how much of chess is natural talent

I was in fact 1150 when I was 18. While it is true that I am not 2300, that certainly seems possible in my lifetime, from where I'm sitting.

It is rare for adults to improve at chess because life gets in the way usually. And it is rare for someone that wasn't interested enough in chess by 18 to climb that mountain early in life to suddenly develop that level of interest at a later age. It can happen though.

I actually used to believe this, but I now know a lot more about children and neurophysiology and development, and I'm starting to think people incorrectly use the language analogy for the early-childhood advantage.

Language is very special - we have a very special part of our brains SPECIFICALLY aimed for languages, and which uniquely responds during childhood.

There hasn't been any definitive similar center for chess or other activities found in the human brain.

I think a lot of people confuse natural talent in chess with 'just starting early.' Many, many kids actually start chess quite early, but vanishingly few of them become masters (or even 1600+). If starting early was the main factor for getting to master+, you'd see a lot more of them. 

In reality, the few kids with a lot of talent, get very strong very quickly, and people are too quick to say 'it was all hard work in their childhood.' Sure, they worked hard, but the reality is that talent is usually the far bigger factor as to why they're so strong (like 14-year olds playing at IM+ level). 

Almost all IMs/GMs got to 1900-2000 pretty quickly after deciding to go after chess improvement seriously. You pretty much never see folks who are plateaued at 1200 for a year despite studying, slowly and steadily ramp up to IM/GM strength. 

My dad taught me chess as a young kid. I had a casual interest in chess, but not enough to put active effort into improving. That didn't start until after college, for me.

"I think a lot of people confuse natural talent in chess with 'just starting early.' Many, many kids actually start chess quite early, but vanishingly few of them become masters (or even 1600+)."

As usual, the easy response to this is that, (generally), all GMs start early, but not all that start early are GMs.

"Language is very special - we have a very special part of our brains SPECIFICALLY aimed for languages, and which uniquely responds during childhood."

You might know a lot about this, I dunno, but do you mind elaborating a little bit? You're saying that there is a part of our brain that does not do any kind of cognitive function besides language? How would the brain know what is or isn't supposed to be language in order to decide whether or not to use that part of the brain?

"Sure, they worked hard, but the reality is that talent is usually the far bigger factor as to why they're so strong (like 14-year olds playing at IM+ level). "

You're basically just asserting this. That's not a good argument.

Chess is not art, it is a science. Anyone with a decent mind and enough training can reach the heights of Carlsen. You can only improve your game with more practice and DVD's.

http://www.chessbazaar.com/chess-set-accessories/chess-dvds-and-movies.html

Chess dvd will develop your tactical awareness. I would highly recommend the chess videos produced by Grandmasters Sam Shankland, Leonid Kritz, and Victor Mikhalevski.

Talent alone is not the key in this game of sport -perspiration is 90%, and mind is the other 10%, practise practise practise and you can become your own champion then.

I agree with kirisato,fischer that was said to be the most talented player spent thosand hours to study chess,sergey began learning chess at age five with five hours a day,ksprov and carlsen didn't make exception,so I think the conclusion to this facts is that the ability to learn chess with high motivitation and being patient to absorb chess knowledge is the main factor!

Being good at chess requires first of all a very good memory. Its more of visuo-spatial ability. Just like a good painter remembers what he has seen and paints things from memory. A liking for chess must also be developed in order to excel. 

No, this is definitely true, not just in chess, but nearly every competitive activity. 

There is absolutely a talent curve for chess, sports, etc., and the GMs are all on the pointy gifted end of it. This is undeniable and has been studied to death by scientists.

The reason why a lot of people erroneously concluded that "it's all hard work", or even say "it's 90% hard work" is that common things are common - it's extremely unlikely that in your peer group, that you'll run into GM-level talent people, possibly ever. And since like 95%+ of all the chess players you run into will be of middling talent, it is true that for your games that hard work will yield 90% of the results against them, since you're all similarly talented. 

As a similar analogy - how many 7-foot tall people have you actually met in real life? Probably close to zero. Now, for all you basketball players, how many 7-foot basketball players have you actually played against? Even less. Per a cursory google search, there are approx 2800 7-ft tall people in the world. Compare with 1522 GMs on the June 2016 FIDE list. So your odds of actually playign someone with 'true GM' talent are even less than meeting someone who's 7 feet tall unless you're a top tournament chess competitor.

And when you encounter a truly talented player, forgettabout it. All your hard work will mean nothing compared to the natural gifts of a 10-year old future GM who's started playing chess seriously. 

There is no coach in the world, even Yusupov, that can reliably turn every serious youth player they encounter into a GM, or even a majority of them. Sure, people will say most youth players dont' have the motivation or desire to commit to the level of training required by the coach to reach that level, but like it or not, that's part of the talent factor - the burning interest and desire to commit that deeply at great cost.

The brain puts language into a specific part. Scientists learned this when people with strokes that damaged their brains specifically lost language ability, often while retaining everything else. Oliver Sacks has written a lot of popular books and articles about this. 

It's true that the language center location is more plastic in early childhood - your body can move it somewhere else if the normal language center area is damaged very early on, but once you're talking and speaking, it's set, and can be specifically knocked out. Neurosurgeons taking out brain tumors often keep patients only partially sedated so they can electrically stimulate the brain they're going to take out to see if it's going to cost them the language center. (People get all garbled up when answering questions while those areas are stimulated.) Pretty freaky stuff.

"And since like 95%+ of all the chess players you run into will be of middling talent, it is true that for your games that hard work will yield 90% of the results against them, since you're all similarly talented. "

All you're giving is a common reason (not necessarily a correct reason) why a person would believe this.

It's possible to use unsound logic to conclude A, yet, A still might be true anyway (for a different reason).

So whether your conclusion is right or not, you're still not doing a lot of real argumentation for it.

"that's part of the talent factor - the burning interest and desire to commit that deeply at great cost."

It probably depends on how the person is using the word talent, then. Some people mean talent in this sort of way, others mean it more as in, like, just having a high IQ or good memory or something -- in other words, a more easily measured attribute than "desire to improve." That's one of the problems that happens in this sort of debate, in fact. Talent is one of those words that many people use very differently, and sometimes those differences are tricky and subtle like here.

"and has been studied to death by scientists."

Those studies and some analysis of them would be precisely what we're looking for, yet in your long post, you don't talk about it at all.

"Scientists learned this when people with strokes that damaged their brains specifically lost language ability, often while retaining everything else."

That's interesting. I just thought of learning language as knowing a lot of patterns and connections between things -- a very, very large amount of them, to the point where you can do it quickly. And if you didn't make those connections when the time was ripe, you could never hope to keep up with how much there was to learn.

My arguments are sound. Your method of going after them is to try and put a disproportionate burden of proof on me, which I have no interest in doing. 

It's not just a matter of not having the time to keep up if you start later - for language, if you don't develop that center early on, it becomes permanently stunted.

Hence all the early interventions in school for hearing test - it's very sad when a kid doesn't use language at all for the early life but not because their brain couldn't process language, but because they simply couldn't hear why they were saying. (And then they lose nearly all their language learning ability as a result, permanently.)

Well certainly some of the arguments that are in this quote aren't sound. They don't prove the conclusion, since for example, people could think that most of chess skill is hard work for a wrong reason, while ignoring the right one(s).

There is no legal burden on you, but there is a burden if you want people to have some reason to believe your conclusion by reading your posts. That's far from asking for some kind of 100% proof -- it's just using a kind of argument that wouldn't be easy for the other side to conveniently replicate (e.g., appealing to intuition, or making assertions).

"It's not just a matter of not having the time to keep up if you start later - for language, if you don't develop that center early on, it becomes permanently stunted."

Well right, I mean that if there are tens of thousands of things to learn for example, you'd want to learn it when your brain can learn things at a healthy rate, rather than when it learns them at a rate hundreds of times slower than that for example.

But yeah, I only have vague memories of psychology classes I took -- it seems like a lot of early childhood learning was based on all the neural connections that are made, and these are flexible/easy to establish early on because they haven't been exposed to many prejudices yet -- but this of course will change with age. I was just wondering if what is called the language center is really just a part of the brain that makes connections, and happens to be useful for language.

But I guess you're saying that it's much more specific than that. There is something about learning language (or at least a 1st language) that is more than just learning lots of patterns and has a very specific area for it, that can't be compared to anything else.

I mean, the analogies are drawn between chess and language because both are extremely complicated (though might seem relatively simple if you're extremely familiar with them and had tons of practice, as is the case with language). And thus, there is just going to be a mass quantity of things to learn about chess. It would be like learning a strategy game with 157 different types of units or buildings, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. No matter how smart you are, you still will have to take in a ton of time just to know what these all are, let alone know what makes them good/bad, and how they work together.

Even if the child doesn't have as deep of an understanding as an adult would when learning these things for the first time, he might be able to develop patterns more quickly, and that could be more useful. Later when he matures he can get a better understanding of these patterns.

And the idea that a lot of chess learning is about quantity is quite corroborated by the fact that GMs constantly tell people simplistic sounding advice like "just do a ridiculous amount of puzzles" etc, just shove them down your throat almost. Of course we know that it's not so simple, but developing patterns (almost) like a zombie is one important aspect for getting good at chess, and that probably doesn't require as much problem solving skills as you would think.

It's just weird that you have these really "dumb" kids, whose problem solving is probably hundreds of times worse than a lot of adults, yet they're becoming IMs etc. Yes, only a very low percentage of them get there, but the fact that an even lower percentage of adults get there, who you'd think would be thousands of times more capable of understanding chess, seems even more surprising. Of course to be fair, the kids pretty much need fantastic coaches to do anything like this.

I don't know, just some thoughts. This might have been a tangent -- I guess now I'm talking more about how much of chess is helped by learning early, etc, which doesn't necessarily tie into whether chess requires a lot of talent or not. But it's still interesting to discuss.

Define natural talent. If you have experience playing ga.es of strategy and tactics then qhen you firat start the the the playing chess you have an advatage

Haed qork goes a llong way talentwd or not