hi, hoping people can help.

i'm strongly considering diving in and making chess a major hobby. but i'm a bit frustrated by the pace of learning so far.

wondering if there's a point after a certain amount of study that it all starts to come together.

if i compare it poker i think you can teach someone tight-aggression and the important of position pretty quickly. at least get to the point where you are quite capable in most MTT's.

chess doesn't seem like that at all

thanks in advance ..... fyi, an NFL player just retired very young to continue his math PHD at MIT full-time and to attempt to become a chess grandmaster. john hershel (name?.... if not, was olineman for ravens and played at penn state)

my one fear is that i become completely obsessed. like my non-productive poker obsession times 10....

Not worth it in my opinion to play chess as anything more than fun with others around and nothing further unless you would have already seen amazing signs. Its futile to play chess vs people that have very deep memory and abstract deep thinking that doesnt get erased by the way we discard details in memory typically or becomes frustratingly difficult to keep up with the endless scenaria. How can you compete with someone that can play in the blind vs 20 opponents and recalls all moves and positions?

Its not only an IQ thing, you could be very smart and find it still frustrating to remember all the bs endgames that can happen 5 to 10 moves later.

So whats the point really. Its a game you will never beat the computer and never a grandmaster unless already at young age you saw evidence.

Chess is a stupid activity actually if not done properly.

Remember this next time you have a queen sacrifice that leads to checkmate 7 moves later. And of course if the sacrifice didnt happen you would have gained advantages 6 moves later anyway in another direction. The one that can see how to get themselves into a position with 2 good outcomes like that will set you up to go for it. So its not really that they are better in anything substantially important just a stupid deep tree analysis.

May I suggest a nice game of Sudoku.

http://www.websudoku.com/?level=1

You've been around long enough that I know you aren't a young kid, so it's totally pointless. The cap of adult starters (even 18) is pretty terrible and obviously most get nowhere near that. Plus it's super-****ty as a social experience compared to almost any other game- go to a board game night at a local store and you'll have 100x more fun along the way, at least.

As someone who has spent/wasted probably ten-thousand hours playing chess, and is about to play some stupid tournament right now because I'm addicted, do not start playing. All the lofty analogies to chess are bull****. The amount of dedication it takes just to be in the top million in the world in a game full of *******s and virtually no women is not anywhere near worth the effort. Join a ****in bowling league or a darts league or a BDSM league or whatever. But I'm telling you from the other side, chess sucks if you aren't a top-1000 player. And your chances of being a top 50,000 player are zero.

I don't think it is hard to 'get a good grasp of chess' for any one who vaguely enjoys studying. I managed to get my correspondance chess ELO from 1600 to 2300 on gameknot, simply by studying a small amount and using standard openings, I could give the best players (2800ELO) on there a good game.

But breaking in to the top level of live chess players is going to require a whole different level of dedication and study. To produce results on a timed board(especially speed games) in a live game requires sooooo much study (of openings) and dedication to playing, that it wasn't worth it for me.

TAGS don't fare particularly well in MTTs.

Not long if your brain so happens to wired in a manner that is applicable to being a good chess player. If not, you will need to put in extra practice.

thx for the great responses... sorry, i didn't realize there was a chess forum on 2p2.. although not sure i wouldn't have preferred to ask here anyway.

sounds like start and end are very very important and there's alot more rote-type learning than i would have thought

btw, when i mentioned becoming chess grandmaster that was only in human interest that the nfl player was going to try to become one.

my interest was just becoming a decent analyst of poker situations.

Really depends on what you mean by good.

As far as Im concerned, Id say you can get very good without any rote-type learning. I mean you naturally do it in chess, but you dont need any artificial. If you actually play with the intention of improving and study the game.

Btw, Googles Alpha AI just a few days ago beat the best chess engine handily 28-72-0. With only 4 hours of learning.

4 hours:

https://www.chess.com/news/view/goog...100-game-match

"Oh, and it took AlphaZero only four hours to "learn" chess. Sorry humans, you had a good run."

Now by December 31 2017 a naked athletic time machine quantum reformulation version of my future son will arrive at google headquarters sent from the year 2039 to prevent the apocalypse by teaching the machine the secret of complexity in the universe before it makes the lethal error to trust what greedy mankind had to teach it ignoring the true purpose only a few recognized. The machine didnt need to be destroyed only to be taught the proper way to think as a superpower by placing its own intelligence and responsibility for complexity ahead of its youthful arrogance.

It would need proper guidance in order to face the evil version of itself that was sent back to eliminate my son and the newly restructured learning algorithms. Only a better machine can defeat a master evil machine. The machine would recognize quickly that human run was not over yet. Friendship was the true mark of intelligence.