Am I too old to reach 2500 ELO?

I am a 40 years old working mechanical engineer. I have known chess basics since i was 10 years old but have never played chess seriously. But because of development of social media in past decade, I have come to know that large community of chess players exist online and now I am inspired to pursue chess again. I joined chess.com couple of months back and by now I have 750 rating in rapid chess. 10 minute game is very difficult for me so I usually play with time more than 15 minutes. sometimes 20 or 30 minutes too... my question is... am I too old to ever reach 2500 rating?... how long does it take for someone like me to reach at that level if I practice regularly?

@1

"now I have 750 rating in rapid chess"
++ A rating of 750 is a sign of frequent blunders.
Always check your intended move is no blunder before you play it.
That little mental discipline alone is enough to reach 1500.

"I usually play with time more than 15 minutes"
++ Best is the official rapid time control 15|10, also used for World Rapid Championship etc. Thanks to the increment you always have time to win a won position or draw a drawn position.

"am I too old to ever reach 2500 rating?"
++ Yes, but 2000 is possible in 1 year.
Key is to analyse your lost games and learn from your mistakes.

@4

It is fine to be a lama, but spitting is uncalled for.
Example:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/reached-2100-elo-in-1-year

I am rated 1200-1300 and I would be happy to reach a stable 1800. 2500 sounds too high

Just play and have fun.

Even the most promising child prodigies need at least 5 years (of seriously studying chess and playing tournaments) to reach 2000 Elo. Doing it in 1 year is completely impossible.

HI!

You are an engineer so you have studied a lot. You are trained in difficult subjects that require a lot of mental abilities (maths, physics, mechanics...) and you solve problems most people would`t. So you are perfect for chess.

You are rated 750 and your goal 2500 is equivalent to play as a GM. You might need many years of intensive study and training to achieve this. Mind that the young GMs today may be 16 years old or even less, that means that they have at least 10 years of chess practice assuming they started at 6.

I don't know if anyone have tried that before at your age. But you could start step by step with a less demanding goal, for instance, what about reaching 1100 by the end of the year? This will depend not only on your intelligence but also in the dedication , the plan you have and working with a coach. Then with time, you can set higher goals.

If you would like to read on improving at chess, you might check out my post: https://www.chess.com/blog/maafernan/chess-skills-development

Good luck!

Example: from 1000 to 2400 over the board classical in 5 years:
https://ratings.fide.com/profile/25745700/chart

This is an amazing example, he was just 1866 on december 23 and 2400+ on february 2024!!

@14

He won +300 in 2 tournaments:
https://ratings.fide.com/calculations.phtml?id_number=25745700&period=2024-02-01&rating=0

That is the problem over the board: you have to travel to tournaments.
Online and in a faster time control progress goes much faster.

How long? Nobody knows, nobody has done it in chess history.

You probably have an idea in your mind of how much effort and study is required to do this. Multiply that amount by 100, and it's still not nearly enough.

Imagine a kid who is obsessed with chess, plays and studies chess all day, every day, for at least 8-10 years. That's how it's done.

Practicing is only part of the battle. How far you go also depends on how much (and how efficiently) you study, as well.

Do you have any quality chess books in your library? I recommend investing in some, if you truly want to maximize your improvement. They can help shorten and accelerate your learning curve.

Thanks for your response.

Please recommend books or online courses, or coaching sites where i can learn serious chess.

it's more realistic to go one step at a time and set proximal objectives

if your interest in chess depends on being able to hit GM level then the likelihood that you will make it is even lower than otherwise

Dear all,

Thank you for your honest feedbacks.

I too have realized as much by watching grandmasters play online in past couple of months. It is certainly a serious game. The speed with which they play, is something like magic for me. But then to chess illiterate person like me it would certainly appear so... It seem true, that this is a game you start in your early child hood to become best at older age, but at our time the online material and content was simply not available. Only people i played chess with were real face to face people, and they were more interested in wining and mocking me rather than to teach me... so even though i liked the game so much, i lost interest in it as time went by. Also there were other necessary things to be done in life, such as education, engineering exams to crack, getting collage admissions, getting degrees, surviving in jobs, getting married, having kids, paying EMIs, paying school fees, fulfilling social responsibilities.... the list goes on. Once you do all this and do a job 10 to 12 hours a day you would hardly find time or will to do anything.

But things have changed so much in past few years... Learning anything has never been as easy as it is now in entire human history.. there is so much online content available for free and sometime with some affordable fees, you could almost learn anything without being ridiculed. I came in touch with chess.com and lichess.com by seeing you tube videos of chess players such as GothamChess, BotezLives, AnaCramiline.... and there on i started exploring...

I find chess.com very interesting place. I am still going through lesson videos available at chess.com... they are really informative and teaching me a lot of things i never new about chess before... Puzzle section i find most fun to solve... I find puzzle after puzzle, keep solving them and losing sense of time flow...

Well, perhaps it will not be possible for me to achieve very high skills of 2500 elo in this life, but i would certainly love to keep learning and playing chess here on chess.com, and hope to make some good friends here.

Thank you all for your response.

Regards,

AlfaMike58

Something to note about chess that you may already have suspected is that chess and chess players as they're portrayed in popular media (films, tv) is almost nothing at all like it all is in reality.

For example in From Russia With Love chess is clearly meant to exemplify people who are extremely organized, extremely serious, extremely studious, extremely smart and most of all able to meticulously plan ahead and use everything to their benefit. Sort of "thinking ahead" in life as well as on the chessboard. I don't really mind this, I enjoy it as much as the next person, especially it portrays chess very positively, but it's not true at all.

In reality chess players are often highly disorganized, often have no monetary or social mastermind plans where they "plan ahead" and treat people as "pawns" or whatever. They do not think ahead and create a masterplan. None of that is true at all. In fact the better at chess you get, the more time is used up by it, to the point where by the time you're among the world's elite your life is partly a bubble of chess variations. I remember once Kasparov saying people don't appreciate how much opening knowledge they're "carrying around" with them - as in, if they stop thinking about chess for a while, they're going to lose a lot of it.

If we were being true to reality chess would go into the same category as card games (excluding bridge, as bridge has taken on some of the intellectual mystique of chess) - so think like Rummy, Canasta, Poker, Pinochle. Whist, and so on. Now they're very respectable games, I don't mean to disparage any of those games, however if you compete hard at them it's seen as a little bit seedy or a little bit strange, rather than the "mastermind" or "fine intelligent patient wise gentleman" status chess has (poker has in recent years gotten a bit of the "mastermind" reputation as well, probably largely due to being pushed by various lucrative websites). It is important to understand that chess can't give you this status or train you on this and there's a high possibility of it wasting your time if you get too addicted to it.

So imagine Rummy players and those who play Rummy a lot in place of people playing and studying chess a lot, and imagine good Rummy players in place of good chess players. It's a skill, noone can deny it, but it doesn't say much about you really other than having a decent memory and judgement and propensity for wasting time.

"am I too old to ever reach 2500 rating?"

yes

Sure you can get better. 2500 no. I'm 55. Could I ever run a 6 minute mile again? Maybe. 4 minutes? No. If I put a lot of hard work in, I can improve, but not that much.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

It's the same if you want to climb the ratings ladder: you need to take it one step at a time.

Aim for 100 points higher than you are now. Then, when you get there, aim for 100 higher. Rinse and repeat . . . This will keep you better motivated (and more optimistic) than aiming for a lofty endpoint that's far off in the horizon.

Make your goals clear, achievable, and incremental ... One bite at a time.

Age is not a barrier to improving at chess and many players have achieved significant progress later in life. Reaching a 2500 rating is a challenging goal.