A simple fact. The more time you dedicate to something the better you get. You might have heard of the famous chess player, Bobby Fischer. Many people believed he was a child genius akin to Mozart in phenomenal ability at a young age. This is a false fantasy by a culture overly indulgent in our young people. Reality is that Fischer and Mozart put more time into their craft then most humans will put into anything before they turned 20 years of age.
If you think Bobby Fischer was good, the contemporary version of him is Magnus Carlsen. He is good, in fact he is super human in his ability. He is 27 years old. Let me put this into perspective. I am pretty good at chess, I am better then the average person who has picked up the game and played some. I have probably 2000 or so hour of time dedicated to the game. I own a chess club, I play casually a few times a week, I study chess books, watch chess videos and have taken lessons for chess Grand Masters. You can say that I am generally proficient at the game. I am rated in chess at a 1500 – 17oo level. A person who learns the rules and plays the game for the first time would be about a 500 rating. So I am a good 1000 points above the average person who knows the rules. Bobby Fischer, considered one of the best players of all time was probably rated at around 2750. They did not rate players then, but that is a good guess. Magnus Carlsen is rated at 2839 currently. He is almost a full 100 points above what Fischer was at and well over 1000 points better then someone like me. Magus is the reigning world champion and the highest rated chess player in the world.
Was he a childhood genius like Mozart? No he is not and neither was Mozart for that matter. What makes Magnus great is 99% the time he has put in and 1% his natural ability. Magnus started playing at 5. Taught himself the game. He really wanted to beat his sister, so he studied hard. Just guessing but between the ages of 5 and 7 (two years) he probably put in 2 hours a day in playing chess (I got that from an interview I watched with him). In two years he probably logged 2000 hours playing chess. He was at the age of 7 probably at my level.
His Dad who was an amateur chess player himself, saw how much his son liked the game and got him into chess on a more serious level. He started committing to about 4 hours a day playing chess. From age 7 to 9 (two more years) he logged an additional 3000 hours of chess play. He is now at 5000 hours of time committed. That puts him at competency level in the game. He is at this stage, far higher rated then I am now. He started winning games at tournaments, and ended this span at a rating of 1907. At age 13, now committing almost full time attention to chess he became an international master, rated somewhere around 2500. By age 13, he was 9th in the Under 14 group in the world. He had probably logged another 8,000 hours playing chess. He is now sitting at 13,000 hours of chess. People think he is at this time a child prodigy. What they dont know is that they are looking at a kid who has spent more time playing chess then most people watch TV at his age.
He is now full time at chess and it does not take very long for him to excel. He is probably logging 12 hours a day at chess. He is increasing from 2000 hours a year to over 4000 hours a year. In one more year, now with over 17,000 hours of chess time under his belt, he becomes a Grand Master at age 14. 9 Years later, at age 23 he wins the World Champion title, easily. By this time he has added 36,000 hours of chess to his time bank for well over 40,000 hours of playing chess. At age 23 he has put more time into chess then most anyone in the world has. He continues to get better. He is now 28 years old. 5 more years and 20,000 more hours he is the highest rated player in the history of the game.
Bottom line. If you want to get better at something – put the time in.
Guy Reams (252)
365 Member
