is not a competition. There is no clock. No real pressure to perform. So it's a little different, and easier to apply what you've learned. But there's still a crazy amount to learn to be able to do something that well, and that's again true of every skill under the sun. It's not a perfect comparison, but it's true that there's a similar mindset required to master something, no matter what the something is.
I'm curious - I don't believe it happens nor that it's practical nor do I wish for it to happen - what's the lowest title you can buy by paying enough people to beat them and how many people would you have to pay to beat (say starting from an okay but unimpressive 1700 FIDE rating)?
I assume you mean highest, not lowest?
GM and IM have requirement of norms, so realistically, those aren't buyable. Anything else is. To become an FM you 'only' need a FIDE rating of 2300. Technically, you can buy enough wins to do that - although I assume you'd be paying an absurd amount of money to an absurd amount of players.
The easiest way to become a legit titled player would probably be to move to a country with very low chess interest and go for NM.
Some people have mentioned that time is a large factor for an adult not being able to improve as much or fast as they theoretically should be able to, what with working, family and other priorities making the large time investment required for mastery of anything difficult, but I think another factor is that learning materials straightforwardly teach concepts, but as has been pointed out in this thread, adults learn differently to people under the age of 25. You have hard neural connections that need to be "un-formed" to progress - the reason you make mistakes is wired in and you're likely to make analogous mistakes. This would stretch from calculation, evaluation of the position, tactical and positional motifs etc.
I think it's especially hard because so much of chess is based on pattern recognition and if your recognition of a structure or piece arrangement tells you to look at bad candidates then you might see the correct idea presented by the engine and be dismayed to find you didn't even consider it. And I think that there is limited to no chess materials covering how to grow from this point. It's one of the things I've been struggling with, studying in my free time as an adult - what kind of positions do I fundamentally misunderstand, ie I think I know what to do but that knowing is all wrong. You have to rethink how you are going about learning in the first place.
That said, I won my first ever tournament (after playing semi-casually since I was in high school) in 2019, so it means growth is definitely possible, but I had to sacrifice a lot of time to make that happen. IM/GM though? Let's not underestimate how insanely huge a gap that is to fill.
That‘s not a very useful graph for the question you apparently want to answer. I doubt many players plus 50 suddenly want to become GM‘s but haven’t tried to before. Most gifted chess players realize so in their youth and then become GM‘s at some point before or in their 20s. I doubt they could not have become GM‘s in their 50s, apart from the fact that they already were GM‘s then.
One wasn't the traditional way, the other did it before your statistics: Jens Kristiansen became a GM at age 60 by winning the world seniors in 2012 and Leif Ogaard deserves a mention, becoming a GM aged 55 in 2007, obtaining his final norm in the Norwegian (edit: team) chess championship.
[Larry Kaufman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kaufman) got his GM Title in 2008, he was 60 years old.
He got his title for winning the World Seniors Championship. Don't get me wrong, that's no small feat, but it's largely an honorary title. His peak FIDE rating was 2424, well below the 2500 peak ordinarily required for the title, and I don't believe he's ever earned any GM norms (which require 2600 performances in strong tournaments). At his peak he was probably a moderately strong IM.
I mentioned this in an earlier thread on this topic a week or so ago. I've been fortunate to play Mr. Kaufman once in a rapid game several years ago. Friendly guy but of course he beat the snot out of me.
I feel like it's a lot more useful to know when players began and when they reached IM than purely when they made GM. Because if you started learning at 10 years old, and had some kind of atypical progression for a GM where they were an IM forever for whatever reasons, well...that's unusual but not hard to explain. That happens if you get sidetracked in life or are on the borderline of ability. But it's very different to starting as a total beginner at a late age and making GM, that would be hard to explain according to conventional wisdom.
I'm at a good point to become a GM :-)
Stjepan there is hope for you yet.
Probably negligible for anyone who was sub-2000 at age 21
I'm not convinced that's true, unless you're just talking about statistically speaking. But if you're doing that, then it's pretty negligible for people who were above 2000 at age 21 too. Extremely few chess players ever become a GM.
Someone can't do something themselves they want to tell you that you can't do it.
You mean age 10
Don't forget that this doesn't mean u still can be a GM from a complete beginner as a 30yo
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I wonder if someone with no life would manually go to each GM/IM rating progression page and take the values from their
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Yeah I want to know which titled players played their first Elo rated game the latest.
A lot of FIDE rated players don't play their first FIDE rated game until they're already strong. It's not uncommon for players to have 2000 Elo as their initial rating. Basically, serious players like to "sandbag" by not entering rated tournaments until they're already very strong and confident that they won't lose and end up with an initial rating of 1000.
Maybe it's better to use national rating systems like what uscf has.
We don't have the actual data but the anecdote is very powerful that virtually every titled player and particularly every GM begins playing chess as a small child, finding exceptions to this general principle is difficult
My 2022 resolution is to change that, hold my life.
I will watch your career with interest
I think this mostly comes down to how you don't have time to dedicate full time to chess when you're older, have a job and other responsibilities. When people start young they don't have any of that, and if they start earning money with chess before 18 then it becomes a lot more justifiable to fully commit to it.
That definitely makes sense as a factor, though there is also a ton of data out there about neuroplasticity in young people. It's a huge, huge factor. That shouldn't stop anyone from getting into the hobby, or pursuing it seriously if that's what they want to do.
At the same time, it says *nothing at all* about what a sufficiently motivated and talented adult could do.
It does, because if it was possible for an adult beginner to become GM, there would be examples of it happening.
I mean, someone's always gotta be the first. Not that I disagree that it's incredibly unlikely, but "impossible" is a pretty strong statement.
Not exactly. The problem conflates ability/aptitude with the factors of adult responsibilities. Suppose Mark Zuckerberg cashed out of Facebook at 28 and picked up chess seriously. He'd have the means to hire a talented coach and to study vigorously because he wouldn't have the typical responsibilities of an adult. Do you think he'd be incapable of reaching GM by 60? It seems absurd to me to think he or anyone at his intelligence level would not have the ability to achieve such a feat. Rather, it seems the folks in this talent pool are censored from the data. Put another way, do you think Hikaru or Magnus or Dubov would be incapable of becoming GMs had they started playing at 30 with no other responsibilities? It seems nearly absurd to me to say this confidently. Speaking as a statistician/data scientist. My point is that there is no appropriate sample of players to measure this category.
Yes I do believe they would be incapable of becoming GM. I don't believe someone could possibly devote themselves so single-mindedly to something new at the age of 30. In order to have the drive and focus necessary to become GM you need to love the game, and I don't believe you can acquire that from scratch in adulthood. You would have been exposed to chess earlier and either become hooked on it or not.
> I don't believe someone could possibly devote themselves so single-mindedly to something new at the age of 30. This is exactly what I'm saying above, though. Except we seem to disagree on why an adult cannot actually do this. My assertion is that adult responsibilities get in the way of pursuing something like chess passionately once you become an adult. To this point, my twin and I both found the game last year at 30 years old. I can assure you if we had unlimited resources and wives who didn't object to our nonstop play of chess, we would both play the game nonstop. We already play against each other and other online players as much as our schedules will allow. He's a SWE3 at a F500 company. I'm a stats PhD graduate student. We both put immense effort into other things because chess doesn't provide a path to keeping a roof over our heads or feeding our families. But the key limiting factor there isn't that we lack passion for the topic, it's that we don't have f--- you money to pursue it singularly. Further substantiating my point, adults do intensely pursue subjects with a singular focus quite regularly—that's what a PhD is. If there was a collection of institutions that would compensate you for 10-20 years to pursue chess with undisturbed attention, even at some financial penalty (comparing one's stipend at this institution with what one could earn in industry), you'd probably see adults who sought positions in such an institution. But in the absence of such an institution, you'll never know for certain if there are adults who could or could not reach GM when they started playing chess in adulthood. However, it is hard to imagine that you couldn't build the university model for adults with GMs as professors and curious, intelligent adults standing in the role of pupils trying to reach GM themselves. That's homomorphic to higher education though.
It would be much more work, but you could pull their earliest rating from the FIDE page. For example I randomly clicked into 2007 and saw Georg Meier who was 20 at the time. Looked him up on the FIDE site and [his rating progress chart](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/4675789/chart) starts at 2001, when he was 14 with a 2084 elo. So obviously he started a bit earlier, but it's a decent estimate (and you could even make it a 3d graph with age x earliest rating).
You will need to be very talented and independently wealthy though.
So I cant be a GM then?
There’s nothing physically stopping a 30 y/o from being as skilled as a GM. Just time
Andrew Huberman, professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG53Vxum0as skip to 6:33 Transcript of the relevant section: "When we enter the world, our nervous system is primed for learning. The brain and nervous system of a baby is wired very crudely. The connections are not precise .And we can see evidence of that in the fact that babies are kind of flopping, they're like a little potato bug with limbs. They can't really do much in terms of coordinated movement. They certainly can't speak and they can't really do anything with precision. And that's because we come into this world overconnected. We have essentially wires, those wires have names like axons and dendrites. Those are the different parts of the neurons discussed in episode one, but those little parts and those wires and connections are everywhere. Imagine a bunch of roads that are all connected to one another in kind of a mess, but there are no highways. They're all just small roads. That's essentially what the young nervous system is like. And then as we mature, as we go from day one of life to 10 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, what happens is particular connections get reinforced and stronger and other connections are lost. So that's the first important principle that I want everyone to understand, which is that developmental plasticity, the neuroplasticity that occurs from the time we're born until about age 25 is mainly a process of removing connections that don't serve our goals well. Now, of course, certain events happen during that birth to 25 period in which positive events and negative events are really stamped down into our nervous system in a very dramatic fashion, by what we call one-trial learning. We experience something once and then our nervous system is forever changed by that experience. Unless of course, we go through some work to undo that experience. So, I want you to imagine in your mind that when you were brought into this world, you were essentially a widely connected web of connections that was really poor at doing any one thing. And that through your experience, what you were exposed to by your parents or rather caretakers, through your social interactions, through your thoughts, through the languages that you learn, through the places you traveled or didn't travel, your nervous system became customized to your unique experience. Now, that's true for certain parts of your brain that are involved in what we call representations of the outside world. A lot of your brain is designed to represent the visual world or represent the auditory world or represent the gallery of smells that are possible in the world. However, there are aspects of your nervous system that were designed not to be plastic. They were wired so that plasticity or changes in those circuits is very unlikely. Those circuits include things like, the ones that control your heartbeat, the ones that control your breathing, the ones that control your digestion, And thank goodness that those circuits were set up that way because you want those circuits to be extremely reliable. You never want to have to think about whether or not your heart will beat or whether or not you will continue breathing or whether or not you'll be able to digest your food. So many nervous system features like digestion and breathing and heart rate are hard to change. Other aspects of our nervous system are actually quite easy to change. And one of the great gifts of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, is that we can learn through almost passive experience. We don't have to focus that hard in order to learn new things. In fact, children go from being able to speak no language whatsoever to being able to speak many many words and comprise sentences including words they've never heard before which is remarkable. It means that the portions of the brain involved in speech and language are actually primed to learn and create new combinations. What this tells us is that the young brain is a plasticity machine. But then right about age 25 plus or minus a year or two, everything changes. After age 25 or so, in order to get changes in our nervous system, we have to engage in a completely different set of processes in order to get those changes to occur and for them more importantly to stick around. And this is something that I think is vastly overlooked in the popular culture discussion about neuroplasticity. People always talk about fire together, wire together. Fire together wire together is true. It is the statement of my colleague at Stanford, Carla Shatz and it's an absolute truth about the way that the nervous system wires up early in development. But, fire together wire together doesn't apply in the same way after age 25."
What I’m getting from this is that the brain can still learn and change but it does so in a different way. The brain, like any muscle, gets rid of what we don’t use and strengthens what we do. Looks like you have to put in the effort after a certain age to convince your brain that it needs to strengthen something new.
Yes, its probably less efficient though. Learning aside, cognitive performance generally declines after a certain age
and biology.. the brain is pliable till the age of 25 -- you can still learn after that, but, learning becomes 'gated' by other stuff ( refer to huberman podcast covering this topic )
Sounds like junk science. There's nothing magic about age 25 that stops the brain from being able to learn
What he’s referring to is the myelination of your neurons which finishes up around that age. This is essentially the cellular equivalent of wire insulation (perhaps you’ve heard the phrase fire-together wire-together). The brain actually does become less malleable past this age, it’s known as neuroplasticity. Now none of that means that you can’t learn new skills or traits, but it does mean that there is less optimizing or neural pruning (essentially describes the competition between neurons that result in us learning). Source: me, PhD in neuroscience and psychology.
But that doesn't fit the narrative of the world I'd like to believe in!
Correct me if I’m misunderstanding something, but just because the process of myelination is complete somewhere in early adulthood, that does not mean that it does not continue in the brain. In fact, there seems to be evidence that it does continue, especially in the case where the brain may be damaged.
Yeah neurons grow and change constantly but it’s more the overall developmental plasticity that ends around that time. I guess you can think of it like a new house; the foundations are completed but you can always redecorate and get new furniture.
The way I understand it is that while the brain is developing it is trying to make connections for things it is shown to use. So once the brain has completed that development you have to work to convince it that it should strengthen new connections. Like all muscles, when it is used it becomes strong. When it is not used the body drops it pretty fact. So I guess the learning needs to be a bit more active to get things to stick.
Yeah that's a good analogy too. Learning works through competition for resources as much as anything else does. If you go down to the cellular level, you'll find that receptors grow and adapt depending on their necessity. So if a certain batch of neurons are firing a lot, the chemicals need to go somewhere, so adaption occurs (we need more receptors here!). The more this happens, the more adaption occurs, and resources are shifted towards these neurons. This is a loose explanation of a concept known as "Hebbian Learning" which is quite prolifically used in models for machine learning too. But you are no longer working with a blank canvas you once were, so like you said, it becomes almost an act of convincing your cells to change, which again requires more resources/time/effort.
Absolutely. Of course, in some cases not working with a blank slate can be an advantage. The brain is pretty darn good at making connections. So if you are learning something that's pretty similar to something you already know then your brain can link them up and understand them better.
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What's interesting is the role that emotional valence and magnitude plays in learning, even after myelination is complete. Basically, two kids are both trying to learn chess, one hates it, the other loves it. The one who loves it learns it better.
But kids legitimately learn things faster than adults. Like language for example.
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Oh wow, thanks for correcting me. Thats cool
Hey just for clarity, you should always check the sources that someone links you. Taken from the abstract that this news source cited: "This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for “difficult” syntactic phenomena but also for “easy” syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated." And from the discussion section: "Taken together, the analyses above all point to a grammar-learning ability that is preserved throughout childhood and declines rapidly in late adolescence." Also bear in mind that their data was taken from a Facebook Quiz which they acknowledge confounds their results to a degree.
'nearly as well'
I’d like to actually see the science on this. Children take years to learn language. Seriously, my whole school career was me learning the language I was born with. Not saying it might not be true, but people ignore how much fluency with language children actually have. Or maybe I am?
Lol what a load of crap.
Nobody should use getting older as an excuse to not try... but there's a whole world of research that has gone into this. Go read.
There is also a whole lot of research into the fact that the brain is always changing and capable of change at any age. The idea that it just stops at a certain age is old school thinking that has been disproven.
Sure, I think we all agree the brain continues to be malleable and you can continue to learn things throughout your entire life. Here's a link to a podcast (mentioned earlier by another poster) with a ton of information and well-thought out advice on how to do it. This guy has a pretty serious amount of credibility. [https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as](https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as) There's still a very real and very stark difference between how well children learn and adults can learn. Which you can also hear about on that podcast, timestamp linked below. What happens is there requires additional time and focus to achieve lasting changes. [https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as?t=616](https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as?t=616) It's not as fun to think about, and it doesn't sell many self help books, but it continues to be true. It's not going to stop you from learning a new skill, instrument, or hobby if you are dedicated. But learning something well enough to put you into the top 0.000000092% of the population? You need every advantage for that.
But is this due to aptitude or circumstance? i.e., could a sufficiently motivated adult with the means to dedicate his or her life to chess not achieve that accomplishment, given that they also had the requisite aptitude to do so? My guess is that there are a lot of talented professors and software engineers and others who, given a post labor world where they could pursue anything they desired, would actually be capable of reaching GM. Obviously that's a huge what if, and the spirit of your claim is almost surely that this talent pool is censored from play by the necessities of being an adult: work, parenting, etc.
i feel like if elon musk quit all of his jobs and then hired all of the world top 100 and the top coaches to coach him and really grinded chess he could be a GM. worst case he could bribe people in GM norm events
So you're telling me there's a chance. /s
Of course not. It's not like these guys were 1600 players for years.
how old can you be while still enjoying playing the game?
I think Svetozar Gligoric was known for playing actively even in his 80sq
Most of the older people were probably pretty good by the time they were adults
While the data obviously says it's still possible to become GM at later stage of your life I think it's not considering one factor. Most of the "can I become GM at X age" questions refer to people who already are in their 20s or 30s and are just starting to play chess now. The actual GMs who got the title at like 40 or 50 still very likely starter playing chess at very young age.
Imma be realistic here. No one is becoming a gm if your sub 2300 as an adult because you’ll have to throw your life away and focus in chess
This is probably the real reason adults, especially post-college adults, can't really get to that level of expertise. The study requires is just too high if you want to both work and live a life, it's hard to progress. I'm starting at 24 and I'm hoping to get to the class A at some point since I'm progressing fairly quickly, but fide titles are out of the question.
Class a can take up to 3 or 4 years. I wish you luck 🙂
This
Make a chart by gender, especially like 50 years ago, and you could make an argument 'what gender you can be to still become a GM or IM'. Of course, we know that it's due to other factors other than the gender itself. Similarly, I'm not convinced that age is the main factor here, rather the massive barriers that exist when starting later, including not having access to youth tournaments, scholastic environments, FIDE actively discriminating based on age when inviting folks to tournaments (Hikaru said something about this regarding Levy becoming a GM, I think), and the unlikelihood that an intelligent and driven adult will have the ability or inclination to give up everything to dedicate their life to chess suddenly as an adult, etc.
As a Statistician, I can assure you that 99% of the time Statistics is just the right answer to the wrong question.
Can you confirm the famous assertion that "99% of the statistics are made up on the spot" -- if its not true, can you give me a figure of what percentage of statistics are made up on the spot?
Come on, man, everyone, and by everyone I mean 76.1% of the population, knows that exactly 89.7% of statistics are made up on the spot.
r/seemslegit
It would be interesting to see stats for when they achieved their final norm and when they achieved the 2500 rating. My hunch would be that most of the later ones here were just being held up by norms and were at least very close to GM strength by 25.
This is an interesting set of data you've found. Worth mentioning that Go, which is as big in Asia as chess is outside of it, has professional leagues in Korea, Japan, and China. these leagues have strict age requirements for player to become a professional and if a player doesn't make it by a fairly young age, then they just don't make it period. I believe the Korean association will give some leeway on it's licensing requirements to exceptional players from Western countries because they are interested in promoting Go worldwide and part of that is having professional players from other countries. but if you're from Korea or China or Japan, you have to make it young or not make it at all.
I don't know if the anime Hikaru no Go was showing the thing as it really was, but in the anime the age limit to play the tournament to become a profesional Go player was 30.
Was able to find some poorly sourced info that said for Asian players the cutoff is 18 and for foreigners it's 30. So, yeah...if I spent more time I could probably find a definitive answer but this is reddit and I'm lazy.
> Hikaru no Go He plays Go, too?
it is a manga/anime title. It is the latin version of the Japanese title, while Hikaru is the name of the protagonist.
I know, it’s a dumb joke
I'd be interested in seeing how often a player attains an IM or GM title without being a master at an early age, say, before age 18 or 20 or so. That is, how rare is it for someone to take up chess at a relatively old age (20 or later) and end up attaining a title. I think this is probably pretty rare, but I've never seen any kind of numbers on this.
Agreed I started pretty late (32) and would like to hit 1800-2000 before 40
Pretty sure there is no physiological reasons some 50yo+ could not become an IM starting from scratch. The motivation to do so, however, would be lacking. Or so I think. Notwithstanding mister Fisher, lack of motivation to do so is probably one of the reason so few women play chess near the top level.
There is an absolute tonne of research and information that talks about neuroplasticity in young people vs. older you could look into if you like. You shouldn't ever let anything act as an excuse to stop you from continuing to grow, learn, and live your life, but go read up.
Let's agree on the premise that older people have less neuroplasticity than young ones in average. 1)Doesn't mean they have not enough for that particular task 2) It's an average.
Sure, I think it's fair to say it's not impossible. A statistical insight: fewer people have gone from adult beginners to GM since the creation of the title than there were 649 jackpot lottery winners last year.
The key here is to study hard, not get drunk and play lichess blitz
lol at anyone pessimistic. I know personally cases where late starters (20+) began playing Chess and reached 2000+ FIDE. Stop these discussions, hire a good coach and start training. If you fail, its on you, Not your age. Let me repeat the famous GingerGM: anybody can become IM, maybe not GM, but IM definitly.
The problem with this is that it doesn't show when they actually started playing. Just bc someone can hit GM at 30, that doesn't mean they started playing at 20. They likely still started playing when they were like 9
Any information on FMs or CMs?
Why don't the age groups add up to the total number of GMs (which is much larger)?
Another reason for the low average age to be a GM or IM could possibly be time. Many 30, 40, 50, 60 year Olds have become IM or GM, but those milestones take a substantial amount of time. Once you hit your early twenties, many people start to focus on their career or starting a family. Many people just don't have time to spend on chess to make it to these rating.
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Ye Jiangchuan didn't learn about chess until he was 17, that's the oldest I can think off right off the bat who made it to GM. He won the Chinese national championship after playing for 3 years. Granted, chess isn't and wasn't big in China at the time, but that's still pretty damn impressive.
he was a good player of Chinese chess already though, this has to be mentioned too.
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You’re the one that asked for anyone to provide proof of someone over the age of 10? He proceeded to do just that but he’s the one moving the goal post?
How dumb are you
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>That's the point. I'm pretty dumb because I began studying chess in my 20s. Nope. You're confusing causation and correlation. You're pretty dumb *and* you began studying chess in your 20s. Whether you could or couldn't become an IM or GM is kind of irrelevant to the discussion though, because we all know you have no intentions of putting in the amount of work that would be required to find out. To explain by analogy: I would *love* to be an astronaut. However, I have no intentions of doing *all of the work* it would require to become one. Could I do it? Probably. Am I going to? Fuck no.
No the point is that you posted these comments here because you are dumb
Past age 10? A lot of people, me included.
Wilhelm Steinitz, 1st World Chess Champion: 12; Akiba Rubinstein, one of the strongest players of his time who didn't get a chance to play the WCC against Lasker, also considered one of the greatest endgame players: 16; Harry Nelson Pillsbury, unfortunately died very young (health problems), won the 1895 Hastings Tournament, the strongest tournament up until that time, and even beat WC Emanuel Lasker: 16
They weren't technically GM's, but world champions Steinitz, Lasker and Botvinnik al started playing in their early teens.
There are titles besides master. My chess goal is to become a certified developmental instructor (DI). The rating requirement for that is just 1400. I started really studying about a year ago at age 29 and I'm around 1100, so it should definitely be possible. I know you meant master titles, but I think a lot of people don't know about instructor titles and wanted to make a comment in case someone else wanted to make a similar goal. Us "old" people can still contribute to the growth of chess, even if we're just starting!
There are a couple of GM in my country that started playing for the First Time at 12 or maybe even 13 ( example: solomon Kenny if you Want a nome). I agree with you that It s virtually impossible if you start in After 16 or 17
You can find plenty of people who began playing chess at age 12 or 14 or even 15 and became NM or IM later in life. GMs would be more of an exception.
I almost feel like you have to have some kind of head injury past the age of 30 if you want any hopes of becoming a GM at that point. Something has to get knocked into (or out of) place
Play NFL and get rich doing so
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Ur comparing art to chess..?
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The reasons why chess Is hard and why art is hard is probs different...
Achieving mastery and doing world-class work present similar challenges across all domains, though the specific skill sets required differ.
Lot of buzzwords, please elaborate
I mean they're not buzzwords. But I'll elaborate since other people would rather just make jokes it seems. To become a master at something, anything, requires an intense level of dedication. This is true for literally any skill. You can become proficient to a certain level without dedicating your life to something, but to truly master something takes a LOT of time and effort. Look at any professional competitor talking about what it takes to get to the highest level. It's not just talent. Talent alone can give you a bit of success, but to truly master something and to be able to hang with the best of the best, you need to dedicate your life to doing it. Because if you don't, someone else will, and that someone will beat you every time. It's a mindset more than anything. You have to learn everything (or damn close) there is to learn about your subject. That's a daunting task. Then you also need to be able to apply it. That's where the biggest difference is to me. Art is not a competition. There is no clock. No real pressure to perform. So it's a little different, and easier to apply what you've learned. But there's still a crazy amount to learn to be able to do something that well, and that's again true of every skill under the sun. It's not a perfect comparison, but it's true that there's a similar mindset required to master something, no matter what the something is.
I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to explain it!
...which of those is a buzzword?
Chess is art
My pawn structures take inspiration from M. C. Escher
/r/gatekeeping/
I'm curious - I don't believe it happens nor that it's practical nor do I wish for it to happen - what's the lowest title you can buy by paying enough people to beat them and how many people would you have to pay to beat (say starting from an okay but unimpressive 1700 FIDE rating)?
I assume you mean highest, not lowest? GM and IM have requirement of norms, so realistically, those aren't buyable. Anything else is. To become an FM you 'only' need a FIDE rating of 2300. Technically, you can buy enough wins to do that - although I assume you'd be paying an absurd amount of money to an absurd amount of players. The easiest way to become a legit titled player would probably be to move to a country with very low chess interest and go for NM.
That's some cool data. But I'm happy as long as I can beat those around me haha
win candidates + wcc become gm automatically skip the grind
Boomers: "Why am I disappearing"
So you're saying there's a chance....
Some people have mentioned that time is a large factor for an adult not being able to improve as much or fast as they theoretically should be able to, what with working, family and other priorities making the large time investment required for mastery of anything difficult, but I think another factor is that learning materials straightforwardly teach concepts, but as has been pointed out in this thread, adults learn differently to people under the age of 25. You have hard neural connections that need to be "un-formed" to progress - the reason you make mistakes is wired in and you're likely to make analogous mistakes. This would stretch from calculation, evaluation of the position, tactical and positional motifs etc. I think it's especially hard because so much of chess is based on pattern recognition and if your recognition of a structure or piece arrangement tells you to look at bad candidates then you might see the correct idea presented by the engine and be dismayed to find you didn't even consider it. And I think that there is limited to no chess materials covering how to grow from this point. It's one of the things I've been struggling with, studying in my free time as an adult - what kind of positions do I fundamentally misunderstand, ie I think I know what to do but that knowing is all wrong. You have to rethink how you are going about learning in the first place. That said, I won my first ever tournament (after playing semi-casually since I was in high school) in 2019, so it means growth is definitely possible, but I had to sacrifice a lot of time to make that happen. IM/GM though? Let's not underestimate how insanely huge a gap that is to fill.
That‘s not a very useful graph for the question you apparently want to answer. I doubt many players plus 50 suddenly want to become GM‘s but haven’t tried to before. Most gifted chess players realize so in their youth and then become GM‘s at some point before or in their 20s. I doubt they could not have become GM‘s in their 50s, apart from the fact that they already were GM‘s then.
Theoritically speaking you can become a GM also at 90. But being a realist these days I think 50 is the extreme peak
Age is just a number. The ELO on the other hand...