Why are all good players prodigies

I'm noticing a trend that all really good players were playing chess since a young age. Where are the grandmasters who first picked up a chess board later in life? Are there any 2000+ rated on chess.com who never played as a kid? I need hope that I could still become good, as i only started playing chess about 8 months ago. (19)

@Lesschess I'm rooting for u

Lovely nuggets thank u for giving me hope! 1800 is already a hell of a rating for no play as a kid, I hope to reach ur rating with enough training. How long did it take?

Dude that's awesome,  u must be gifted. 2500 is on chess.com is definitely IM range if not GM.

I did play as a kid, and I'm not very good.  

Oh, wait, maybe that doesn't help after all.  :-)

I don't really think that all the Chess "bests" are prodigies. Sure, your tactical thinking (etc.) might help you in the game (they call it "talent"). But honestly, every thing chess included need hard work. If you don't put the work it requires for you to get better, you won't get better. If you don't practice enough, the same applies. And that works for everything that requires logic, creativity and vision.

Just my two cents, obviously. Then again, if you're someone with a good memory and can memorize 500 different variations in 1 opening, then that'll most likely help you a lot. But to understand such variations, what they do and why they do some stuff will help you play smartly, and not as a computer.

Looks like that guy lovely nuggets was just using an engine, his account disappeared.

When you begin learning something early in life, you absorb it much more quickly than when older and your growing brain makes room for learning more of it.  This is true in almost every field.

My virtuosa piano teacher was a child prodigy.  She was chairman of the piano department at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, one of top 100 music colleges in the world.  She had a long waiting list for students, but she told me she would bump my nephew up to the top of the list and take him as a student in Peabody's Prep Program at the age of FIVE.  He and his parents didn't take up the offer.  At age EIGHT, she said, "It's a shame he didn't do piano. He's too old now to become an excellent player."

I personally wanted to be a chemist at age 12 after being the most science-oriented kid in my elementary school for several years.  At age 28 I, a few years after completing graduate school at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I became the chief research chemist of a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Corporation.  Starting early gives you an edge - your brain understands the area of interest more deeply and improvements are easier for you than for most others.

I was a total beginner at 18. I played with my friends and family for a few years, and I got a few books, learned the basics, and went to my first chess tournament at age 21.

IMO that's way too late to be a GM, but you can be over 2000.

As GoP more or less said, there's an enormous difference between 2000 and GM. A GM would beat me so badly I'd look like a beginner.

@stiggling that's awesome dude I hope to follow ur footsteps

That's being a bit humble. Just because they're better than you doesn't mean you'll lose in 20 (or less) moves. If they play into a line you know very well, you could last into the endgame.

Anyway, I was thinking of this a few days ago... that the problem is players that good have so much experience, and so many ways to beat you. If you give them opportunity to get a very slightly winning, but still winning, endgame, they might trade down into that and play it more or less flawlessly. If you give them an attack, they can do that too, and of course transition between the two as necessary. It just takes too much accuracy to do well against someone 500 points higher than you, but I feel like that's especially true if they're a GM.

I started at twelve and a half I don't know if you consider that a kid but I'm over 2000.

I was like that, and I never liked (or read) opening books. Sometimes I wouldn't even know which opening I was going to play as I sat down across from my opponent at a tournament haha.

What I did like however was chessbase. I know as far as chess things go it's really expensive, but it's a great program. Instead of someone telling me which lines to play, I could just look at the options myself and choose moves I liked.

Of course it's not really possible to check everything. My repertoire had (and has) holes. But that's the first time I actually made an attempt at a reasonable repertoire, and it helped me out.

Mikhail Chigorin started at 18 or so, and he played two WC matches, though it is very uncommon

Clearly, most here do not have an understanding of the term "prodigy," including the OP with the good player reference.

True prodigy's are very rare. Only a few come along every decade in the fields of math, music and chess. They are "born" with a special gift and if pursued, they become of the very highest caliber indeed.

The terms genius and prodigy are greatly overused by todays media and the general public. Everybody seems to have an uncle or cousin who is one.

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S. Karjakin and J. Polgar can be considered as true prodigy's. There are a few youngsters <13 that are doing very well with the Press making the usual hyperbole of "prodigy." We'll have to wait and see if their talent is truly extraordinary. Wiki lists Fischer and Kasparov on their list. Carlsen is not on it. Really depends on how strictly the term gets defined. Noted that only 1 prodigy is listed in math born after 2000.

Traditionally, only 3 fields were considered - math, music and chess. Children under the age of 5 or 6 exhibited natural mental abilities equivalent to adult masters, without any training whatsoever. Nowadays, journalists have stretched the term to include any and all fields. We see physical sports, the arts, humanities etc.,  all with young people being labeled as prodigies. Not adhering to the true sense of the term imo. 

Another misconception is that of memory. Many people are born with extraordinary capabilities. They can direct their abilities to accomplish many things that appear to the ordinary person as quite "intelligent" or fantastic.  Most all of the elite chess players posses some form of eidetic memory of varying degree. They are not prodigies because of it.