Aging in Chess

Edit: Thank you so much for all the likes and for Lichess putting this on the home page! It means the world to me!

We know athletes grow older, and they can't compete professionally anymore at some point. So how does this impact chess.

The Sad Story of Hikaru at the World Rapid and Blitz

What made me consider this subject was watching the performance of the legendary streamer Hikaru Nakamura in the recent FIDE World Rapid and Blitz. Hikaru was showing his excellent class, but in time scrambles, would blunder wins into losses far too often. In post-game interviews on his channel, Hikaru would repeatedly tell his fans things along the line of: "I'm getting too old...I can't think in time scrambles anymore...it's not anything that will probably ever get better" He ended with the chilling statement: "I think this is the beginning of the end for me. This probed me to examine how age affected top players of earlier years, and here are the results.

How Age Affects the Brain

I first decided to look at how the brain is impacted in general by age. We all know someone at 70 thinks much slower than someone at 20 (in general), but why exactly is this?
Science has shown that after age 40, (which is a number we should remember for later in this article) the brain starts shrinking 5% every decade.
If that isn't enough, another medical article highlights the following: communication between the neurons also becomes worse, which slows the speed of the brain working. The amount of blood going to the brain also grows less, limiting the amount of energy it has. In chess, this information is especially important since the game is almost all mental.

The Field of Study

I decided to take a look at the top 10-15 players in the year 2000. Some were excluded, such as Peter Leko, if they had reasons besides age influence their rating or retirement significantly. (Leko essentially quit chess after losing the World Championship to Kramnik.)
Here are the players:
Kramnik, Anand, Morozevich, Adams, Shirov, Ivanchuk, Topalov, and Bareev.
At what age did these players begin to decline in chess? At what age can the brain no longer uphold its strength at the same level?
*The ratings used for this were FIDE Classical Ratings.
What I first did was take a look at the age of these players when they dropped from being the world class players they were.

The Results

Kramnink 43
Anand Never
Morozevich 36
Adams 46
Shirov 38
Ivanchuk 43
Topalov 41
Bareev 37
The average age for these players was the very interesting 40.6. What we can notice is that this almost exactly aligns with the number we had earlier; in looking at what age does the brain start shrinking. The one player who was not counted in this average was the legendary Vishy Anand, who was still playing world championship matches at the age of 45. The reason for excluding him was that with a rating of just over 2750, though not too active, Vishy is still a top-class player according to my calculations. The player who started declining at the youngest age was Morozevich, who dropped out of the top as early as age 36, while for the English legend Micky Adams, he was still at the top until age 46. Of course, this is still roughly 10 years shy of Vishy.
Two typical rating charts are shown below, as you can see.
First here is Topalov's slow but steady decline.

And here is the chart for the beloved Vasyl Ivanchuk:

What this Means

We can see that, as following science, chess players begin to falter around age 40.
We can see Topalov's rapid decline in 2015 (approx. age 40), while for Ivanchuk it is more gradual around 2017 (approx. age 43). However, besides seeing the inevitable effects of aging, we can also see a positive message from this. Players like Anand, or even Ivanchuk, though in their mid to late 50s, can still play competitively and enjoy the game. While Levon might only be at the top for a few more years at age 42, we could still see him playing serious tournaments in a decade! (If you think of it the other way, we could see Gukesh still playing in 40 years if we are alive at that point.) So, for Hikaru, there is good news. While his blitz skills might never be the same, he still has many years of brilliant chess potentially ahead of him.
As the great chess saying goes: "Form is temporary, class is permanent."

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