Chess — The Age Thing

Al GJ

GM Genna Sosonko, in his 2006 book Smart Chip from St. Petersburg devotes an interesting few pages to the subject of how increasing age affects chess ability. To paraphrase Sosonko, it may appear to those who do not play chess, that any player of the game can continue playing with no loss of their ability as they age. Given that the chess player merely sits and moves pieces around a board, they may think that increasing age has no effect. Sosonko states emphatically “This is wrong!” Increasing age goes hand in hand with increasing tiredness, declining motivation, a weakening of concentration and a deterioration in the ablity to cope with stressful situations. and he cites some famous names on the subject. Evgeny Vladimirov, an experienced chess coach is quoted as saying

Modern chess with its faster time controls can't be recommended for people over thirty, and for those over forty it should be categorically forbidden. For medical and humane reasons.

Nigel Short, after a gruelling and time-troubled game with Alexander Morozevich at the 2005 Wijk aan Zee tournament commented

I feel completely shattered. Mentally I’m in ruins. There is no doubt that this is a consequence of my age.

He was forty at the time and the oldest player in the tournament. Yuri Averbakh quit tournament chess at fifty years of age after a game with Tseshkovsky in the semi-final of the Russian national championship. He was in time-trouble in a sharp position and waiting for his opponent to move. Eyes fixed on the board he reached out for his flask of coffee and started to unscrew the lid only to realise that he had got hold of the chess clock and was trying to twist the top off it. He realized then that age was having an effect. In a conversation with Sosonko, Anatoly Lein, then fifty odd, remarked

… before when I played chess, the ideas popped straight into my head, while now all that’s in there is crap.

The playing style of Milan Matulovic, once one of the most aggressive grandmasters of his day, changed completely after he reached the age of fifty, when he began to close the game down at the first sight of danger, real or imagined. Kasparov, when announcing his retirement from chess, remarked

I remember some of the great games I played and that I was very, very excited before the game. I felt that an enormous energy was raging inside me. Unfortunately, this is in the past. It's completely obvious that an older person loses the ability to concentrate.

Boris Gulko goes further, believing that a chess player’s way of thinking changes as age leads to a waning of confidence.

Sometimes during a game a shameful thought comes into your mind: why not offer a draw to conserve more strength? Such thoughts never used to be imaginable before.

Karpov, when turning fifty, remarked

The only difference between me at thirty and me today is that then I was always in superb form, and now my form is changeable: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.

For Sosonko, the phenomenom of changeable form is also a consequence of ageing. The relationship between age and cognitive performance was investigated by Anthony Strittmattera, Uwe Sundeb and Dainis Zegners who described their research in a paper entitled Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in November 2020. They used data from all games played by world champions and their respective opponents from Wilhelm Steinitz to Magnus Carlsen throughout their entire lives to assess each player's cognitive ability over a long period. Over 1.6 million move-by-move observations from more than 24,000 games were carried out, comparing the actual moves made by the players against the optimal moves suggested by a chess engine (3200+ Elo rated) in order to provide an objective benchmark of player performance. This would provide a measure of cognitive ability that would be fully comparable over a long time range. Providing that a player begins to play at a young age, they found that individual performance increases sharply until the early 20s and then reaches a plateau, with a peak around 35 years followed by a sustained decline at higher ages. Cohorts of players born after the 1970s showed an 8% increase in performance compared with players born around the 1870s. In addition, the collective performance of players increased steadily from the 1970s, but showed a marked increase from the 1990s onward. It comes as no surprise that this marked increase in performance coincides with the rise of information technology and the availability of powerful and affordable chess engines on home computers. The later a cohort of players was born, the steeper their performance profile. Additionally within the cohort the increase in performance is considerably steeper for younger-aged players. This is entirely understandable given that today’s chess kids operate within in a sea of digital, computer enhanced chess information. Their developing brains, stuffed with neural plasticity, soak up chess knowledge like dry sponges absorbing water and they progress in the game at a phenomenal rate. Notable examples of such child sponge prodigies are 11 year old Supratit Banarjee and 10 year old Bodhana Sivanandan who both played in the recent 2025 British Chess Championship. Both youngsters performed stupendously. Supratit, a Fide Master (FM) rated 2242, lost just one game in the tournament to Nikita Vitiugov, a 2676 rated GM, and he ended with a score of six points from nine rounds. He beat GMs Simon Williams and Mark Hebden, and drew with two IMs and GM Ameet Ghasi. Bodhana, rated 2216 and already a Woman Fide Master (WFM) at 10 is reckoned by some to become the youngest WGM ever. She scored five points from the nine rounds, beating GM Peter Wells and WFM Kamila Hryshchenko and winning two other games and drawing twice. But now, with great sadness, we leave these sunlit uplands where live those fortunates who imbibed chess through their young years and for whom chess is a matter of instinct and intuition. My fate as an ordinary club player (along with thousands like me), is to travel the stony path that falls bleakly down into a dark and windswept valley where all is lost in shadow and mist. This ghostly valley is the abode of those who take up chess as adults, the so-called 'adult improvers'. Things are much harder for these poor creatures. Progress is much slower — the adult brain is more ossified, less flexible than the child brain. And of course the older a person is the less reliable their memory, the duller their mental acuity, and the harder it is for them to assimilate new knowledge. Martin Rowson in his book Chess for Zebras touches on this difference between adult and child players

... while junior players tend to put what they learn into practice without any real conscious intent, and thereby improve steadily, adult players strain in an effort to understand what they are learning, and this leads to all sorts of problems because rather than gaining in tactile skill, this skill is adulterated by our attempts to formalize it into knowledge.

It is generally the case that adults who take up chess only achieve a modest rating beyond which they have little hope of progressing. On average, the older the player the lower the rating at which they get stranded. There seems to be little hope for me then. I took up chess as a very senior senior during lockdown and even after several years of playing my rating remains unimpressively low. I have come to realise that no great leap forward in chess performance is possible for me, despite all my efforts to improve. It’s me age, innit.

Genna Sosonko: Smart Chip from St. Petersburg: And Other Tales of a Bygone Chess Era — New in Chess Martin Rowson: Chess for Zebras: Thinking Differently About Black and White — Gambit Publications Ltd