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Comment by Lordarminius | Hacker News Reader

I have been a serious chess player for over 20 years.

Improvement in chess is not directly proportional to the number of games played - that is one factor. Amateur park players and hustlers rack up many hundreds of games per week, and thousands per year, but are usually beaten by masters who have played fewer games for shorter periods of time. Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.

Improvement is a function of directed study of chess : analysing one's games with the aim of eliminating weaknesses in one's play, becoming familiar with common patterns (and anti-patterns) of strategy and tactics, learning the fundamentals (and advanced aspects) of openings, middle games and endings, and conquering psychological barriers.

I say this because we need to take this into account as we study perfomance else we get skewed results.

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> Improvement is a function of directed study of chess

This is true of so many things. Improvement is proportional to the amount of deliberate, conscious practice, which is more uncomfortable than “game time”.

When I used to play chess, I always found short time controls the most fun, but the least useful for long term improvement.

This seems to also be true for piano playing. Basically Friedrich Gulda said he only practices 3-4 hours a day sitting at the piano. The rest of the day he is sitting in the café thinking about music and piano playing.

Ah ... I think you are onto something with this statement. What's the name of the cafe? /s

Commenting as I have heard of fellow musicians sometimes performing almost ritualistic steps or 'cargo cult' emulations of 'famous' musicians to try and replicate their success.

This comment reminds me of the book "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work"

> he only practices 3-4 hours a day

only... Deep sigh!

I spend 6 to 8 hours sitting at the computer thinking about C++. 3-4 hours then sitting in a cafe seems like a sweet deal.

If I found time at work for 3-4h of concentrated, uninterrupted programming I would be happy.

Even if I have time for more, around 4h of focus is my limit, and after that quality is lost very quickly.

I’ve found sitting in a cafe (or going for a walk) often allows me to think more productively about code: sometimes the screen is just a distraction.

For me, most of the time the hard part is not writing the code, but understanding all the code around it so that I figure out where to get my inputs from and not break anything. I can't do that without sitting at the computer and reading the code.

Assuming you're talking about your job, I'm not sure this is the same as "practicing" C++ for 3-4 hours the way you would practice piano. For us programmers there's usually no difference between practice and "the real stuff" unless you consider side projects as practice but that's "outside" our job.

Unfortunately, for us as a profession we still haven't yet figured out what "practice" looks like.

The closest we've done is just "more game time". The closest we've found is when learning a new tech doing a small project. But that is learning a tech and distinctly different from "practicing" the craft of programming.

I feel like a good start would be to reflect on what we do on our job, time ourselves, see where we struggled, practice these parts. But that's still far from deliberate practice. Griding leetcode is one, but it's practice for leetcode problems.

Every line of code that you write and later delete is practice. We practice a lot.

It is practice, but usually not "deliberate practice" in the way musician or people that talk about 10 000 hours think about practice. I'm not sure how big the difference is between practice and deliberate practice.

I immediately had the same reaction. Granted I am beginner and more on the pop side of things than classical.

But it still surprises me about the amount of effort to master the instrument.

That is very low for professional pianists.

Many professional classical musicians of all sorts of instruments will practice 6-8 hours per day or more. Whether that's necessary or not is up for debate. Either way, many of them have an almost obsessive relationship with music and their instrument -- at least at the highest levels -- which means they probably want to be playing that much.

I was wise enough at the early age of 12 or so to realize that whatever that "commitment" gene was, I didn't have it, so I kept piano a personal passion rather than try to go to school for it like my parents wanted.

Regarding "thinking" about music ... I recently took up playing drums again after a 20 year hiatus. During those 20 years I was never able to stop tapping rhythms on things (to my own and everyone around me's great frustration). Every song I listened to I couldn't not imagine playing that drum track. That must have kept those neural pathways alive.

Now that I'm finally playing again, I feel like I'm back to my previous levels, or even better, after just 3 months of playing 1x week.

Having said that, there's also the 10,000 hours thing.

It seems to be very true for humans to learn things that require practice. Playing video games, playing piano, sport, etc.

My interpretation is even though I love those practices, I would still make myself tired from playing and concentrating for too long - after that my standard is downgrading. If I continue, I get used to those lower standards more than I could gain expertise.

This is very true. I've never played RTS games seriously, so every time I play I just feel naked. I can figure out eventually how to build a base and crawl the tech tree, but I've always felt what I would really need is to just sit there and study what all the units are, common tactics, and videos of other people playing.

Of course like with sports the fun thing is playing a game, not practicing for it, so that's what ends up happening.

In expert level RTS play, if you take even a tenth of a second to think about any decision anytime during the first 15 minutes you will most likely lose the game. After that it gets more interesting but many games don't last that long.

The thing is with most computer games (I suppose games in general) is that you not only have to learn the rules of the game to get better, you must also study and practice the current best strategies to even stand a chance.

Related book: Talent is overrated https://geoffcolvin.com/books/talent-is-overrated/

[I read the book years ago] Anyone who has been able to do anything measurable at a high level knows that talent is underrated. But "Talent is Underrated" would sell very few copies: who wants to have their hopes buried under a ton of reality?

I think this is true for many other disciplines, especially programming. You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.

This is something I wish I knew 20 years ago.

It's also something i wish companies would prioritize, you will be more valuable if these activities are supported by the company and not something you must do on your own time.

They do. You can take a lower paying job while you earn improve your skills, and then get a new role or raise with the skills earned. If they wanted someone in the role without the skills already in place, they would have hired that person and paid them less.

And misses OPs point.

> You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.

Companies need to prioritize this is the point. It's not about low pay, high pay jobs. Or obtaining a role once you have the skills, it's that companies don't prioritize learning/development as part of the role, they focus on output - and they would get more value from their employees of they did.

That flies in the face of the current Lord of the Flies policy and extracting maximum effort from each employee though.

Companies have very little interest in investing in their employees personal education, because once they have learned the new stuff, they might just leave to another company and take their freshly acquired knowledge with them. It's the same reason why companies want to hire only experienced people even when the skills they require could be acquired by an otherwise competent person in a few months with proper training. In economic terms, it's a market failure; no-one wants to be the one paying (either in terms of money or employee working hours) for stuff that someone else can benefit from.

I know everyone learns differently, but I gained most of my programming skills just from programming.

You will study other people's code on the job and code reviews provide coaching.

Chess is much harder for me because I don't have the discipline to study like that.

With coding, I can read a quick blog post or follow a tutorial, then immediately start incorporating ideas into my work.

In chess, if I study something, I might not encounter a situation where I can use that knowledge in game for a while. I don't get that immediate reinforcement so I forget things much easier.

Chess should be super-easy to use knowledge quickly after acquisition. If it's openings you can play online/against a computer and use them.

If it's mid game it's going to be strategy, you're not going to ever repeat it, so you can apply the strategy in general terms.

If it's endgame then surely you can setup scenarios and play against engines.

Maybe, if it doesn't exist, there's a need for a game engine that will try to do a particular opening to give you practice, will try, say, to fianchetto or castle early (I imagine such settings exist) to allow practicing against those moves?

But, unless you're seriously good can't you get the repetitive practice easily with engines?

> In chess, if I study something, I might not encounter a situation where I can use that knowledge in game for a while.

That's a problem everyone has :)

> Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.

Fun fact: Botvinik became world champion without being a `professional` chess player. He had a full-time job as an electrical engineer.

He was also the last world champion to have any occupation outside of chess.

Well Put

Just by playing, you gain too little data - you'd have to re-invent the world's expertise on your own.

One must study the vast amounts of data generated by other players, now embodied as knowledge.

Not unlike many other fields. Reading and coaching count a lot.

>"and leave himself/herself"

Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self? And what do we call gender neutral person if not?

themself

Whether it's proper depends on who you ask but you can use the singular they.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

This is interesting.

Themself sounds more natural to me than simple self. Singular they has been in common use since the 14th century. Don't let prescriptivists tell you otherwise.

Theirself sounds way better, but I've always been more of a neologist.

  A: They are after you!
  B: Who, a single they or multiple theys?

Atributed to Dave Chappelle.

Depending on the sentence you are looking for the reflexive pronoun "oneself" or "one's self" to refer to an unspecified person's self consciousness.

> Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self?

No.

> And what do we call gender neutral person if not?

they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries. It spent a while with strong bias against it in formal contexts but that's weakening recently.

One/one/one’s is less controversial in formal settings, but requires a somewhat different writing style.

“Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.”

might become:

“Botvinnik famously recommended that, as a professional chess player, one should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave oneself time to think about chess.”

or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all:

“Botvinnik famously recommended a professional chess player only playing 80 tournament games a year and leaving time to think about chess.”

And yet the current world chess champion often plays 80 bullet games within a matter of hours in various online events or matches.

Everybody is different. Playing lots of games gives you the ability to experience playing different types of positions against different players, which can feed into your training in terms of figuring out which areas to focus on.

If you want to get better at chess you will have to study, but I don’t think playing is in itself negative. Only if you never study and only play.

There are also practical things like managing the clock and managing your attitude that you can only practice in games.

> And yet the current world chess champion often plays 80 bullet games within a matter of hours in various online events or matches.

Botvinnik's quote refers to tournament games, that is, long, over the board, classical time control games that take hours to play. It says nothing about playing practice/friendly games, or playing other time controls.

Botvinnik also claimed he only ever played one blitz game, so he did mean this in a stronger sense. Though he may have been allowing for training games at tournament time controls.

Incidentally, I'm familiar with the recommendation (actually I thought it was a maximum of 50 games in a year) but I can't find any source for it online. Does anyone have a source?

> or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all [...]

That is not grammatical. One rendition in such a style might be:

> Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player only play 80 tournament games a year and leave time to think about chess.

Though I would prefer to substitute for 'year and leave time to think' one of: 'year, to leave time to think', 'year, leaving time to think', or even 'year, to live time for thinking'.

There is also an ambiguity in the original: 'a professional chess player' may be taken as definite; that is, it may seem as though the advice was directed at a specific chess player. To avoid the possibility of such an interpretation, I might prefer the rendition using 'one', or something like this:

> Botvinnik famously recommended that professional chess players only play 80 tournament games a year, to leave time for thinking about chess.

> they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries

The one problem is that many people have difficulties with distinguishing usages. This is especially a problem for foreign learners, but even native speakers are not immune to naive generalizations.

...or you could just use, you know, plural? "Professional chess players should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave themselves time to think about chess." No problem there.

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