What exactly is chess talent?

I'm sure we all see those on these forums who spend hours studying and practicing and yet struggle in 500-1200 ELO for years while others just play their way from 400 to 2000 quickly and without much effort.

What is it exactly that's making the difference?  How are their brains wired differently?

Probably the same as any talent. A natural aptitude.

What that specifically entails and how to know you have it without playing chess? Hard to know.

But why do some people excel so much faster than others with the same training? There's obviously some internal difference.

We know that IQ has a genetic component but no single genes have been identified which play a major role in its expression. While there isn't a particularly strong correlation between IQ and Chess ability it's reasonable to assume that there is also a genetic component.

chess talent means being addicted to chess😄🤨

Certainly having a somewhat obsessive personality is required to get really good, since you have to put in a ridiculous number of hours to reach high levels of ability. But that wouldn't explain why the same number of hours will result in one person making next to no progress and another making huge strides.

Both hard work and natural aptitude are required to reach the very top.

Just how much of one compared to the other probably varies from person to person.

Botvinnik and Tal were both world champions, but they had very different ways of training and preparing for competitions.

Yes, both are required.

But what exactly do we mean when we talk of natural aptitude?

It doesn't seem to be IQ, so what is it? Is it a mix of memory and visualisation? Or something else?

'I have only one talent: a talent for hard work' - Kasparov

But that's clearly not the whole story. Two prople can put the exact same amount of hard work in, and yet one make far more progress than the other. This clearly happens in chess, as well as everything else in life. And I'm curious as to what makes that difference?

Just to make a guess, without any claim to have the Explanation.

If, as it seems, net of knowledge chess is reduced to a question of pattern recognition, probably the ability to memorize, visualize and recognize them is the essential element. Then I would say that there is also the ability to stay focused on a same activity, repeated continuously for a certain time, without getting distracted for a moment ( what are blunders due to if not distractions ? ). Creativity in chess consists of imagining more or less complex situations, and therefore also relies on the ability to visualize.

These are certainly skills that can be trained, but it is reasonable to think that some have them more than others, and that some have them highly developed. I learned to play chess as a child with a cousin of mine. We just played with each other, neither of us studied, watched videos, solved puzzles, analyzed games, etc.; well, he almost always won. Evidently he had something that made him more "natural" for chess than me .

I think it's a bit like drawing. Contrary to what most people believe, everyone is capable of learning to draw well ; however, it is indisputable that some know how to do it naturally, better than others.

I think the ability to quickly see and remember patterns is a key element to chess talent, yes. That makes sense. Focus and other stuff too, but the ability to quickly see meaningful visual patterns amongst 'noise' and recall what those mean seems the primary 'talent' of chess.

How can this be trained, I wonder?

Nobody shoots up from 400 to 2000 "without much effort".

It might seem like that, from an outside perspective. But the players who actually accomplish this have done so because they feel compelled (obsessively, even) to play and learn more and more, every day.

This compulsive need to keep playing and keep learning is what creates the phenonemon that we call "chess talent".

I know this because I was described as "talented" in my youth. I knew very little about chess, in a technical way, yet I frequently outplayed opponents who were much more experienced than me.

My secret? I was obsessed with chess. I played it day and night. If I were given the chance, I would have skipped sleeping and eating to play chess.

So while it seemed like I was winning games "without much effort" - the opposite was actually true. I devoted a ton of my time and effort into chess - arguably more than my more-experienced opponents.

I played chess in the morning. I played chess at lunch. I played chess after school and between homework assignments and on evenings when I should have been sleeping, and on weekends whenever I could ... I wrote down chess moves and chess positions on scrap paper while sitting in classes, listening to lectures about Shakespeare or geography ...

And along the way I started to encounter stronger players who shared the same obsession that I had. You know the saying, "Genius recognizes genius?" I would tweak that a bit and say, "Obsession recognizes obsession."

This is why I'm convinced that secret ingredient to chess talent is: obsession. It's the mortar upon which skilled players lay those bricks ...

Obsession is certainly an essential ingredient for those who become great at chess.

But it seems hard for me to accept that it is all just about the amount of hours put into practice. If that were so, then two people who put in the same hours would be of the same skill. But it's clear that some play better on less hours than others do with more.

its not talent, humans learn way faster (like 10x) when they are child. anyone who starts chess in early ages learns 30 years of knowledge in like 3 years.

I don't see how this can be true when people clearly and demonstrably progress at different rates even when putting in the same amount of study. This is true in every area of human endeavour, and chess is no exception.

This is true.

But even 2 children or 2 adults of the same age will have different skill levels after the same input. Why?

anyone who started chess very early on will get to somewhere eventually.

key to success is liking the game. some kids like the game more and they learn more, some just dont and they learn way less than others. thats what makes the difference between 'normal' kids

but there is this savant kind of kids, like magnus, those are outliers, don't compare yourself or anyone with them.