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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

> TIL Psychologist László Polgár theorized that any child could become a genius in a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1d9gjeh/til_psycholo...

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The problem there is that just because you can do it doesn't mean it's good for them. I have two cousins who were trained at playing classical instruments from extremely young age(like 2 years old), one of them went on to become a very successful and well known violinist, but......she hates it. She will be the first one to say that the constant almost daily lessons were an absolute nightmare and that she's had no childhood because of it, and it also locked her into being a violinist despite whatever else she might have wanted to do.

Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.

The part of the Polgár story that amazes me the most is that all three daughters showed enough interest and engagement in chess for the experiment to work so successfully. Because with my own children, I’ve seen again and again that you can encourage and expose them to certain interests, but they’re their own people - many of the things I exposed them to and tried to get them excited about just weren’t interesting to them.

And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.

There was a 3-part BBC documentary called "My Brilliant Brain" with one that featured Susan, who was the oldest and is today one of the best live chess commentators in the world. The doc talks about her father's theory and practice. His most important understanding was that the child must choose the endeavor of their own free will, and then he merely helped them optimize their learning curve.

Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.

The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.

And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.

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