“How Long Does It Take Ordinary People To “Get Good” At Chess?”, Joseph Wong2021-10-30 (chess psychology; similar)⁠:

TL;DR: According to 5.5 years of data from 2.3 million players and 450 million games, most beginners will improve their rating by 100 Lichess Elo points in 3–6 months. Most “experienced” chess players in the 1,400–1,800 rating range will take 3–4 years to improve their rating by 100 Lichess Elo points. There’s no strong evidence that playing more games makes you improve quicker.

…After extracting the data for Elo per player over time (including games as white and black), filtering for one time control, calculating the monthly average, aligning everyone’s starting dates, assigning the ratings into rating bins, and averaging the ratings by the rating bins (with 95% confidence intervals), I get the plot below:

I analyzed the data from the perspective of a player’s monthly average which should be a better estimate of a player’s playing strength than looking at the game-by-game Elo fluctuation. I’m not particularly interested in cases of players who managed to jump 100 points in one afternoon blitz binge session. I believe those instances can be attributed to chance rather than those players suddenly having a “eureka” moment that boosted their playing strength by 100 Elo points overnight.

From the graph, it looks like improvement rate depends a lot on what your current Elo is. As one might expect, lower Elo ratings have the greatest opportunity to improve quickly, while higher Elo ratings will take much longer to see improvement. Most players in the 800–1,000 rating range (about 6% of players) will see their Elo jump up 100 points in just a few months of activity. Most players in the 1,600–2,000 range (27% of players) will take 4 years or more to move up just 100 Elo points…4 years just for 100 Elo points? Seems a bit longer than I expected. But it is plausible.

There are players in the data with long histories of activity who have not improved their rating despite playing many games over the span of many years. See the player who’s played the most games of all time on Lichess:

…The data looks consistent with previous analysis, but I think it better illustrates how only a small percentage of players actually do improve. It looks like only about the top 10% of players achieve meaningful improvement (>100 rating gain) over time, with only about 1% of players breaking past more than 200 Elo in a few years. The majority 90% of players seem to hover around their initial rating despite being active on Lichess for several years.

…Here’s another heatmap showing the average time it took for people to achieve × Elo gain, divided up by their starting Elo…The results were actually pretty surprising. It looks like these “outliers” seem to have made these gains in a little less than 2 years! Amazingly, that’s about the amount of time it took GM Hikaru Nakamura to bridge that gap when he was learning chess as a child. So it seems that there is hope for people looking to become strong players. With serious study and dedication, it looks like it’s possible to make massive improvements in a reasonably short amount of time.

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