Is it too late for me to start professional chess? [closed]

Question

I am 25 years old. I play online chess regularly and I am rated about 1900 on chess.com. And I recently won a local tournament. Now I want to start playing professional chess. Here are some of my questions:

1. Is it too late for me to be ambitious? I am aiming for a GM title in 5 years time. I don't doubt my learning abilities or memory, as is usually the case for the older aspirants, since I solve problems for a living (computer science/ mathematics). However I am not sure if I can afford the kind of time needed.
2. So my second question is about time:
   • How many hours do serious players put into preparation and analysis? I estimate to be able to put in about 30-35 hours a week.
   • How many tournaments/ games does it take to be a GM? I need an estimate. Is 5 years too little? I am imagining playing 3-4 tournaments a year.
3. GM is a long way. So here are more basic questions:
   • How does one find the right tournaments? I don't want to travel too far. Also I don't want to pay hefty fees to enter tournaments. And the participants should be all roughly around my level or slightly better.
   • What FIDE rating does a rating of 1900 on chess.com equate to?

Answer 1

I will write from the perspective of my home country, USA. If you are in a different country, you can likely find parallels.

Is it too late for me to be ambitious?

It is never too late to learn more.

I am aiming for a GM title in 5 years time. I don't doubt my learning abilities or memory, as is usually the case for the older aspirants, since I solve problems for a living (computer science/ mathematics).

5 years is not much time from going from an amateur skill level to earning a GM title. I am also a CS/Math guy. A good one. It doesn't always translate to chess as my lofty 1650 USCF rating will tell you.

How many hours do serious players put into preparation and analysis? I estimate to be able to put in about 30-35 hours a week.

That should do it. Expect to be very good in 5.5 years of extremely focused work. (10,000 hours for mastery...)

How many tournaments/ games does it take to be a GM?

Unanswerable. But expect hundreds and hundreds of serious, focused games. Not blitz. Tournament speed games.

Is 5 years too less? I am imagining playing 3-4 tournaments a year.

It is hard to image anyone with no over-the-board rating can become a GM in 5 years. A few young adults do it and they get their names in Chess Life for it. You need to be playing serious games every week. Plan on some sort of a local tournament every month, plan on 3 or 4 nights at your local chess club playing opponents as serious as you are. And get an instructor.

How does one find the right tournaments? I don't want to travel too far. Also I don't want to pay hefty fees to enter tournaments. And the participants should be all roughly around my level or slightly better.

USCF tournaments are generally very affordable as chess is not a profitable venture for 99% of the participants. Check the USCF web site for chess clubs near you.

Becoming a professional at anything worthwhile is not cheap. Expect to pay thousands annually in hotels, food, transportation, instruction, equipment, entry fees, and so forth. If you aren't willing to invest you should temper your expectations.

How much a rating of 1900 on chess.com translate to in real?

It doesn't. There is no reliable way to compare that rating with any other rating.

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You've set yourself a lofty goal.

I recommend you play some rated games and earn a rating. This will tell you how hard you'll have to work to become a GM. Let's say your rating is 2000 USCF. That's an very respectable 'expert' rating. To be a GM, you would have to improve to about an 2600 USCF. So you'll need 600 points. Every 400 points of improvement means that your old self would have no appreciable chance of defeating your new self. So you'd have to make a Herculean 400 pt improvement, and then become dominant over that new self.

Answer 2

It depends what you mean by 'professional'.

If you want to support yourself solely by playing tournaments, the answer is definitely no. At the very least that would require being in the top 50 in the world which takes a lifetime of work starting at a very young age.

If you want to support yourself by playing and teaching, that is much more feasible. Provided that you are charismatic and can demonstrably improve your students, you could probably make it work with a low master title in the US.

If you want to get to GM and not really care about making money from it, that is possible. At 30-35 hours a week I would say that 5 years is ambitious but doable. Almost nobody has the drive to actually put in that much work though, which is why it is rare.

Tournaments: 3-4 tournaments a year is way, way too low. To get to GM like that you would have to make massive rating gains in every tournament you play, which is not a realistic plan. You should be aiming to play every single weekend at long time controls. Your opponents should be as strong as you can possibly find. This is tough to do in the US unless you live in a few select areas: New York City, San Francisco, Dallas and maybe Saint Louis and Los Angeles would fit the criteria.

You have to study the right things. Read the spine off of Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. Do hard calculation puzzles on a daily basis. Play through tons of high-level games. Don't look at opening theory until you're >2300.

I hope you succeed.

Answer 3

I think there is only one reasonable answer: You're too old. Learning chess is like learning a language. And that's not a metaphor. You learn "chunks" of piece constellations, just like you would learn typical turns of phrase. You get a feeling which phrases and expressions go together and which don't. One day you just know where to put your pieces in certain positions. I bring up this comparison, because you probably know people who learnt your language after their teens. Even those that have mastered your language to a very high degree are still recognisable as non native speakers. And of course they garnered much more experience than you could in a 35h week.

Could you still learn Chinese well enough to write a decent novel in it? Could you still learn to play the violin well enough to make a living in a professional orchestra?

Maybe in some exceptional cases these things are actually possible. But you should rate your success probability as <1%.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from putting in time to improve your chess. But spending five years on chess and chess alone and to expect some financial returns at the end … that's definitely a bad idea.

But fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it. Just put in 10-20h a week for a year and see where it gets you. If you reach 2000 Elo in that time, you clearly have some potential. And anyway, you'll have a much better idea of what you are actually aiming to reach. Wanting to become a chess professional without ever having played a tournament game, is a lot like wanting to become a F1-pilot without ever having driven a car.

I remember a blog by somebody setting out to do exactly what you want to do: roadtograndmaster.com Might give you a better idea of what you are up against.

Answer 4

I think aiming for GM is really unrealistic. Aiming for the GM title is something that players do who are IM, have improved since, and feel they want to push further.

I think that amount of preparation time could work, but it's not the most important thing. Most important is playing serious tournament games. Chess is not about knowledge, it's about skill, and you learn by doing.

I am baffled by the idea of not wanting to travel much and not wanting to play a lot of tournaments, while striving to be a chess professional. What do you think chess professionals do? Answer: it doesn't involve being at home much. And the only way to become one is to start living that life and becoming really really good at it after many years, before that it only costs money. That's probably the main reason GMs are often so young: they still have parents paying for the first ten years of their hobby.

The vast majority of fanatical tournament players of course never breach 2200 let alone higher levels, so the number is a bit meaningless, but I think most GMs become one after about 500-1000 games.

Yes, five years is too few, but more importantly 3-4 tournaments per year is by far too few.

Answer 5

Hate to dash your dreams but 15-20 tournaments (especially in the US, but pretty much anywhere) is not going to cut it, even if it were granted that 1900 on chess.com directly translated to 1900USCF.

1) Ratings involving different pools of players will of necessity diverge. It's the nature of the mathematics involved, so I can say with a great degree of certainty that 1900 chess.com will not translate to 1900 anywhere else on the planet. The rating is an approximate ordering within a given population. If the population differs, the number representing that playing strength will differ.

2) It will, again with near certainty, be impossible to select tournaments in which all players will be near the same rating level, regardless of the rating level you choose.

3) For the most part, it will be impossible to find tournaments with a significant number of players at the higher end of your proposed scale without paying large entry fees. (There will be more exceptions to this than the first two points, but still not very many.)

4) Probabilities are against you. I'm most familiar with USCF ratings so this math will apply to them, but it won't be all that different in other places. If you play someone exactly your rating, you can gain a max of 16 rating points by beating them. In order to gain 600 rating points (assume the 1900 is ELO, 2500 is minimum rating to be awarded the GM title) that means you will have to score +38 against that pool of opponents. That works out to +2 in every single tournament for five years. Haven't checked, but I seriously doubt anyone this side of Kasparov has managed that feat. For example: Magnus Carlsen played 50 games in 2012, and only managed a +17 score for the year, so unless you're farther above everybody than Carlsen is, the odds are pretty heavily stacked against you.

IIRC, only one person went several years without a defeat in history; that was Capablanca. If you're as good as he was, you have a chance, I guess. Otherwise you're going to have to expect to lose games along the way. To be +7 every year for five years will be an impressive achievement. to be +7 any year while playing opposition whose actual strength is 100 points below yours while their rating is equal to yours would require a minimum of 25 games. Make the difference 50 points and the number of games goes over 28.

Finally, it might surprise you to know very few GM's even are making a living off of chess tournaments. Most make their living writing or teaching, not playing.

Answer 6

I am not going to be negative, but realistic. At age 25, it is highly unlikely you will ever be a chess professional. A professional not only has to travel worldwide and play in top tournaments, but also has to teach and do other chess things to make a living in chess.

To achieve a GM title, you will need to play dozens of tournaments each year against IMs and GMs to earn your three norms.

Go to YouTube and follow John Bartholomew. He is an IM working on his GM norms. He posts a short video after each round of the tournaments he plays. He has ups and downs and it has been a tough road for him and he still does not have his GM title yet. Will he ever achieve it? I don't know, but it is a LOT of work.

I don't say this to discourage you, but to be realistic. There is only one way for you to find out. Try it and see what happens. Best of luck!

Answer 7

If you are rated only 1900 at 25 (especially if that's an online rating), it will be a significant achievement to reach FIDE Master level (~2300), not in 5 years, but at any point in the rest of your life. IM and GM are almost certainly out of your reach at this stage, although it is theoretically possible - Scottish GM John Shaw became a grandmaster at 37 after being rated only 1745 at the age of 19. Most grandmasters are already 2200+ by that age. However, Shaw is an extreme example, and his peak rating was 2506, which is still not high enough to earn a living from playing.

Answer 8

It is never too late to start, but you have to weigh your available resources (mainly time, and energy) against your potential achievements (2200 rating? title? norms?). For most people, the cost-benefit analysis does not justify the huge time investment mandated by a "professional" involvement. They can continue to compete in rated events like professional players out of interest, but they do not consider themselves as playing professionally.

Answer 9

You have a lot of pessimistic answers mostly based, as far as I can tell, on the assumption that you live in America. Well, apart from a brief period during Fischer's prime the US has been a bit of a chess desert. If you live somewhere better, have the talent (who can tell?) and are prepared to work hard then, yes, it isn't unreasonable to become a chess GM although 5 years is probably too ambitious. 10 years perhaps more realistic.

As you can see from this list of GMs on Wikipedia many gain the GM title in their 30's and a few even in their 40's. As for opportunity, if I had your youth, talent and dedication I might have a good chance ;-). My local club runs a FIDE rated 9 round Swiss 3 times a year with 3 or 4 GMs at the top level down to my level which is probably not too far off your level. There are 2 GMs and one IM in the club who give training / tuition, so I would have every chance to get the chess I needed.

If I ever became good enough then norm tournaments would come my way mostly via tournaments within a radius of 100 miles. Just playing on one of the top boards for the club first team in the national league (rather than something like the 10th team in the regional A league as at present) would be one norm possibility. Once every 3 or 4 years our club chairman manages to raise enough money to run a 10 player all-play-all where norms are available with one or two places reserved for our club aspirants. 4 or 5 other clubs within a 50 mile radius also manage such tournaments although the one or two untitled places go to their players.

So, if you live in the right area, somewhere on the right side of the Atlantic would be a good start ;-), then you have a chance. If you don't then your chances are bleak.

One piece of advice I would give is that you need to start playing stronger players as much as possible. If you are regularly playing tournament games against players 300 or 400 points higher than you then you may end up getting beaten up regularly but you will quickly get a feeling as to whether or not you have what it takes and you will get a much better feeling for what it takes. In other words it is probably the quickest way for you to find out for yourself if your ambition is realistic or not.

Answer 10

I knew a guy from high school who was an 1800 player at the age of 15 (not 25). He was the best player in my high school chess league, and the best chess player that I got to know on a day to day basis.

When I looked him up over the internet this past decade, he was in his early fifties, and about a 2200 player, that is the lower ranks of master. He spent all of his free (non-professional) time playing chess (I don't know about his personal life).

At 25, you are starting ten years later, and only about 100 points higher than Mark. If you were grandmaster material, it would have been more obvious earlier (e.g. master or close to by your late teens). Based on Mark's experience, 2200 may be a realistic goal for you, but not 2400 or 2500.

Answer 11

Very late to this question (and I would be curious about what you ended up doing with chess) but I can tell you that even very talented players have had trouble making a living at chess. Even those who reached world champ struggled. "Mere" grandmasters have often had to have non-chess jobs. Fischer was perhaps the first player in history who, had he chosen to fully exploit the opportunities available, could have become rich from chess and the fame he achieved.

Answer 12

First of all, it took Bobby Fischer about 10 years to become a GM. He was one of the greatest geniuses the game has seen. A 1900 on chess.com isn't much. Fischer was probably playing at that level at age 7. So, assuming you're one of the greatest geniuses in human history you're looking at about 8 years to become a GM. But, that's not going to be completely accurate because Fischer was 15 when he became a GM and you would be well past your physical prime. Also, you have to remember that children learn faster than adults. A child will learn their first language within their first few years of life but if they tried to do the same thing as an adult they could spend decades and never reach the same level of proficiency.

The first thing to ask yourself is if you have the talent. Your IQ would need to be in the 180+ range. You should be able to calculate faster than anyone you play and have a very, very good memory. There are players who meet all of that who can't make a living at the game so why should you starting so late be an exception? That's the bare minimum considering your age.

Second, you would need to spend roughly 16 hours a day (7 days a week, 52 weeks a year) for the next decade. If you have a job or a girlfriend (or want to) you should give up now.

Third, you would need to compensate for the fact that you would be past your physical prime and the fact that children learn much faster.

Now, if you've done all of that you should still realize that I've only talked about reaching GM level NOT becoming a professional. Many (most?) Gms don't make a living playing chess. Only elite players like Carlsen can do that. There's still a big difference between reaching GM and being an elite player who can make a living at it.

On a side note, you conceivably could make a living writing books or teaching etc. without reaching GM but there aren't a whole lot of guys who can do that and the money isn't that great. If you could become at least a strong IM and are very good at communicating and marketing yourself you might be able to become a professional that way.

Answer 13

Yes. Your train has already left the GM station. Next stop 'expert' in USCF terms if you study and play seriously for ten years. You might even make NM. Forget IM and GM.

If you expect to make a living from it you will need to already have a big bank account to use to keep eating until you make GM assuming that you could.

Is it likely? Not really based on statistics. Look at all the chess players and what a small percent are GMs. And these days GMs are a dime a dozen going from one small regional tournament to the next every week trying to eke out a living.

You are starting late. Most prodigies, that make GM easily, start before age 10.

Playing chess regularly will guarantee that you do NOT make GM. You will need to STUDY chess regularly to achieve that. And play serious chess often OTB not speed chess on any web site.

1900 on chess.com does not mean much. Nor does winning a local tournament. And was that a real OTB tournament or one online? And just how strong were the rated players in that tournament??? You need to go to a large national tournament and see how you do there and what your provisional REAL USCF or FIDE Rating is. Then see how far away 2800 looks from there.

1 - Never too late to be ambitious. But as the saying goes we grow too soon old and too late smart. Is trying to be a GM worth throwing your life away?

2 - 5 yrs to GM from where you are is delusional unless you are a true genius and spend all your time on doing it. ALL your time.

3- You may not doubt your learning ability or memory but there is more to it than just memorizing Chess Base. And while chess, music, and computers tend to be easy for the same sort of people that does not mean everyone can do all of those well.

4 - You cannot afford the time unless you are single and hit the lottery. If you are married then you have epsilon approaching zero chance.

5 - Fischer did more like 60-80 hours a week. 40 hours a week prep and also a job would be unlikely.

6 - You need to make the GM norms so you would need a LOT of INTERNATIONAL tournaments to be able to make GM.

7 3-4 tournaments a year at highest level might work if you were ready to try to get the title. Your problem will be getting to the point where you can play other GMs at all.

8 - 5 years is wildly optimistic.

9 - USCF and FIDE list tournaments.

10 - Good luck finding enough GM tournaments without a lot of travel.

11 - You have to pay to play if you want to play at the top level. The other GMs want big prize funds that are paid for by folks like you.

12 - Good luck with that. Until you are so good you get invited to play then you will be playing the others like you who paid the big fee to enter so they too could play GMs.

13 - 1900 on chess.com -- for the speeds you play at on chess.com -- would translate to something like a FIDE rating of 1200 for OTB.

You need to play in a real, strong open, OTB tournament and find out how good you really are.