Quote:
Originally Posted by fishfood69er
ouch , i was proud of my 1400 on chess.com lol. i only play for fun though i havent looked at training vids or opening just intuition and rep.
im kinda just doing an experiment as well i wanna see how high i can get my elo without study or any help of any kind. what do you guys think is possible as far as just learning from exp. because technically you are learning by playing people better than you.
Interesting idea.
I think you could get reasonably far by playing lots of LONG TIME CONTROL games, especially against players much stronger than yourself.
However I also think there's a limit to how far you could get. Perhaps 1600-1700.
After people start getting to 1800, it becomes important to have a well structured opening repertoire, because you can get a losing position without your opponent playing any original moves himself.
At that level, games tend to stop being decided by huge tactical blunders and instead strategical understanding and positional thinking become more important.
I think it would be very difficult to progress beyond that level without learning some openings, training your tactical awareness systematically, and trying to understand positional and strategic themes.
You would stop learning as soon as you were unable to comprehend the ideas being used against you - it's easy to see why you lost when you missed some tactic that caused you to lose material, it's much much more difficult to understand how a superior opponent was able to put you in a positional bind and simplify to a technically winning ending, or to see why you fell victim to a sophisticated attack on the kingside, due to a particular type of strategic imbalance.