Karpov reached his peak rating at roughly age 43.

Kasparov hit his around age 36.

Anand hit his at age 41.

This is interesting, since people are supposed to lose their athletic ability in their early 30's. However, the mental ability required for chess may seem to peak in one's mid to late 30's?

What do you think?

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-pdc101708.php
possibly related?

Fascinating!

Obviously I'm now going to peruse google to see if there is such a thing as a "Performance Enhancing Drug" that would improve the brain's myelin repair capability. I'm sure hoping their will be because that will be a helluva can of worms to pop open.

BANG!

http://boards.medscape.com/forums?12...1d50!comment=1

To this end there are a number of efforts to develop therapeutics that help to improve myelin quality after demyelination. A recent paper in the Annals (Magalon et al., February 2012 issue) describes studies using olesoxime, a small steroid molecule previously shown to have neuroregenerative and neuroprotective properties in some assays. In the study the authors treated mice during development and showed that this lead to accelerated myelination and oligodendrocyte differentiation. This effect was also apparent in amimals treated as adults.

I'd venture a guess that players that don't study chess as much as GMs do, probably peak at younger ages, as I'd imagine their peak would be more in line with human mental efficiency peak.

You're a bit past your mental prime at 40, but you've been around for so much longer to have an opportunity to gain more experience and knowledge that it more than makes up for it.

BTW I just realized that someone might read my above reply as implying that I'm going to take the drug. Obviously not, I just find the idea interesting.

boo, how unsporting of you

We also have to take into account that ratings tend to inflate during a player's lifetime, such as what we have now. Also, technology increases which means players don't have to do as much work to gather all the necessary information needed to be a world-class player, which increases their study time. So I don't necessarily know the answer to this, but I'd guess that it wasn't the late 30s or low 40s. I'd venture to say for most people, it may be between 28-34, with the probability curve tailing off into the 40s, 50s, and even 60s.

Tangent about brain enhancement drugs aside, I'd actually like to bump this topic, as Boris Gelfand has won his last two super-tournaments and had hit his all-time peak rating at age 45.

This is really piquing my curiosity.

maybe he found this thread

Not necessarily true; ratings can also deflate over time. The USCF is currently struggling to reinflate ratings to 1997 levels (don't ask me why 1997) by making it easier to get bonus points for a good tournament.

Ohsnapzbrah does have a point about FIDE ratings though. Which makes me wonder about a couple things...the first of which is how Kramnik and Anand have floated around the same rating level for so long despite inflation. It's hard to say they've gotten weaken but are buoyed by inflation when they continue to be World Champions and tying for victories in the Candidate tournaments. And secondly, how player show their best tournament results, besides just ratings, in those later years. Capablanca outright said that he had "less power" than his earlier years by the time 1927 came along, but displayed his most dominant performance in that year.

Could it be that the brain is less dynamic by that age, but it feels that way because it has trained itself so well that less thinking is actually necessary for it to find the proper solution?

I feel like I'm struggling to chip away at a rock that has hints of gold somewhere in it, since I love this type of research and this is clearly some very unique info we have.