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From	Message
grege79 26-Jan-11, 00:47	Chess skills - Nature or nuture? I always wondered if come chess skills are inherent, ie there is a population of individuals that will always perform better. Here is a quote from an article based on a recent study. "Professor Tanaka added that the findings supported the idea that the brain could be trained to be good at spotting patterns - and that it was unlikely that people were born with the requisite intuition needed to be good at board games." www.bbc.co.uk
king_0_nothing 31-Jan-11, 15:32	When I joined my first chess website, I didn't even know how the pieces moved. I mistakenly thought you won the game if you could simply get a piece next to your opponent's king. Reality struck when I haphazardly sacrificed my queen. It's funny now. I lost my first 25 games before finding an opponent I could beat. That was in the low 800 rating range. Before long I learned the significance of forming a defense with pawns and the other pieces on the board and my rating steadily rose before peaking around 1400. I took time off and am a little rusty now, but I have no doubt my rating will climb again. I believe there can be a certain degree of talent there that is completely natural. Why can someone have a natural ability to kick a ball or know what stocks to invest in and not have a natural ability at a board game (although I believe chess is much more than a board game). I think that talent was apparent with my rating rise from 800-1400 in little more than a year. It is not of my opinion that someone can be born a GM. But there are many talented children playing chess at a level of which I could only dream. With proper coaching, anyone can improve on their raw talents; that applies to chess or anything else for that matter.
itchynscratchy 01-Feb-11, 05:50	From my experience playing as a child all the way to now coaching, I think someone's ability ''cap'' is very much nature. How close they get to that cap is down to how hard they want to practice. No one is a GM straight away, but by the same token I think there are many of us who are simply unable to reach that standard. I think if I gave up everything else in my life and concentrated only on chess I would be a much better player, but I would still fall some way short of GM standard.
grege79 01-Feb-11, 11:06	I wonder if that cap that we consider to be nature is actually related to the way we process information, and perhaps that is pliable within the first few years of life? Would be interesting to see grandmasters first few years of life from their parents point of view.

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