> For reference, the most improved player is (as of oct 2021) an 11 year old world chess champion from the Ukraine. His rate of improvement averaged out to 33 points per month over a period of 6 years.
I’d assume most of that could be attributed to the average 11 year old being significantly smarter than the average 5, but I wonder how sustainable that gain is? Given a large enough cohort that practiced enough, ELO is probably a decent-ish proxy for mental development.
> According to 5.5 years of data from 2.3 million players and 450 million games, most beginners will improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points in 3-6 months. Most "experienced" chess players in the 1400-1800 rating range will take 3-4 years to improve their rating by 100 lichess elo points. There's no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker.
There is obviously some minimum number of games required. I haven't played chess for 6 months, should I expect to be 100 points higher next time I play? Probably not, but I have watched some streamers and thought about the game a bit, so maybe. I have a goal to improve to at least 1400 in chess, and I'd like more analysis of how many games I'll have to play.
> However, there does seem to be a sweet spot in the elo gain rate where a large portion of the players who have gained the most elo per month seem to cluster around 100-300 games per month, which comes out to a handful of games per day. That may be evidence that playing at least a few games here and there on a consistent basis will give the best chances at improving, but that could also be due to the fact that there are just more data points for players playing at that rate.
I have been a serious chess player for over 20 years.
Improvement in chess is not directly proportional to the number of games played - that is one factor. Amateur park players and hustlers rack up many hundreds of games per week, and thousands per year, but are usually beaten by masters who have played fewer games for shorter periods of time. Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.
Improvement is a function of directed study of chess : analysing one's games with the aim of eliminating weaknesses in one's play, becoming familiar with common patterns (and anti-patterns) of strategy and tactics, learning the fundamentals (and advanced aspects) of openings, middle games and endings, and conquering psychological barriers.
I say this because we need to take this into account as we study perfomance else we get skewed results.
> Improvement is a function of directed study of chess
This is true of so many things. Improvement is proportional to the amount of deliberate, conscious practice, which is more uncomfortable than “game time”.
When I used to play chess, I always found short time controls the most fun, but the least useful for long term improvement.
This seems to also be true for piano playing.
Basically Friedrich Gulda said he only practices 3-4 hours a day sitting at the piano. The rest of the day he is sitting in the café thinking about music and piano playing.
Ah ... I think you are onto something with this statement. What's the name of the cafe? /s
Commenting as I have heard of fellow musicians sometimes performing almost ritualistic steps or 'cargo cult' emulations of 'famous' musicians to try and replicate their success.
For me, most of the time the hard part is not writing the code, but understanding all the code around it so that I figure out where to get my inputs from and not break anything. I can't do that without sitting at the computer and reading the code.
Assuming you're talking about your job, I'm not sure this is the same as "practicing" C++ for 3-4 hours the way you would practice piano. For us programmers there's usually no difference between practice and "the real stuff" unless you consider side projects as practice but that's "outside" our job.
Unfortunately, for us as a profession we still haven't yet figured out what "practice" looks like.
The closest we've done is just "more game time". The closest we've found is when learning a new tech doing a small project. But that is learning a tech and distinctly different from "practicing" the craft of programming.
I feel like a good start would be to reflect on what we do on our job, time ourselves, see where we struggled, practice these parts. But that's still far from deliberate practice. Griding leetcode is one, but it's practice for leetcode problems.
It is practice, but usually not "deliberate practice" in the way musician or people that talk about 10 000 hours think about practice. I'm not sure how big the difference is between practice and deliberate practice.
Many professional classical musicians of all sorts of instruments will practice 6-8 hours per day or more. Whether that's necessary or not is up for debate. Either way, many of them have an almost obsessive relationship with music and their instrument -- at least at the highest levels -- which means they probably want to be playing that much.
I was wise enough at the early age of 12 or so to realize that whatever that "commitment" gene was, I didn't have it, so I kept piano a personal passion rather than try to go to school for it like my parents wanted.
Regarding "thinking" about music ... I recently took up playing drums again after a 20 year hiatus. During those 20 years I was never able to stop tapping rhythms on things (to my own and everyone around me's great frustration). Every song I listened to I couldn't not imagine playing that drum track. That must have kept those neural pathways alive.
Now that I'm finally playing again, I feel like I'm back to my previous levels, or even better, after just 3 months of playing 1x week.
Having said that, there's also the 10,000 hours thing.
It seems to be very true for humans to learn things that require practice. Playing video games, playing piano, sport, etc.
My interpretation is even though I love those practices, I would still make myself tired from playing and concentrating for too long - after that my standard is downgrading. If I continue, I get used to those lower standards more than I could gain expertise.
This is very true. I've never played RTS games seriously, so every time I play I just feel naked. I can figure out eventually how to build a base and crawl the tech tree, but I've always felt what I would really need is to just sit there and study what all the units are, common tactics, and videos of other people playing.
Of course like with sports the fun thing is playing a game, not practicing for it, so that's what ends up happening.
In expert level RTS play, if you take even a tenth of a second to think about any decision anytime during the first 15 minutes you will most likely lose the game. After that it gets more interesting but many games don't last that long.
The thing is with most computer games (I suppose games in general) is that you not only have to learn the rules of the game to get better, you must also study and practice the current best strategies to even stand a chance.
[I read the book years ago] Anyone who has been able to do anything measurable at a high level knows that talent is underrated. But "Talent is Underrated" would sell very few copies: who wants to have their hopes buried under a ton of reality?
Themself sounds more natural to me than simple self. Singular they has been in common use since the 14th century. Don't let prescriptivists tell you otherwise.
> Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self?
No.
> And what do we call gender neutral person if not?
they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries. It spent a while with strong bias against it in formal contexts but that's weakening recently.
One/one/one’s is less controversial in formal settings, but requires a somewhat different writing style.
“Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.”
might become:
“Botvinnik famously recommended that, as a professional chess player, one should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave oneself time to think about chess.”
or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all:
“Botvinnik famously recommended a professional chess player only playing 80 tournament games a year and leaving time to think about chess.”
And yet the current world chess champion often plays 80 bullet games within a matter of hours in various online events or matches.
Everybody is different. Playing lots of games gives you the ability to experience playing different types of positions against different players, which can feed into your training in terms of figuring out which areas to focus on.
If you want to get better at chess you will have to study, but I don’t think playing is in itself negative. Only if you never study and only play.
There are also practical things like managing the clock and managing your attitude that you can only practice in games.
> And yet the current world chess champion often plays 80 bullet games within a matter of hours in various online events or matches.
Botvinnik's quote refers to tournament games, that is, long, over the board, classical time control games that take hours to play. It says nothing about playing practice/friendly games, or playing other time controls.
Botvinnik also claimed he only ever played one blitz game, so he did mean this in a stronger sense. Though he may have been allowing for training games at tournament time controls.
Incidentally, I'm familiar with the recommendation (actually I thought it was a maximum of 50 games in a year) but I can't find any source for it online. Does anyone have a source?
> or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all [...]
That is not grammatical. One rendition in such a style might be:
> Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player only play 80 tournament games a year and leave time to think about chess.
Though I would prefer to substitute for 'year and leave time to think' one of: 'year, to leave time to think', 'year, leaving time to think', or even 'year, to live time for thinking'.
There is also an ambiguity in the original: 'a professional chess player' may be taken as definite; that is, it may seem as though the advice was directed at a specific chess player. To avoid the possibility of such an interpretation, I might prefer the rendition using 'one', or something like this:
> Botvinnik famously recommended that professional chess players only play 80 tournament games a year, to leave time for thinking about chess.
> they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries
The one problem is that many people have difficulties with distinguishing usages. This is especially a problem for foreign learners, but even native speakers are not immune to naive generalizations.
...or you could just use, you know, plural? "Professional chess players should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave themselves time to think about chess." No problem there.
I think this is true for many other disciplines, especially programming. You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.
It's also something i wish companies would prioritize, you will be more valuable if these activities are supported by the company and not something you must do on your own time.
They do. You can take a lower paying job while you earn improve your skills, and then get a new role or raise with the skills earned. If they wanted someone in the role without the skills already in place, they would have hired that person and paid them less.
> You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.
Companies need to prioritize this is the point. It's not about low pay, high pay jobs. Or obtaining a role once you have the skills, it's that companies don't prioritize learning/development as part of the role, they focus on output - and they would get more value from their employees of they did.
Companies have very little interest in investing in their employees personal education, because once they have learned the new stuff, they might just leave to another company and take their freshly acquired knowledge with them. It's the same reason why companies want to hire only experienced people even when the skills they require could be acquired by an otherwise competent person in a few months with proper training. In economic terms, it's a market failure; no-one wants to be the one paying (either in terms of money or employee working hours) for stuff that someone else can benefit from.
I know everyone learns differently, but I gained most of my programming skills just from programming.
You will study other people's code on the job and code reviews provide coaching.
Chess is much harder for me because I don't have the discipline to study like that.
With coding, I can read a quick blog post or follow a tutorial, then immediately start incorporating ideas into my work.
In chess, if I study something, I might not encounter a situation where I can use that knowledge in game for a while. I don't get that immediate reinforcement so I forget things much easier.
Chess should be super-easy to use knowledge quickly after acquisition. If it's openings you can play online/against a computer and use them.
If it's mid game it's going to be strategy, you're not going to ever repeat it, so you can apply the strategy in general terms.
If it's endgame then surely you can setup scenarios and play against engines.
Maybe, if it doesn't exist, there's a need for a game engine that will try to do a particular opening to give you practice, will try, say, to fianchetto or castle early (I imagine such settings exist) to allow practicing against those moves?
But, unless you're seriously good can't you get the repetitive practice easily with engines?
> Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.
Fun fact: Botvinik became world champion without being a `professional` chess player. He had a full-time job as an electrical engineer.
This was interesting to me. I played chess seriously for about 4 years and gained about 400 Elo points. Apparently that's rather above the expectations for an "ordinary" person!
I spent around 1000 hours practicing chess during that time, 3/4ths of which was spent on tactics training (writeup here: https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-ra...). I'm guessing that's a significant differentiating factor, and that the majority of players only spent time playing games.
Of course, you can't tell from the Lichess data in the post how much time was spent practicing via not playing. And I would argue that 250 hours per year, like I accomplished, is not actually that much.
Tactics training is by far the most effective thing you can do to improve your game short of Master level (assuming you have the basics down).
Chess before Master level is all about "avoiding blunders" and "capitalizing on blunders". It's a function of the fact that a single mistake can at any point completely destroy your game.
I agree and I don't agree :) It is not all about tactics, that is a mistake that I see repeated often.
A difference between 1300 FIDE level and 1800 FIDE level is partly tactics and avoiding blunders, sure. But there is also more positional play, which is a very good addition in your toolbox, if it is even a tool. There is thinking in fields, which can be about controlling one field that is deciding the game, or about controlling the white fields for example, or the seventh row. There is also intuition, which is much more than pattern recognition, but more letting the unconscious part of the brain work for you (inspired by the moon or by god :) ). (edit) Oh, and I forgot about tempo, which is especially important in the opening or during an attack. Gambits are loved for a reason, you give a pawn for a tempo and win the game :)
Also, I feel very much that improvement in chess is often sought in improving someones strong points, because they are the most fun to work on. There are also the weak points that you can work on, which are less comfortable and more confronting, but can be a bottleneck. In psychological sense this works as well.
I guess this is true for any activity requiring thinking.
There must be a floor, a minimum frequency or total number of time practiced, but no specific ceiling or linearity between the time/frequency of practice and the progress in the art.
If we had two pictures, and asked to guess which photographer takes 80 pictures a day and which takes 200, it would be a tough question. I see the above point the same way, past a certain point the number of games shouldn’t make a difference.
I think the fact that good chess players memorize sets of positions is related to this finding that playing more games is not necessarily the way to improve your skill. Because chess improvement isn't necessarily dependent on reflexive subconscious action but in more conscious pattern recognition ('last time my opponent brought a knight to this square I got destroyed...')
Great analysis! I wonder whether you can also incorporate puzzle usage in this.
"But while I have the data here, let's take a moment to answer the question everyone's asking: does playing more games make you a better chess player?
Intuitively, the answer seems like it should be yes. Seems like experience should be a huge factor in someone's chess strength. It also seems like the go-to answer many of the top players recommend for improving at chess."
That's actually not what I've seen top trainers recommend, at least for improvement at classical time controls. They recommend playing something like one or two games a day but carefully analyzing each game afterwards.
Time playing chess should be at least a weak proxy for time spent on all chess activities, which you'd expect to correlate with improvement. At least at smaller numbers - of course if someone is spending 23 hours a day playing chess they aren't spending much time studying or anything else.
> I wonder whether you can also incorporate puzzle usage in this.
Unfortunately the article itself states that data on puzzles, lessons, etc are not available from the Lichess API, so all that they can really look at are games played... (Though agree this would be cool!)
The Maia engine seems promising. I've never really looked into it myself. But my understanding is that unlike AlphaZero or similar engines which use convolutional neural networks to predict a position's objective value and a probability distribution over legal moves and are trained by self-play which allows them to "learn" objectively best strategies, Maia's networks are trained on human moves taking rating into consideration.
So humans typically don't gain much from playing traiditional engines, since they play at levels beyond mortal comprehension and make too deep moves from outer-space, Maia would be more down-to-earth.
This is not really related to what this author means as "good" at chess. But I found spending about 8 hours working through lessons and chess.com and Magnus Carlsen's app (I preferred the chess.com one personally), and maybe another 8 hours playing online was about what I needed to have the occasional "good game". Relatively speaking.
It was eye opening for me learning some basic strategies and tactics. Mostly controlling the center, a couple of openings, and techniques for checkmate.
Too much beyond that and most players are doing a lot of memorization and pattern recognition. Which I don't really want to do, but I am super happy I learned the basics because now chess is fun and I understand it.
I'd recommend taking lessons online if you want to learn chess. Skip many games.
It seems like a significant confounding factor in analysis like this could be the "natural floor" of a beginning player. Some people signing up for Lichess have never or barely played a game, others have lots more experience. Wouldn't this affect their rate of improvement but be invisible in the data set? The OP touches on this a bit; what would be good ways to filter for it?
Yes, I think the data is inherently corrupted this way. There's nothing to indicate when someone started playing. I'm on Gameknot rather than Lichess, but you try to measure my improvement? You're not seeing the 30 years I was playing before I ever did it online.
A weird observation for myself, sometimes I wake up at around 3AM for no apparent reason and can't get back to sleep. Sometimes I reach for my laptop and figure why not play a few games of chess. Weirdly, my strength of play is 400 - 600 higher than normal. This observation is a little off topic I know, but just made me wonder if anyone else has a similar experience.
Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise. You can use these to your advantage when trying to climb rank.
Is it weird if I feel like my brain is completely useless for the first 4 hours of the day, I feel like my concentration gets better the longer the day goes - exercise definitely does it for me too.
I've found I've settled into some of my best creative musical flows when I've got out of bed in the morning by myself, made a cup of tea and started playing. I'm willing to take more creative risks and trust my intuition without questioning it or overthinking. It all feels so natural.
It's also really amplified if I'm up before my wife, I think because music is the first thing my brain actively focuses on. Without a conversation, my brain doesn't have anything else for me to think about yet and I've used none of it's energy.
Unrelated to chess, but I find it fascinating that you wake up at 3am regularly. This might just be biphasic sleep [1], and throughout history, it was believed people were more effective between their first and second sleep [2].
Perhaps unrelated, but when I'm incredibly fatigued and on the verge of sleep, my memory seems to acquire an almost savant quality. For example, I can will arbitrary images to appear in my mind's eye, or effortlessly invoke the vocal tics and subtle inflections of people I've been close to, and generate muted mental conversations in their voice — something I'm never able to do during ordinary waking hours. It's like briefly unlocking a superpower. I wonder if the brain operates in a different way in those liminal spaces between sleep and waking.
When my toddlers wake me up in the middle of the night to pee, their vocabulary, speech and general lucidity is better than any other time during the day. Very weird.
Apparently it's a common phenomenon. Hans Selye in his _From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist_ recommends always keeping a pen and notepad bedside, since breakthrough thoughts often gestate in twilight of sleep.
I think there is some measurable improvement when not overthinking a skill when you are still a beginner. I have also had and seen improvement in foreign language speaking when people are tired or drunk.
Which are your low and high ELO baselines? 100 points usually means two times better and 600 points would be 64x times which is a huge difference, unless the ELO is very low, in an area where there a very few players therefore a very low accuracy.
On a vaguely related note, any suggestions for books for a 7½-year-old who's fascinated with chess? It seems like there's kind of a gap between books that are geared towards total beginners and those which will have you analyzing games. I'm looking for something that will help him develop his skills beyond the basic moves. (I will say, that having introduced him to loser's chess and finding a free iOS app for him to play, he as able to consistently beat the app within a couple weeks, but regular chess is still hit or miss for him and I suspect the AI in the loser's chess game might have been limited).
Jeremy Silman's books are great for beginner/intermediate strategy after they've read a few of the total beginner books.
How to Reassess Your Chess & The workbook
Complete Book to Chess Strategy
are both good. They might be a little heavy for a 7 year old but with some guidance I think they're doable. I think I read them when I was 9 or 10 and didn't have any trouble.
Chess.com lessons are really good too and might even be a better place to start.
chess master 10 had a great walkthrough tutorial on strategy by josh watzkin that i did around that age, if you can find a copy of it
"Winning Chess Tactics" by Yasser Seirawan might be a good sweet spot. It has some board positions and uses a bit of notation, but it's still pretty easy to read and is a natural step up from intro play into basic tactics...
The Steps method is the official didactic method in Dutch chess. There are different levels. If you succeeded all levels, you should arrive at 1600 FIDE, from there on you can pick up other methods. I have no idea if there is an international interest in this, but in the Netherlands this is standard repertoire for chess youth.
This seems to be a trend in general. Books or instructional videos are usually either made for people who are assumed to know basically nothing, or people who can be assumed to already know everything. I find it makes self guided learning very difficult in almost any field
I'm interested in the choice to use Airflow to download and munge the files. The author is clearly highly skilled with python for analysis/charting so i imagine another short python script could have done it with less ceremony. Why was Airflow used, can it do more interesting things?
Ordinarily I would not recommend airflow over a script for a one off like this and you are right that it could be done with much less ceremony. I do however think it was a good choice in this case due to the sheer amount of data downloaded and how long it took because airflow gives you the following advantages:
- Parallelization: this may be the most minor advantage in the list, but you don't need to set up thread pools to parallelize your work since the scheduler parallelizes tasks.
- Observability: you easily see which tasks failed and look at the logs.
-Reliability and task isolation: you can set up automatic retries for jobs that fail, and they won't affect the rest of the flow. You can easily relaunch the tasks that fail independently without restarting the whole load.
All good choices, but it's also worth noting that the structure of the author's DAG is strange. The way this is set up, you would have to change Python code to run (or rerun) this task for different days.
In canonical Airflow, the job would be one DAG, and each day would be a separate DAG run. Then you would backfill all the days that you would like the job to run. If there's some sort of max-concurrency requirement, that would be handled by setting the `max_active_runs` parameter or by using Airflow's pool concept.
If I had to venture a guess, the author is not an experienced Airflow user, and just wanted to give a new technology an honest try.
Ah yes, taken from Susan Polgar in the documentary My Brilliant Brain. Recommended watch.
She is put on a terrace in the street, and she can see a van with a chessboard painted on the side, and has to recreate the position. With a real position she succeeds, since she remembers the pieces and pawns in chunks. With a position that doesn't make any sense in chess, she cannot recreate it.
Not sure how good of a selftest this is. But it can be good to remember pieces in chunks, like pawn structures. The same counts for tactic patterns, like knight with wood, or hook with ladder. Instead of 2 or 3 moves, you see a chunk of moves which take up the memory of 1 move.
There are videos of Magnus Carlsen being shown various positions, and he can instantly tell which games they are from. Like their brain has an index on postions or something. Not only that, but also can tell how the game continues.
I’ve learned piano basics when I was a child. Then almost completely stopped playing (I devoted myself to learning IT). And a couple months ago I decided to start again (Im 36 now). I was searching for a book like this, and didn’t found anything. thanks a lot!!!!!
In most human activities requiring learning and training it takes a short time to go from the bottom to average but a very long time to get from average to the top. Unless you are a genius and have a different way to think then the most people, learning becomes exponentially harder after a point. Chess, or math, poker or chemistry, software or physics, go or biology it does not matter. Getting to medium level is easy, becoming really good is really hard.
The article said that there are some players who gained 500 or 1000 points in about two years and that they are outliers, they represent 1% of the total number of players.
I would think that it would be far more interesting to consider these people as a percentage of the number of players which started from zero and dedicated two years to playing chess. I would suspect that the percentage would be much higher.
I won't import and ETL the data myself just to answer to that but maybe the author can help.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] thread> For reference, the most improved player is (as of oct 2021) an 11 year old world chess champion from the Ukraine. His rate of improvement averaged out to 33 points per month over a period of 6 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tykhon_Cherniaiev
There is obviously some minimum number of games required. I haven't played chess for 6 months, should I expect to be 100 points higher next time I play? Probably not, but I have watched some streamers and thought about the game a bit, so maybe. I have a goal to improve to at least 1400 in chess, and I'd like more analysis of how many games I'll have to play.
Edit: These graphs are nice: https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA...
Total number of games played has more correlation with rank than games per month it seems.
Improvement in chess is not directly proportional to the number of games played - that is one factor. Amateur park players and hustlers rack up many hundreds of games per week, and thousands per year, but are usually beaten by masters who have played fewer games for shorter periods of time. Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.
Improvement is a function of directed study of chess : analysing one's games with the aim of eliminating weaknesses in one's play, becoming familiar with common patterns (and anti-patterns) of strategy and tactics, learning the fundamentals (and advanced aspects) of openings, middle games and endings, and conquering psychological barriers.
I say this because we need to take this into account as we study perfomance else we get skewed results.
This is true of so many things. Improvement is proportional to the amount of deliberate, conscious practice, which is more uncomfortable than “game time”.
When I used to play chess, I always found short time controls the most fun, but the least useful for long term improvement.
Commenting as I have heard of fellow musicians sometimes performing almost ritualistic steps or 'cargo cult' emulations of 'famous' musicians to try and replicate their success.
only... Deep sigh!
The closest we've done is just "more game time". The closest we've found is when learning a new tech doing a small project. But that is learning a tech and distinctly different from "practicing" the craft of programming.
But it still surprises me about the amount of effort to master the instrument.
I was wise enough at the early age of 12 or so to realize that whatever that "commitment" gene was, I didn't have it, so I kept piano a personal passion rather than try to go to school for it like my parents wanted.
Now that I'm finally playing again, I feel like I'm back to my previous levels, or even better, after just 3 months of playing 1x week.
Having said that, there's also the 10,000 hours thing.
My interpretation is even though I love those practices, I would still make myself tired from playing and concentrating for too long - after that my standard is downgrading. If I continue, I get used to those lower standards more than I could gain expertise.
Of course like with sports the fun thing is playing a game, not practicing for it, so that's what ends up happening.
The thing is with most computer games (I suppose games in general) is that you not only have to learn the rules of the game to get better, you must also study and practice the current best strategies to even stand a chance.
Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self? And what do we call gender neutral person if not?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
No.
> And what do we call gender neutral person if not?
they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries. It spent a while with strong bias against it in formal contexts but that's weakening recently.
One/one/one’s is less controversial in formal settings, but requires a somewhat different writing style.
“Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.”
might become:
“Botvinnik famously recommended that, as a professional chess player, one should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave oneself time to think about chess.”
or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all:
“Botvinnik famously recommended a professional chess player only playing 80 tournament games a year and leaving time to think about chess.”
Everybody is different. Playing lots of games gives you the ability to experience playing different types of positions against different players, which can feed into your training in terms of figuring out which areas to focus on.
If you want to get better at chess you will have to study, but I don’t think playing is in itself negative. Only if you never study and only play.
There are also practical things like managing the clock and managing your attitude that you can only practice in games.
Botvinnik's quote refers to tournament games, that is, long, over the board, classical time control games that take hours to play. It says nothing about playing practice/friendly games, or playing other time controls.
Incidentally, I'm familiar with the recommendation (actually I thought it was a maximum of 50 games in a year) but I can't find any source for it online. Does anyone have a source?
That is not grammatical. One rendition in such a style might be:
> Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player only play 80 tournament games a year and leave time to think about chess.
Though I would prefer to substitute for 'year and leave time to think' one of: 'year, to leave time to think', 'year, leaving time to think', or even 'year, to live time for thinking'.
There is also an ambiguity in the original: 'a professional chess player' may be taken as definite; that is, it may seem as though the advice was directed at a specific chess player. To avoid the possibility of such an interpretation, I might prefer the rendition using 'one', or something like this:
> Botvinnik famously recommended that professional chess players only play 80 tournament games a year, to leave time for thinking about chess.
The one problem is that many people have difficulties with distinguishing usages. This is especially a problem for foreign learners, but even native speakers are not immune to naive generalizations.
This is something I wish I knew 20 years ago.
> You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.
Companies need to prioritize this is the point. It's not about low pay, high pay jobs. Or obtaining a role once you have the skills, it's that companies don't prioritize learning/development as part of the role, they focus on output - and they would get more value from their employees of they did.
You will study other people's code on the job and code reviews provide coaching.
Chess is much harder for me because I don't have the discipline to study like that.
With coding, I can read a quick blog post or follow a tutorial, then immediately start incorporating ideas into my work.
In chess, if I study something, I might not encounter a situation where I can use that knowledge in game for a while. I don't get that immediate reinforcement so I forget things much easier.
If it's mid game it's going to be strategy, you're not going to ever repeat it, so you can apply the strategy in general terms.
If it's endgame then surely you can setup scenarios and play against engines.
Maybe, if it doesn't exist, there's a need for a game engine that will try to do a particular opening to give you practice, will try, say, to fianchetto or castle early (I imagine such settings exist) to allow practicing against those moves?
But, unless you're seriously good can't you get the repetitive practice easily with engines?
That's a problem everyone has :)
Fun fact: Botvinik became world champion without being a `professional` chess player. He had a full-time job as an electrical engineer.
Just by playing, you gain too little data - you'd have to re-invent the world's expertise on your own.
One must study the vast amounts of data generated by other players, now embodied as knowledge.
Not unlike many other fields. Reading and coaching count a lot.
I spent around 1000 hours practicing chess during that time, 3/4ths of which was spent on tactics training (writeup here: https://blog.waleedkhan.name/hours-invested-vs-percentile-ra...). I'm guessing that's a significant differentiating factor, and that the majority of players only spent time playing games.
Of course, you can't tell from the Lichess data in the post how much time was spent practicing via not playing. And I would argue that 250 hours per year, like I accomplished, is not actually that much.
Chess before Master level is all about "avoiding blunders" and "capitalizing on blunders". It's a function of the fact that a single mistake can at any point completely destroy your game.
A difference between 1300 FIDE level and 1800 FIDE level is partly tactics and avoiding blunders, sure. But there is also more positional play, which is a very good addition in your toolbox, if it is even a tool. There is thinking in fields, which can be about controlling one field that is deciding the game, or about controlling the white fields for example, or the seventh row. There is also intuition, which is much more than pattern recognition, but more letting the unconscious part of the brain work for you (inspired by the moon or by god :) ). (edit) Oh, and I forgot about tempo, which is especially important in the opening or during an attack. Gambits are loved for a reason, you give a pawn for a tempo and win the game :)
Also, I feel very much that improvement in chess is often sought in improving someones strong points, because they are the most fun to work on. There are also the weak points that you can work on, which are less comfortable and more confronting, but can be a bottleneck. In psychological sense this works as well.
That's pretty interesting. I guess some types of learning can't be rushed by grinding practice.
There must be a floor, a minimum frequency or total number of time practiced, but no specific ceiling or linearity between the time/frequency of practice and the progress in the art.
If we had two pictures, and asked to guess which photographer takes 80 pictures a day and which takes 200, it would be a tough question. I see the above point the same way, past a certain point the number of games shouldn’t make a difference.
"But while I have the data here, let's take a moment to answer the question everyone's asking: does playing more games make you a better chess player?
Intuitively, the answer seems like it should be yes. Seems like experience should be a huge factor in someone's chess strength. It also seems like the go-to answer many of the top players recommend for improving at chess."
That's actually not what I've seen top trainers recommend, at least for improvement at classical time controls. They recommend playing something like one or two games a day but carefully analyzing each game afterwards.
Almost every good chess player says to play less chess and do more tactics/study.
Unfortunately the article itself states that data on puzzles, lessons, etc are not available from the Lichess API, so all that they can really look at are games played... (Though agree this would be cool!)
So humans typically don't gain much from playing traiditional engines, since they play at levels beyond mortal comprehension and make too deep moves from outer-space, Maia would be more down-to-earth.
https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...
It was eye opening for me learning some basic strategies and tactics. Mostly controlling the center, a couple of openings, and techniques for checkmate.
Too much beyond that and most players are doing a lot of memorization and pattern recognition. Which I don't really want to do, but I am super happy I learned the basics because now chess is fun and I understand it.
I'd recommend taking lessons online if you want to learn chess. Skip many games.
Can you recommend some books/papers/videos on this ?
It's also really amplified if I'm up before my wife, I think because music is the first thing my brain actively focuses on. Without a conversation, my brain doesn't have anything else for me to think about yet and I've used none of it's energy.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_slee...
[2] https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in...
How to Reassess Your Chess & The workbook
Complete Book to Chess Strategy
are both good. They might be a little heavy for a 7 year old but with some guidance I think they're doable. I think I read them when I was 9 or 10 and didn't have any trouble.
Chess.com lessons are really good too and might even be a better place to start.
chess master 10 had a great walkthrough tutorial on strategy by josh watzkin that i did around that age, if you can find a copy of it
(And it's not "by" Bobby Fischer. It just licensed his name. The book is famous for being the first chess book with diagrams typeset by computer.)
https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/index.php
- Parallelization: this may be the most minor advantage in the list, but you don't need to set up thread pools to parallelize your work since the scheduler parallelizes tasks.
- Observability: you easily see which tasks failed and look at the logs.
-Reliability and task isolation: you can set up automatic retries for jobs that fail, and they won't affect the rest of the flow. You can easily relaunch the tasks that fail independently without restarting the whole load.
In canonical Airflow, the job would be one DAG, and each day would be a separate DAG run. Then you would backfill all the days that you would like the job to run. If there's some sort of max-concurrency requirement, that would be handled by setting the `max_active_runs` parameter or by using Airflow's pool concept.
If I had to venture a guess, the author is not an experienced Airflow user, and just wanted to give a new technology an honest try.
If you are pro you can do this easily, even for games with a long game play.
A good chess player will not be able to do the same if the pieces is in random order, not connected to the rules of the game.
She is put on a terrace in the street, and she can see a van with a chessboard painted on the side, and has to recreate the position. With a real position she succeeds, since she remembers the pieces and pawns in chunks. With a position that doesn't make any sense in chess, she cannot recreate it.
Not sure how good of a selftest this is. But it can be good to remember pieces in chunks, like pawn structures. The same counts for tactic patterns, like knight with wood, or hook with ladder. Instead of 2 or 3 moves, you see a chunk of moves which take up the memory of 1 move.
One example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY
I would think that it would be far more interesting to consider these people as a percentage of the number of players which started from zero and dedicated two years to playing chess. I would suspect that the percentage would be much higher.
I won't import and ETL the data myself just to answer to that but maybe the author can help.
I'd love to learn though, I might write a blog post some day detailing how long it took for me to 'get good' (or I might suck at it).