Chessplayers often wonder what it takes to play like a grandmaster - does it require talent or can everybody achieve mastery if he/she just trains hard enough. And if talent is not necessary, is it important how the training is done or is it enough to just play a huge number of chess games? The article "Anyone can have his shot" in the St. Petersburg Times describes some recent work of Florida State University's psychology professor Anders Ericsson. I mentioned his work on talent vs. training already in a previous post. Here, I will summarize only a few remarks he made on chess improvement in the St. Petersburg Times interview.

First of all, Anders Ericsson stresses the importance of studying chess master games: "If you can beat everyone very easily, how can you become a better chess player? People who become very successful chess players, they re-create games played by experts to see why these other players were picking these moves. If you find you pick the same move as they did, then you?re playing as well as them. If not, then it?s a clue that you?re not doing something right."

Secondly, he describes that the way how training is done matters a lot and uses amateur golf players as example: many players play golf for decades but do not improve much. This shows that experience alone does not necessarily lead to mastery. More important is the way training is done. The golf player (I assume that this applies to chess players in the same way) has to determine her/his weak spots and work on them. If the weak spot situation occurs only seldomly in real play, then improvement requires training that repeats this situation over and over until it is mastered. Conscious and repeated work is necessary to improve. In my opinion, this implies several consequences for chess training. First of all, it is necessary to analyze games after they are over to determine weak spots. Secondly, if this weak spot is, e.g., not recognizing a tactical pattern such as a fork, then it is necessary to practice forks until perfection.

Last but not least, motivation is important. Anders Ericsson says "If everyone has a shot, then it's up to them to decide. If they don't have the motivation and the drive, then they're not going to reach the higher levels. It's not so much that someone put in thousands of hours to be good at something. It's that someone else gave up after an hour and a half. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy." After all, being a chess master only means that you are better than most other players. Therefore, all it needs to become a chess master is to train harder and to be more persistent than most others, even if it may take some of us more than 40 years to get there.

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