Do adults become Grand Masters?

Not sure where I picked this up, but from my understanding it's very rare for anyone over a certain age (17-18?) to take up the game and achieve a GM title. In fact, I don't know of a single GM who didn't start out somewhere between the ages of 4 and 12.

 

I think it's possible for adults to take up the game late in life and achieve CM or NM, but to get that GM title I'm pretty sure you have to start out real young. There may be exceptions by rare, outstanding people, but I don't know of any.

For anyone, it is somewhat unlikely to just reach master level.

"... the NM title is an honor that only one percent of USCF members attain. ..." - IM John Donaldson (2015)

http://www.jeremysilman.com/shop/pc/Reaching-the-Top-77p3905.htm

If one takes up chess at age 17 or later, is one likely to be able to put in the kind of time that is involved for becoming a grandmaster?

"To become a grandmaster is very difficult and can take quite a long time! ... you need to ... solve many exercises, analyse your games, study classic games, modern games, have an opening repertoire and so on. Basically, it is hard work ... It takes a lot more than just reading books to become a grandmaster I am afraid." - GM Artur Yusupov (2013)

http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/ebooks/QandAwithArturYusupovQualityChessAugust2013.pdf

I start when I was 18, I only knew how to move the pieces, and this year I will be CM maybe FM, my dream is to be GM and there are guys that archive the GM when they are like 60 years old, so its never to late 

didn't Akiba Rubenstein start at the age of 16?

didn't he?

but he still started in is 16s and became one of the best endgame players

I started when I was 17 in 2016, and now, just turning 20 yesterday, I’m afraid I started to late to be a GM. However, I’m going to chase the CM title when I get better.

Well I started when I was 13, it’s been a long year and a half, and I’m not sure wether the IM title is in reach for me let alone the GM title, but if ur super talented then sure u can become a GM whenever u want to.

 

That's pretty much what I'm saying. There's going to be a rare exception here and there.

Aside from the exceptions, you basically need to be a child but not just any child. You have to be more mature than most of your classmates and have the ability to just sit there and focus on something for a long period without getting distracted or wanting to play around with the pieces.

That's your GM right there. It's the 5 year old who is able to concentrate and remain focused. 

I'd imagine if you know a kid between the ages of say 5 and 10 who really likes to read and can just sit there for hours reading a book, that kid is probably a candidate for some serious chess.

I know of many 20+ year olds who became NMs in 5-6 years, but I think that you have to start at at least twelve years of age to have any chance of becoming a GM. I don’t think it’s because of the natural development of the human brain as much as it is the time commitment a GM title requires. It takes 10,000 hours of study to become a grandmaster, and older players just don’t have that sort of time to spend on chess. I’m 14 years old and I’ve only played chess for about a year. I’ve achieved a rating of about 1400, and would like to continue improving, but at the moment I have school, sports, and other commitments to attend to, which take time. If you are extremely dedicated, and do nothing but study chess for 10,000 hours at any point in your life, I think it would be reasonable to dream of a GM title. But most people just don’t have that much time in their hands.

 

That's true about Magnus, but his father did state in the 60 Minutes episode that Magnus had the ability to sit and focus on one thing for a long time.  

By the age of 5, Magnus had memorized every country of the world, their capitals and populations. I may be wrong, but that doesn't seem to be something that your typical 5 year old sets out the accomplish.

"... 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

It's true in many skill activities that it's very difficult to start later in life.

There are studies that indicate children can not learn to speak an initial language or solve abstract problems if they haven't been taught to do so by age 12.

I studied piano as an adult under a child prodigy who became a great teacher with a waiting list of students. She told me she would hold a spot open for my nephew, but he decided to do saxophone. By the time he was SEVEN, my teacher said: it's too late for him to start piano now and hope to become great at it.

There are three modern examples that quickly come to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Aagaard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_K._Shaw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kaufman

They all have written popular chess books.

shaw is well known, another one is jonathan hawkins who was below expert at 18 i believe. 

Florida's Julio Becerra picked up the the game at 13 so he was a late beginner. 

 

I think there is a big deal of truth that you should be at a certain level of proficiency by your early 20's to be able to pull off the herculian task later in life. the stresses and inconveniences of adult life can explain a lot but not completely why people getting their GM title as adults are so exceedingly rare unless you were like a 17 year old IM. you would think at least 10 very wealthy people could have pulled it off by now if it was merely a problem of not having time.

 

the interesting question is. when is it too late bother? i tend to put the practical line, at being expert in your early 20's minimium. If you cant hack that, your odds look practically impossible. It's a pattern recognition thing, and most GM's learned those in their formative years.

A lot of math geniuses do their best work while pretty young too.  Older people have to support their families, pay bills, commute to work, etc. and one reason they are not becoming grandmasters is that they don't have time.

like i mentioned earlier. that can explain many but certaintly why adult grandmasters are virtually nonexistent. there have been enough grandmasters in the world so that we shoudnt be able to count them with our finger. i dont think we have even named 5 in the whole forum.

 

so its either life obstacles + some other factor  OR something entirely different like some brain limitation. same way language cant be acquired if it is not learned, say before 12.

 

Regarding Aagaard: "Jacob Aagard was born in Denmark on July 31, 1973 and later moved to Glasgow, Scotland. In 1985, at the age of 12, Jacob learned how to play chess. At age 16, he was the champion of his local chess club in Denmark."

 

Regarding Kaufman: "My father taught me at age 7, and I had a lesson on how to do the king and rook checkmate at age 8 from Harold Phillips, the first USCF President and a New York Champion of the Year." "During high school I oscillated between Chess and Bridge, but by the time I entered college (Age 16) I dropped Bridge for Chess."

 

I suspect a similar story for Shaw. These people started as children.

if you want someone that learned chess very late that became gm, check out ye jiangchuan. learned chess at 17 .but who knows if he had experience with some similar board game, at a much earlier age that gave him that "boost" in pattern recognition.

 

the legendary mir sultan khan learned chess very late in life, but played indian chess at a very high level already.

According to his Wiki article, Sultan Khan learned "western" chess aged 21 and was world-class just a few years later, based on his tournament results. He beat Capablanca in a top tournament game about 4 years after learning how to play!