Add me to the list of folks likely to respond to this thread about getting back into it later in life. I have a toddler (and soon baby number 2) and I find it a really enjoyable brain exercise when I have brief gaps.
For those of you with just basic experience, or looking to learn, I really recommend the “Chessbrah Building Habits” series on YouTube.
GM Aman is a really pleasant dude, solid teacher, and takes the most methodical approach to coaching beginners to intermediates how to build habits at each elo range to keep growing.
For those new to time controls, 15 minute rapid games are a good place to start. I felt a lot more comfortable after a couple of months jumping to 3 or 5 minute blitz based on my schedule, once I felt like I could get out of the opening without being totally lost :)
Other great content creators are GothamChess (be aware his YouTube and twitch styles are different but equally awesome), Hikaru, Eric Rosen, Nemo, St Louis Chess Club, and so many more.
The chess community is really great. I hope y’all come and join the fun.
Would be a shame not to mention Naroditsky. Watch him play through lower rated players and give you great insight to both his and his opponents thought process.
I watch all of his videos but if you are starting, 'Building habits' is definitely much better, Aman will often keep making the simple moves he preaches even when more complex ones are available just to drill it into you. Naroditsky, while a great teacher and highly educational can't help himself from playing overly complicated lines that people at those levels wouldn't see. Hikaru is even worse in that respect (tho he doesn't attempt to be particularly educational in the first place anyway).
Other than that, I'd also recommend John Bartholomew who also explains his moves thoroughly in his series where he plays lower rated players.
I too came back to chess. The weird thing is that now at age 48 I'm obsessed with it while when I was young (I played from very young until approx 15) I never really liked it. It was something that you were just supposed to do. I played in a club and played regional and national tournaments with varying results but it was never enjoyable. Had i known the word then, I would've said it was a grind.
I taught the kids as soon as they were old enough (age 4-5) but they never liked it back then either, it was something I think they did because I wanted to do it and I only wanted to do it because it was something my dad and grand fathers did with me.
And then, booom! When my son was approx. 15 a couple of years ago he met a few friends at school and chess became something highly competitive and I was drawn into it again and suddenly, it was so much fun and I was completely engulfed by it. And my kids were also drawn into it (I have a daughter too).
I used to study openings as a kid but hated it and now, it's the best way to spend an evening. Now I play almost daily with the kids (one daughter that is also playing) and after my son moved off to uni it's how we keep in touch (but he's effing killing me with the London System).
Youtube channels? No day is complete with out a game from agadmator's channel.
I had the opposite experience. I was really into chess when I was a teenager, but after getting back into it in my 50s, I find it a bit "samey." I also picked up Go and Shogi. I like both of those games better than chess because they both seem to have more variety between games. The Duck Chess article from HN yesterday did pique my curiosity though, so I'll have to give that a try.
Have you heard of or tried Chess960? That's one popular solution to the sameyness of chess, randomizing the starting positions of the pieces on the back rank.
So timely. This (and the replies) are just what I needed. I am 40 and getting back to chess. I was never really good to begin with (I think I was in the 1400s in high school) and I’m quite awful at chess now. But my 7yo has become obsessed with chess. I would like to not only get better myself but also get better at teaching him.
Thank you for sharing that series. I've been looking for something like this and chess books put me to sleep. Check out BotezLive, Maurice Ashley, and Hanging Pawns on YouTube. xQc also has a series on how not to play.
I started playing chess regularly a few years ago, in my late 30s. One thing that's helped me probably the most is lichess's puzzle storm. If I'm clear minded, I can hit 25. Out of curiosity I looked up 'puzzle storm gm' just to get a sense for what a gm can do with that, and it's seriously mindblowing.
This really shows how much of chess is subconscious recognition of patterns. Training that is much easier when you're young. Learning chess is a fascinating way of getting in touch with that kind of training.
I'm also in my 30s and enjoy the challenge of chess, but have never been able to get beyond the basics. Sure, I can learn one particular gambit by approaching it like an algorithm, but I've never felt like I was able to grasp the high level strategy in the way that the author describes. There just seems to be too many permutations and tricks for me to memorize them all. Did you ever reach a point where the game come together? If so, has it been from memorizing very specific lines (kings gambit, if this then that) type of stuff or is it really more like intuition?
You should not be approaching chess as a memorization problem. Yes, as you gain skill and familiarity, your brain will pattern-match on particular aspects of positions but outside of openings memorization will not get you very far.
The things you should spend your time and effort on are tactics and positional play. Tactics will directly help with pattern-matching on situations with direct and immediate impact: taking advantage of forks, overloaded defenders, x-rays, etc. (as well as defending against those things). Positional play will help with pattern-matching on higher-level concepts: getting knights to ideal squares, understanding the implications of certain pawn structures, how to leverage bishops' strengths and weaknesses, maintaining rooks on open files, restricting your opponents' space and movement options, etc.
For the former, tactics trainers are your best bet. For the latter, I think books are probably still optimal. I'm a big fan of Jeremy Silman as an author, and Reassess Your Chess (4th Edition) is my personal favorite book for learning these concepts.
Studying openings should be done sparingly. Learning the basics and general principles of one opening system as white, and one each for 1. e4 and 1. d4 as black can be useful in helping you always get to midgame positions where you understand the basic ideas, but I wouldn't spend too much effort past that.
The psych literature on expertise draws in part from studying chess masters, and this expertise in chess mainly consists in recognizing a large number of critical positions. But this is founded in a fluency with tactics.
The parent is doing probably the most effective thing at their level by focusing on tactics, tactics, tactics. Learn the basic tactical motifs, practice finding them in puzzles, and practice employing them in games.
When you are starting with chess, don't study openings, just learn basic opening principles -- how to develop your pieces. Learning opening lines is the least productive thing you can do right now. The same positions can arise from multiple opening lines, so you are better off understanding principles and learning tactics (and how to calculate).
Using brute-force, algorithms or rules is too hard for humans, there is too much going on at the same time. Even Stockfish didn't manage that against AlphaZero :) If you do want to have a more strict repertoire, you could find a few openings that you like and that play naturally for you. The way I choose them is by simply playing them and then see the first ten results. The first 5 games with King's Indian defence were wins for me and felt very natural, the first 5 moves are slow and after that there is a game going. I tried Ben-Oni, but I am too messy of a player and just mess that up, the same with the French. Ofcourse, getting to know an opening better, with the themes that belong to it, will make you better at it long-term.
Anyway, there are so many things going on, you need to feel some intuition or patterns on what is currently important on the board. Rules are so very much based on context, like, for black, c5 is almost always good while f6 is almost always bad. But there are many games with exceptions. And if you play against people of your same level games can just be fun.
Memorizing specific lines is only important at the highest level of competition. You should however have some rough idea of what you're trying to accomplish. Hanging Pawns channel[0] has videos about a lot of openings and their main ideas. I recommend Scotch Game for white and Sicilian Defense(any variation) for black. You can also use https://listudy.org as a tool to practice memorization(though I repeat, this is not worth focusing on). The most important thing imo is to play longer games(at least 15 minutes) and analyze them afterwards. There are some people who can improve by only playing shorter games, but from my experience, that's very rare.
I'm also in my 30s and have also been learning, and I recognise the frustration of trying to learn through learning specific opening lines.
What helped me was to stop trying to learn specifics outside of the first 3 or 4 moves, and just playing so much that I built up memory for specific cases where it was either a huge blunder or missed win, while at the same time sticking to trying to do the same things each game.
So I'd try not to vary my responses to particular lines so that I'd get the same situations repeatedly.
If I found myself consistently being uncomfortable, I'd change something earlier about how I'd respond, such as an early Nbd7 instead of trying to more aggressively fight for the centre in the Italian.
Overall, my three pillars of learning were puzzle rush (puzzle streak equivalent on lichess), playing more (~10k games over 2 years), and every day watching one of Naroditsky's speed-run videos, where he plays rated games from rating 400 up to around 2000 and explains his thinking. (They tend to end when he starts playing against too many cheaters).
That said, I've also plateaued around 1500 rating on chess.com. That rating is high enough for me to enjoy without feeling that every game is decided by silly blunders. I'm not sure that I have the capacity to get much higher, because my rating has barely moved for a year despite playing every day and trying hard to learn.
Strategic thinking at my level is still infrequent, but I feel like I won't progress my game until I get more of it. I've reached a level where just thinking over each move in turn just looking for tactics is no longer enough. To get better I need to think about "how to improve your pieces" which is another word for strategic and positional chess.
From watching videos, I think a lot of it is intuition. Quite often during his speed-run videos when faced of a choice of two seemingly fine moves, Naroditsky's intuition will take over and he'll say, "I'll play this move, I can't explain concretely just yet why but this other move just feels worse somehow".
There's an intuition about moves which obviously is incredibly strong in a bullet-specialist GM.
So part of it is just falling into the same tricks over and over you'll come to recognise them. Other parts is there is an intuition which as you get stronger at other aspects of the game will come to fruition.
Both. Intuition tells you which moves are even possible. It's like having a voice in your head that tells you "sacrifice the knight here", since the pattern of the pieces looks like it "has that move" in it. But you don't know how. This is where the algorithmic part comes in, you brute-force the most likely ways to do it by playing your best move, then your opponent's best move and so on. Your ability to win is defined by how many moves you see and how many moves ahead you can think.
Of course, it's more fuzzy than this. Intuition can be wrong. Sometimes the messages are along the lines of "there's some good move here", or "my opponent has mode some sort of mistake", rather than something definite. But when it all comes together, it feels like you're a pattern-matching wizard machine.
Tactics is the main thing to learn in the beginning, which builds the 'intuition.' Later study a couple openings like ruy lopez or giocco piano. You can learn a couple traps too and be on the lookout for them (fried liver and scholars mate in particular).
The game 'came together' for me when I realized how easy it is to squander any advantage you've gained. So in a game, you might be rocking it and winning. Suddenly, you've done the wrong thing and now your opponent is capitalizing on it and crushing you. That situation is very frustrating in the beginning. Once you recognize it, then you can try to be the one to not step in doo-doo by being very careful with every move.
I've thought that maybe it's a good idea to play Chess 960 because memorization is out of the question from move 1. This way you learn to analyze each position individually and hopefully understand the consequences of candidate moves. I think obviously it's important to learn specific openings and problems that have already been solved as well, but 960 can help develop "chess eyes" a little bit. Don't take my word for it; I'm bad at the game, but these are just some ideas that I've had.
- Do lots of tactics puzzles—treat it like exercise, consistency is key. 1 to 3 puzzles per day is ideal.
- Read strategy books. Don’t worry about memorizing, just get the intuitive gist of things like moving rooks to open files, knights to outposts, keeping pawns on opposite color squares of your bishops, try to pile up pieces against the enemy king, etc.
Its very true. Lower level players will view the board in isolation, piece by piece. Higher rated players will see structures, shapes, and patterns. The coordination of those structures and patterns using simple chess fundamentals allows for some really intuitive play that looks otherworldly to most people.
I'm middle aged and I'm lucky if I get to 5 on puzzle storm. It takes me several times longer than it probably should to solve puzzles, and even then I get about half wrong. Dunno what it is.
Folks say you should spend time studying past games to learn weaknesses but I feel like that's as bad advice as is asking children to grade their own homework -- it will simply reinforce bad ideas.
Still, I enjoy it. Mostly the self-paced puzzles. I'm hovering around 1200-1300 there (on lichess).
> Folks say you should spend time studying past games to learn weaknesses but I feel like that's as bad advice as is asking children to grade their own homework
Are you using an engine to analyze your past games? It is much more efficient than using your own brain power to find your mistakes. If you think the games that engines show you aren't realistic (they aren't), then play out the opposite side of the engine yourself. That way you can see how to refute players of your skill level.
Doing these things quickly is mostly an exercise in pattern recognition. As you memorize patterns the moves become automatic. If you need to think through the position it will take too much time. It just takes thousands of hours of play to memorize the patterns as the puzzles get more complex. I don't play a lot so it is a good day for me if I get to past 5 in puzzle rush on chess.com.
I don't know what percentage of high level play is memorization and pattern recognition vs calculation. I suppose pattern recognition instantly culls thousands or millions of branches from the decision tree, and the rest is calculation on what's left.
Just try to find how to put the opponent in check first. Make the move before even seeing the solution. That approach works pretty well until you get to the 1300 rated puzzles (around 16-19 puzzles in).
Of course it's good to have some practice on different types of tactics. You want to be on the lookout for knight forks in the beginning too.
Another thing that might help with your tactical vision is the chessable checkmate in 1. You can just drill that all day and its really great. You can feel your chess muscles flex (chess swol).
It's never too late to learn something complex. If you tell yourself you will be mediocre/average then those will be your results. I'm 30 so not old by any means but - the secret is to obsess over the thing you want to learn intimately. Obsession beats practice any day.
If you have trouble finding that obsession - you weren't that interested anyway. Let your mind decide what you truly enjoy and want to grasp. Listen to yourself
I was in an evening class with other students who were mostly in their 20s. The age thing was really obvious. All the older students struggled.
I kind of thought I could be super organised, come up with smart efficient ways to learn characters etc. But no, you need raw brain power - mostly memory I think. Wisdom doesn’t count for much.
I learnt more about the reality of growing old than I did about Japanese:-)
One day, a year before turning 50, I decided to play a five minute game of chess against Lichess, level 2. I lost horribly but I wanted to make it a habit. So every day with my morning coffee I would play a quick game.
For months I didn't win a single game until, one day, I did. That was five years ago. I still don't play more than a game or two a day, always 5+0 Blitz, but each year I've moved up a level in Lichess and I think about 100 points. I'm somewhere between 1700 and 1800 rating currently.
Now I'm plateauing and I can see that some openings are killing me and I'm still too tactical, meaning moving up in ranking won't be as easy now, but if the author is using an anecdote to say that you can't be a novice when you get older, I'll use one to say that's nonsense. It's a mindset; it's up to you.
I too started learning chess at the beginning of this pandemic when I turned 29. While I knew how the pieces moved as a kid, I was unaware of rules such as promotion, pawns moving two squares in the beginning, en passant etc. When I started I was 900 blitz on chess.com. I moved to ~1750 on Chess.com blitz and ~2000 on lichess blitz. I assume I would be higher in rapid if I played it as much, probably due to less competition in it online. I learned a single opening with white (and probably the most hated - London system), and one with black (Sicilian hyperaccelerated dragon). I guess most of my improvement came from observing tactics in games and in puzzles. Watching a lot of agadmator kind of videos also helped in figuring out what is a better move out of multiple candidate moves (I guess this is what is positional chess is about.) I have reduced playing it these days since it is quite addictive and takes up a lot of my free time. Also, it is quite demotivating to hear that no matter how much effort I put in as an adult, a 5 yo kid will be much better than me with the same amount of effort.
I have a similar story to you, learning those same systems as well! I don’t really buy the guy’s story I’m pretty sure the kid would eventually beat me regularly with enough years, but at age 5? I have access to more resources and more motivation, more focused training, less likely to make blunders.
I started playing regularly about 5 years ago after a New Year's resolution to break a video game addiction - I figured I would play it when the urge was too much and that either I would stop playing games entirely, or come out being decent at a timeless game that is at least considered a respectable pastime...
I started playing 5+0 rated on Lichess (which if you've never been to, you should check it out right now as an awesome example of beautifully designed, open-sourced software) . Right away dropped to ~1000 elo which was like the bottom 10-15% at the time but kept it up and have climbed as high as 1900 recently. I always thought chess was so boring but I realized I always just hated waiting for the opponent to move so Blitz was perfect for me. And, believe it or not, it'll get your heart racing just like any other high-stakes game.
After training AI Go engine for competitions and seeing an AI learn more in one weekend than I can in one lifetime, I feel it's hard to be motivated to learn this kind of thing. I feel like I'm training my bespoke artisanal neural network.
It’s fun seeing so many parents at 40 jumping into chess personally and with their kids. I’m doing exactly the same thing and it makes me want to take lessons to step it up :)
Since you all have more experience than I do, does anyone have a sense of what rating is reasonably achievable with daily effort? Perhaps this is the wrong approach, as we obviously want to be as high as we can, but just curious if 1800 or 2000 is out of reach for most people or not? For context I can beat 1500 bots, but get crushed by a 1700 (though it isn’t clear if bots are accurately rated or not, so maybe I should use a different metric?)
I think you should try playing people instead of bots. I'm 1100 but can beat the 1500 bots (not necessarily easily, but about 1/3 of the time). The problem with the bots is they are rated by just throwing in a random blunder every once in a while (which is what humans do too, but usually the bots are a bit more apparent about it).
Reading through this, I have to wonder why the Father was so obsessed with beating his Daughter? I have a daughter, and I have nothing but admiration for the things she does well, that I am no good at. Would I devote hours/days/months of my life to become an expert in a thing just so I could beat her at it? Certainly not.
The Father in this piece is running the risk of ruining for her, one of the very things she is really good at (and clearly enjoys), and all because of his own insecurity.
But she beat him after that. Don't you see the enormous value in her knowing that she's beating him fair and square? Even after the enormous effort he's making? She must feel like the smartest kid in the world.
My son is 11 and he started beating me at chess when he was 10. I never once let him win, each of his wins was 100% earned and I tried like hell to beat him each time.
I had the same reaction. I have a 3.5yo daughter now, and it feels like spending time and attention being truly interested in the things she loves is a great way to bond. The extra zing of needing to beat her is ego, and as you say feels like it would sour the positive effect of all of those hours.
Same observations seems right for many other types of relationships. Time and attention is a gift, don't ruin it with ego.
He was obsessed with proving to himself that he wasn't aging uncontrollably and that he still had some hope for his future. It's an existential problem he is articulating, not a literal problem with beating his daughter in chess.
He also has a very small window to still beat her before it never happens again because she will simply be too strong. Which is the story of every young chess player playing their parents.
I didn't really read it as him having an obsession with beating her—
It struck me more that this was his reckoning with the inevitable regression of his own cognition, in the context of comparison to the developing cognition of his daughter. Like racing the clock even if you have competitors on the track.
Sure, there was some disconcert over the fact he was "getting lapped" and he knew it, but I think that realistically we'd all feel that way at least a little. Even if it was our kid. Not because we're jealous of them, but rather because they are forcing us to face our own decline.
Not that I am necessarily correct. Just a thought.
I can learn a lot of programming languages at 40 no problem but learning fucking DnD and/or chess at 40 or how to play an instrument is a fucking nightmare.
It's even worse when people say to me: my 15 year old can figure this out.
Yes, the embarrassment of being a Novice at anything at 40 is part of the issue, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't.
But yeah, I just find myself having trouble learning things fast enough.
> Yes, the embarrassment of being a Novice at anything at 40 is part of the issue, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't.
This sounds like a pride/ego issue more than anything. You need to learn pacing. You'll probably take longer than a teenager, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to learn most skills with practice.
I doubt anyone else passionate about whatever you're learning cares about your age. Most people are just excited others also enjoy their hobby or skill.
I disagree that it is cognitively more difficult to learn an instrument as an adult - in fact I think adults have a lot of advantages in that regard, at least up to a "proficient" level. Clearly it would be different talking about the highest levels of professional playing, but at even "normal" levels of professional ability I think this holds.
But it's about time spent. Kids just have fewer demands on their time, so it's easier for them to practice regularly. They might also have a parent enforcing the practice time. They might also spend more time on important fundamentals (scales, theory), while adults might gravitate toward current applications (a song I want to learn).
I believe that if you try to learn an instrument AS THOUGH you were a kid, you would learn at least at the rate a kid would, subject just to whatever natural talent difference there might be.
I've been learning piano as an adult, and over several years have managed to stay ahead of all my kids. Not sure how much longer that will hold true, but if nothing else it's a strong motivator for me!
Re: DnD - I did try to get my kids into this along with me (I never played before either), and while one of my kids seemed interested, I just felt my adult brain had trouble getting into the imaginary world in the way that a kid might. There's a level of "pretend" that I just can't find anymore.
There's never really been an adult who started playing chess and reached GM despite some devoting as much or more time than children do. Obviously GM is a high bar, and you can learn plenty as an adult but it does seem to be harder even when you account for hours spent.
You just have to find enjoyment in it or whatever else you're trying to learn. There will likely always be people better than you, this is especially true of chess. If the only enjoyment you get out of it is being good then chess is probably not the hobby for you. I started in my early 30s and I likely lose to 12 year olds online all the time, I lost to one in real life even though I'm a fairly highly rated player. It's still fun though.
If you're not genuinely interested in chess or DnD, it'll be harder to learn. You don't need to be interested in either, no one will think less of your intelligence or geekiness if you aren't! It's just that there's a certain expectation that certain geeky things are (best, only?) learned when one is 12.
At 40 you are dumber than a 15 year old. Your brain just can't compete on learning new things. Accepting this will help in aging gracefully given soon you will become physically weaker than most 15 year olds as well.
Hah, yeah I have been teaching my 10 year old, he's very competitive. I never really gravitated towards chess but, its quality 1 on 1 time with a physical game, that is quite challenging.
I deep dived into chess several months ago, probably on the back of that netflix series (Queen's gambit?).
Then you realise, that chess nowadays is purely a memorisation exercise of the first 20 moves you can make, and if you make one wrong move you get systematically beaten. After you break out, then fine, then there is chess. This just killed it for me: the fact it's a memorisation exercise. I'd rather remember less useless facts if I'm rote doing that.
The chess puzzles are fun, the new variations are fun, but the original game, just pointless.
This isn't even remotely true unless you're playing at the highest levels of chess. I'm a fairly highly rated player on chess.com and I only know the first few moves of a handful of openings. I end up playing the book moves a lot but that's because I've played so many games and practiced so much that it's pretty intuitive at this point.
I've never played 20 book moves, ever, in any of my 1000s of games.
I think whether or not you're right about memorizing openings as others dispute, I suspect you do ultimately memorize lots of patterns. Usually it's done through sheer practice, but if you dig enough, someone has probably given a name to all sorts of situations and tactics faced.
What I think you're touching on with your gripe is that there isn't as much room for flexibility in chess. At high levels, the first to screw up loses. At low levels, you just don't recognize each other's screw-ups and vulnerabilities. You recognize them probably from experience more than anything. That still qualifies as 'memorization' to me, but you just can't get that from a book, in the end. To me it makes chess appear stiff and uncreative.
Now, grant: with competitive play, lots of mind games go this way. If you have time to reflect and have expert-level knowledge, there are probably a narrow range of correct plays. It's difficult to allow for intuition.
I don't quite know what you mean by "chess nowadays".
It's always been the case that the players who make the best moves win more. And it's always been the case that memorization is a part of making good moves. Nothing qualitatively changed nowadays, it's always been true. What has changed quantitatively is that the quality of the average player is going up over the centuries, and memorization is part of that. So basically, what you said is equivalent to "with the amount of effort I'm willing to put in, I'm in a low percentile nowadays".
The opening is in no way like that until you get to extremely high-level high-skill games, which will take years if not a decade
Until then, all you have to do is understand a few basic opening goals; and you're good to go. You don't have to memorize 20 moves deep of every opening if you are 800-1900 ELO, that's just silly and completely wrong.
You might find Chess960 interesting then. The starting position is randomized, with enough variations that memorizing an opening book no longer really helps. You have to start evaluating the board from move 1 in the same way that you do 20 moves later.
For those of you with just basic experience, or looking to learn, I really recommend the “Chessbrah Building Habits” series on YouTube.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8N8j2e7RpPnpqbISqi1SJ9_w...
GM Aman is a really pleasant dude, solid teacher, and takes the most methodical approach to coaching beginners to intermediates how to build habits at each elo range to keep growing.
For those new to time controls, 15 minute rapid games are a good place to start. I felt a lot more comfortable after a couple of months jumping to 3 or 5 minute blitz based on my schedule, once I felt like I could get out of the opening without being totally lost :)
Other great content creators are GothamChess (be aware his YouTube and twitch styles are different but equally awesome), Hikaru, Eric Rosen, Nemo, St Louis Chess Club, and so many more.
The chess community is really great. I hope y’all come and join the fun.