@coderunner86 said in #1:
> Now here is my question: I am under no illusion that I will go places at my age with my limited capacity to grow new dendrites. However, should I even somewhat seriously try to get better?
It's never too late to work with a chess coach, or find a chess buddy to boost your chess improvement.
Good that you are doing chess puzzles!
And someone else in a comment recommended really slow time controls. That is OK but if you are a beginner it makes more sense to also learn from videos, analyzing your own games (preferably with other humans not engines), chess books, chess magazines. If your knowledge and skills are still very limited, then lots of thinking time may not help you very much during the games. Focus on building and improving the skills.
Good luck, enjoy your chess journey :)
There's a reason we can all remember the songs we sang at school decades ago, but we can't remember that song on the radio we heard ten minutes ago... :)
Super cool you got back into Chess after a lifetime! Good luck & GG's!
mysterytramp said it well: don't let conventional wisdom tell you what you're capable of learning. as humans, we constantly evolve and the only time we can't learn is when we're six feet under.
the puzzles are good (always. a GM told me that) and endgame&opening principles. my ratings have increased nearly by 200 in the last year and I'm half a centrury, played as a kid and stopped for a long time.
Soltis books are good: Inner Game of Chess and How to Make a Chess Move
absolutely, try to improve. you'll have fun doing it!
Even though it's too short of a time frame to judge whether I am improving - just following up on the suggestions I got here has added to my fun with the game. Amazingly, reading up on very basic concepts (like Fried Liver) has brought up memories from my youthful chess attempts where I did fall for that!
To me, it is absolutely fascinating that at age 60 I retain memories of games I played when I was 16. That alone brought value to digging in a bit deeper than I intended to.
(Kids like the "you are fossils!" youngster who posted in this thread will not get that of course but many of you will)
And again - lichess has the absolute best CAPTCHA ever!
I'm also turning 60 in just a few' days @coderunner86 For me it's keeping up with all the latest improvement tools/ideas & as we know with our health ... Good Luck' Too many give up on keeping up or improvement . I haven't read Chess Doe Zebras but it's supposed to take a look at us "Middle-Aged" Folk & Chess . Chess Books by the way "are still legal" to use to get better at Chess & United States Chess Federation sells some as well as New In Chess website & of course Amazon still selld em' . Chess Videos are also another way to help & a combination of Playing Studying Chess Books Chess Videos & doing Chess Puzles in a healthy mix seems fine . Playing over of completed games with annotations is great as well . Here also broadcasts give you the latest games & engines annotate games as well
Welcome back. 52 here, I am also enjoying chess after many years. Just ping me if you are in the mood for an informal game, we can chat or use voice talk and comment the moves
@DTCHESSY I will take you up on that at some point! What time zone are you in?
@ThunderClap obviously, as chess is concerned, you are living in a different universe from me. But I would assume that our brains age the same way, so thanks for the book suggestion (I am a book guy...) and also thanks for yet another confirmation that doing puzzles is essential. I can easily focus on that, since uninterrupted playing time seems hard to come by for me at the moment.
Overall, and again addressed to everybody who replied: I am very glad that I got diverted away from my initial tendency to just play it like an occasional game of checkers. I now am reading up on the history of chess, the masters of yesteryear and I also got a tremendous kick out of looking at the Immortal Game in the context of the book by David Shenk - even though I am sure I can't fully appreciate it. But doors are opening!
@coderunner86 I am from Spain, so Central Europe Time
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