I'm of two minds on this article. My first reaction was that it didn't say much of anything and wasn't of much use. It did cause me to do a little thinking though so perhaps its more useful than I thought.

I have read that Capablanca said it took 500 losses to become a master. Assuming that you are winning 2 out of 3 games on average (I'm assuming you are improving) that would be 1500 games. At 5 hours a game that would be 7500 hours of just playing.

Reuben Fine was pretty vague writing about his own progress in Lessons From My Games: A Passion for Chess. If I understand his comments correctly he started taking chess seriously at about age 15 and he wrote "For the next few years all my spare time was spent at chess. Since my college studies were fairly easy for me, I was at the chess clubs every weekend, and often many evenings during the week." Assuming he improved over a 4 year period at 30+ hours a week that would be over 6000 hours.

So what? Well it seems to me that improvement in chess is dependent upon a whole lot more time at the game than most people assume at first glance. Capablanca and Fine were both Super GMs in their day so their comments tend to make me think the 11 000 hour estimate is probably accurate for mere mortals. I have never really stopped to think about chess improvement in terms of pure hours but I never would have guessed the number would have been that high.

The again I read this article Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success - October 30, 2006 a couple of years ago. Turns out 10 or 11 000 hours may be a very reasonable number.

Food for thought, I think, for those of us who are trying to improve our game and are frustrated by our rate of progress. It is a long long way to the top...