I know these kinds of stories are supposed to be inspiring but they do the opposite for me. They make chess less interesting, imo. How great can a game be when a 12 year old is one of the best in the world?
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Meh Iām positive there are thousands of twelve year olds who would whoop my ass at pretty much every game Iāve ever enjoyed.
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Maybe youāre right. I havenāt played a lot of games. The only ones Iāve played at a high level are poker and Magic, where it doesnāt seem to be right that there are thousands of potential elite children. But maybe there would be if parents had the same incentive to raise a WSOP champ as a GM.
Pretty great, actually.
The fact that some kids take naturally to chess is one of the best parts of it! Some of the best chess memories I have are being taught by my grandfather and I think thatās actually totally standard. Itās a universal part of the human condition that someoneās grandfather somewhere is teaching them chess right now, and itās beautiful.
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Same here. My grandfather played at quite a high level, and I could beat my dad (his son) by the age of 10 or so, although I have no doubt he taught him when he was a kid also.
All the games I play now and post here are 3/2 hence all the blunders etc. Iām a bit better under normal time controls!
i used to be much better, which wasnāt good anyway. perhaps in 1700-1800 range at peak post-hs. right now i do chess.com puzzles and rush puzzles to at least gauge if iām falling further off, or staying level. iām sure in 20 years or so i will have lost my mind and there will be data to back it up
Iām confused here. Which one has higher incentives?
For me it would be GM, but I can understand seeing it the other way.
The GM training is incentivized. There are many disincentives associated with training a 5-year-old to play poker. I guess you are thinking purely in terms of monetary incentives? Iām a little surprised that anyone would see it the other way.
I actually think there is a lot math and decision analysis in poker that is directly applicable to real life situations. Also if you fall short of being a WSOP champ, you can still make a comfortable living playing winning poker. If youāre the thousandth best poker player in the world, you can make decent money.
If your the 1000th best chess player in the world, there isnāt that much money in that (I assume).
Nevertheless, Iād still pick GM for my kid (realizing that itās never gonna actually happen).
Before the last few years I think 100th worldwide would probably get low 6 figures. But now with twitch itās a whole new world. Botez is like 25000th worldwide ranking, Gotham is 5000ish, Rosen is about 3000, etcā¦ and they are doing quite well.
I think the most successful guys online arenāt successful just because of their chess ability. Someone can be great at chess and not have the ability to create that kind of content.
But I agree with the overall point that chess has more income potential than it used to.
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Rozman and Rosen are near identical in strength.
When you play against your favourite defence you generally know when blackās gone wrongā¦
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Iām on a 26-4-3 run at 5+5 blitz over the past few weeks, flipped the god mode switch or something.
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How does your puzzle rating compare to your game rating? Iām 1100 in Rapid and 1550 with puzzles. I get that this could point to lots of different problems. I do get into time trouble a lot, which isnāt really an issue with puzzles because I can sit there for 3-4 minutes and figure it out if need be.
My blitz is currently 1460, but Iām on a heater and Iām probably more accurately somewhere in the 1300s. Puzzle is like 2150. I think Iām really too lazy with puzzles though, i rarely spend more than a minute or two trying to find the entire line, so Iāll end up guessing a lot and sometimes back my way into a solution I didnāt see until after the opponentās move.
Ah, ok, so itās pretty normal then to have a higher puzzle rating. I thought the system might adjust for this if everyoneās puzzle rating is several hundred points inflated.
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My puzzle rating is also much higher than my game rating. Puzzles arenāt timed so I dont make blunders.
My puzzle is also 400+. My only gripe about puzzles is it feels disjointed to jump in the middle of a situation and find the best move
Yeah I donāt think I have a puzzle rating, Iāve hardly ever done them, but I find it kind of disorienting to jump into a position and have to figure it out. I kind of wonder if your puzzle rating is much higher than game rating, whether it means you need to work on noticing motifs more in-game. What I mean is, during a game Iām constantly being like āhey if my knight takes on d6 that would fork the queen and rook, doesnāt work at the moment because the pawn on c7 defends it, but notedā. GothamChess is always on about doing your checklist - checks, captures, attacks, do they do anything? - which is good advice but the truth is, Iām more likely to notice a tactic in reverse. Rather than being like āhey would it do anything if I took the pawn on c7ā Iām like āhey that tactical motif I saw earlier works if I take on c7 nowā. When thrown into a puzzle position, I donāt have that library of motifs in the position built up, and Iām slower and weaker than I am in-game. Or so it seems to me, anyway.