Are we all capable of 2000+ Elo?

Are we all capable of 2000+ Elo?

I always been inspired by stories of the impossible dream, tales of triumph in the face of adversity. To continually face the odds and eventually come out on top, must be one of the most gratifying experiences we can feel.

200,000 years ago, facing the odds was a daily occurrence. Homo sapiens would have to hunt for food in the most inhospitable conditions while trying not to become prey themselves. This would often take days and they would have to avoid other rival groups in fear of confrontation. If you failed against the odds, you were probably going to die.

Now fast forward 200,000 years. You are now transported to a world where failing against the odds means not making it to MacDonald’s before closing time. We have all become so desensitised to the real struggles of hardship that now, anything requiring any real effort seems almost impossible. Of course, it isn’t impossible, we just must accept that the average person gives up his dream long before we run out of mental and physical resources

In Geoff Colvin’s excellent book, “Talent is overrated”, Colvin Discusses the value of what can be achieved if the average person (yes! He means you and me!) puts in high quality work over many hours. He found that with almost perfect consistency, anyone who had achieved mastery of their fields, from Tiger Woods to Mozart to Michael Jordan to Bill Gates to our very own chess legend Bobby Fischer, had dedicated an average minimum of 10,000 hours of dedicated study—a number that translates into about 10 years of daily, dedicated effort. That is around 19 hours a week of dedicated study. Dedicated study for me, would mean playing long OTB games instead of mindless blitz, or taking the time to understand why you played a particular move in your pet opening instead of just memorising it. I’m sure we all could think of countless examples of passive and unengaged study. Of course, we all do not have 19 hours a week to dedicate to chess. However, we might fit in 10 hours a week over the course of 20 years.

But aren’t people like Mozart geniuses? Did they not have an abundance of natural talent? I shall attempt to define talent later, but it is very well documented that Mozart was an extremely hard worker, often working for 19 hours day from the age of 4. It is said that Mozart hit his 10,000-hour mark by the age of 8!

So, what exactly is talent? According to my dictionary, talent is someone who has a natural ability to be good at something. However, Bobby Fischer was not able to checkmate a king with just two bishops at the time of his birth, it was a skill he had to learn.

I prefer my own definition of talent.” The ability to work extremely hard at something regardless of the circumstances”.

I believe that we all have the mental resources to at least hit the 2000+ Elo mark. The reason many of us have not is because we are nowhere near our own 10,000-hour mark (of Deliberate and Thoughtful study) despite playing and studying for decades.

I not saying I have the work ethic to hit 2000 Elo anytime soon, maybe I will in 6 years, probably in 20 years. But knowing it’s possible must be a positive first step.

I believe that hard work is needed to get 2000+ in chess. The problem however is that for a very talented and young player the amount of energy to invest in chess is much smaller than an untalented person who began to play seriously chess as an adult. And because the investment is so high, most adults will at a certain point of their learning process will realise that it is not worth to try so hard to improve. Why should we? My personal motivation to improve in chess is to earn the respect of my students (I give since 20 years chess lessons to drug addicted in a clinic).

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I not sure your point holds though. I think talent is more about work ethic then natural ability as my original post explains, I'm sure that if you could meet up with mozart and tell him " your works are so famous, you have incredible natural ability, you are simply a genius". I imagined he would be quite angry! " I worked for 19 grueling hours a day for most of my life and you put my success down to natural ability!" 

 

I also think the reason why young children absorb information quicker than adults is because they don't have the life experience to doubt themselves. They don't have all the negative thoughts running in their heads when they are challenged. In short,  nobody has told them they can't do it yet!

Bump

No, the reason young children absorb info quickly is neuroplasticity.

IMHO natural ability is natural. I'm sure there are plenty of people with lots of talent. I have a friend who was extremely talented at football/soccer or whatever you want to call it. It took me many more hours than him to learn anything when it came to football. Talent i believe is the ability to learn something quickly or to be good at something with much less effort than rest of the field. Everyone has a certain degree of talent in everything. There are many people with lots of talent in this definition. Geniuses like Mozart however, possess both incredible natural ability, and extreme hard work and dedication. The reason my friend will probably never become a pro football player is because he doesn't have the work ethic that people such as Mozart or Bobby Fischer or Lionel Messi, ( not saying he has the same talent that they have just using him as an example). In essence, what I'm saying is that talent is not the ability to work hard, rather something that is natural and that geniuses have both their natural ability and the ability to work extremely hard to create the masterpieces that they do.

Lol dpnorman coming out with the scientific facts.

Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

 

The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Wrong. How to Really Master a Skill

 

New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Rule

 

I teach chess to few kids in the ages of 6 to 9 and I can see very big differences in the speed of learning and improvement between them.

I believe that hard work can get you very far. But their is such a disparity in skill among the world's skilled practicionars of anything, it cannot be all hard work. There are only 24 hours in a day, and eventually you reach a roof. In that arms race, the poeple who wanted it the most would all top out at about 19 hours and sleep what they needed to. You'd have some sort of equalization among the top. This isn't the case. There are some people who are just born different. No one was born with the ability to play chess, but some people can simply learn things faster and better than others. 

There is an Indian International Master who is ten years old. There have been people playing and studying chess, hard, for more hours than he's been able to be truly aware of his surroundings, and they never reached IM or anything close. Time and time again, it pops up. We can't all be Lebron, Or Jordan, or Woods, or Federer, or Fischer, or Carlsen. But we can all get good. 

And Dpnorman brought up a good point that simply disables a great deal of our otpimism that you can learn anything to the highest degree after a certain point. We know that when it comes to launguage, there is a very important and profound window from around 3-6 (Or so, something around there, maybe up to 8) where their brains are, in a sense, solidifying and finishing the connections. Once this point is past, some things will never get into that brain. Feral children who are found as young teens, can never be taught language. Ever. Their brains won't take it. I don't have the studies and charts and graphs, but Chess is in a sense a sort of launguage. And certain types of pattern recognition solidify around before teen years. If you learn chess after this window, you can be good. You might even be a strong IM, but Grandmasters almost always have to be taught at this critical time - where fo the rest of their life, Chess isn't something that they "have learned" and "think" about. It's become a part of way their brain operates, like language. It is this intrinsic pattern recognition they get to carry with them for the rest of their lives that creates a foundation to build that other people simply can't get. So no, if you want to be World Champion, and you learned Chess after say 8 or 9, forget it. Not gonna happen. My explanation is probably full of mistakes in details, but the broad strokes I think are correct. 

For god's sake how from anyone who had achieved mastery had dedicated 10,000 hours he arrives at what the average person can achive with 10,000 hours??? That's just a basic logical fallacy!

 

A lot of people say they want to work hard at chess to reach a certain level, but I have never seen them keep it up and achieve it. Show me any.

Talk is easy. Work is hard.

And talent is something else.

"... In a recently published issue of the journal 'Intelligence' there were numerous studies, analysis, and pieces on the 10,000hr rule. In particular, one study by David Hambrick and colleagues entitled “Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert”, sought out to 'test Ericsson’s claim that "individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice.' As a refresher, Ericsson was the original researcher who developed and then publicized the concepts, which then took off with Gladwell’s Outliers, Geoffrey Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, and numerous others who jumped on the bandwagon with their own spin.
In there research Hambrick reanalyzed 12 studies looking at expert performance in chess and music. Similar to Ericsson’s original work, they simply looked at hours of deliberate practice for each and compared it to performance levels along their development. In the chess studies, they found that deliberate practice explained 34% of the variance in performance, and therefore 66% unexplained. Looking at the individual numbers is even more staggering. There were some people who had over 20,000 hours of deliberate practice yet never went beyond Intermediate, the lowest of the three levels (intermediate, expert, and master). Perhaps most striking, was the range of “masters” was 832 hours to 24,284hrs to reach mastery.
When looking at Music, the results were very similar. 29.9% of the variance in performance was explained by amount of deliberate practice.
The whole study is worth a read as it delves into intelligence, personality, and other factors related to reaching 'expertise.' However, the take away to me is simply common sense. Does practice make you better? Of course it does, but it isn’t the be all end all. And you know what, neither is genetics. ..."
http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2014/03/why-gladwells-10000-rule-is-just-plain.html

TL;DR: Yes we are all capable of becoming 2000.

 

The problem is (1) The vast, vast majority of players don't really understand what it takes to get there -- if they did, it would scare them; (2) The vast majority of players, knowing what is required to get to 2000 decide that it just ain't worth it.

 

In my case the journey to 2000 took me nearly 13 years (March 1996 - December 2008).

 

It has turned out to be worthwhile to me because I teach chess for a living. If I did not do chess for a living, and I had a chance to do it all over again...I would not!

 

Anyone CAN do it, but you gotta really REALLY want it. To the exclusion of almost all else.

 

3% of people reach 2000. That probably approximates the percentage of tournament players who want it badly enough.

 

 

For the win.   

 

Also, one blunder can undo hours of hard work and winning play over the board.   

Probably most players trying hard to get 2000+ (but aware that they will not get 2600+) have a practical reason to invest so much in chess. I am not sure, but I can imagine that at the moment somebody get 2000, he still thinks he is a rather weak player, as he now comparing with 2200+. It is similar to a tennis player who reaches the top ten but is mostly losing against all the other top ten.

I think most players are capable of getting to 2000 if it's a goal they're committed to with proper study. Improper study is what holds most back IMHO

Thank you all for your insights. It is indeed a very complex subject and deserves much more research.