by Paul Tough
7. Mastery
In Columbus, James didn’t go over his games with Spiegel; instead, he analyzed them with Matan Prilleltensky, a twenty-three-year-old competitive chess player from Miami who had been working that year as a part-time assistant coach for the IS 318 team while he studied for a master’s degree in special education. Prilleltensky’s interest in special ed had its roots in his own diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, when he was a child. He had struggled in elementary and middle school, unable to concentrate in class or on his homework for longer than a few minutes. And then he discovered chess. It was, he told me, the first time he had ever felt able to focus on anything. Chess, which requires hours of patient study, seemed an unlikely pursuit for a person with an attention disorder, but Prilleltensky said that the combination was not as odd as it sounded. “A lot of people with attention issues crave intense experiences and serious stimulation,” he explained. “They want to be absorbed in some sort of all-encompassing pursuit.” For Prilleltensky, chess was in fact the perfect antidote to ADHD; when he sat down at a chessboard, his symptoms all but disappeared.
Prilleltensky became a serious player in high school, reaching a rating of 2000 just after his eighteenth birthday. In college, he continued to play and even won a tournament or two, but he didn’t really improve much, and when he graduated, in 2009, his rating was stuck at around 2100. He wanted to get better, but his chess didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Then in January of 2010, he played in a tournament in Palatka, Florida; he was on the verge of winning the whole thing when he blew a crucial game. He felt crushed by the defeat, and when he analyzed the game afterward with his opponent, a high-school student, he realized that the other guy hadn’t played particularly well—Prilleltensky had beaten himself. It was an awful feeling, he told me later. He was tired of being an unexceptional chess player.
On the way home to Miami, Prilleltensky read a collection of interviews with grand masters that included an e-mail conversation with Jonathan Rowson, the Scottish grand master who had written about the importance of emotion and psychology in chess success. Rowson’s comments seemed to speak to Prilleltensky’s plight—and they also echoed Angela Duckworth’s theory on the crucial difference between motivation and volition. “When it comes to ambition,” Rowson wrote, “it is crucial to distinguish between ‘wanting’ something and ‘choosing’ it.” Decide that you want to become world champion, Rowson explained, and you will inevitably fail to put in the necessary hard work. You will not only not become world champion but also have the unpleasant experience of falling short of a desired goal, with all the attendant disappointment and regret. If, however, you choose to become world champion (as Kasparov did at a young age), then you will “reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination. Every action says, ‘This is who I am.’”
Inspired by these words, Prilleltensky, in late January of 2010, made a belated New Year’s resolution: he would break 2200. He devoted almost a full year to the study of chess, eliminating everything else (except his understanding girlfriend) from his life: no parties, no Facebook, no ESPN, no unnecessary socializing. Just hours and hours of chess. (“This is who I am.”) His efforts paid off; on October 10, 2010, his rating hit 2200 for the first time. He was a national master.
I met Prilleltensky soon after he reached his goal, and what surprised me, as I listened to him talk about it, was that he looked back on those monastic months with not just pride in the result but also pleasant memories of the process. What, I asked him, was so fun about a year of complete immersion in chess? “It was mostly the feeling of being intellectually productive,” he replied. “So much of the time I feel like I’m not really challenging myself or pushing myself, just kind of wasting my brain. I never feel like that when I’m studying or playing or teaching chess.”
I was struck by the word that Prilleltensky used: productive. Spiegel chose the same word when she described for me, a little wistfully, what she had lost when she traded all-night online chess obsession for domestic bliss with Jonathan: “I miss how productive I used to be.”
This was a puzzle. I could appreciate the appeal of mastering chess, just as I could appreciate the appeal of mastering any other skill I wasn’t good at—oil painting, playing jazz trumpet, pole-vaulting—but while I could easily be persuaded that chess was a worthy and challenging intellectual undertaking, productive was the last word I would choose to describe it. Chess players, it seemed to me, were quite literally producing nothing. As it happens, this question had come up in the Rowson interview that sparked Prilleltensky’s quest for 2200. The interviewer asked Rowson if he was embarrassed to have expended such prodigious mental energy to become a grand master “rather than something worthwhile like a brain surgeon.” Rowson acknowledged that “the question of chess being an essentially futile activity has a nagging persistence for me. . . . I occasionally think that the thousands of hours I’ve spent on chess, however much they have developed me personally, could have been better spent.”
But Rowson went on to defend himself and his fellow chess players, and he did so on essentially aesthetic grounds: “Chess is a creative and beautiful pursuit, which allows us to experience a wide range of uniquely human characteristics,” he wrote. The game “is a celebration of existential freedom, in the sense that we are blessed with the opportunity to create ourselves through our actions. In choosing to play chess, we are celebrating freedom above utility.” In Rowson’s eyes, two chess players facing off across a board were making a unique, collaborative work of art, and the better they played, the more beautiful the result.
In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell brought to popular attention Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s theory that it takes ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to truly master any skill, whether it is playing violin or programming computers. Ericsson based his theory in part on a study of chess mastery. There are no natural-born chess champions, he found; you simply cannot become a grand master without dedicating thousands of hours to play and study. The best chess players started as children, Ericsson discovered; in fact, over the course of chess history, the age at which an aspiring chess champion needed to start playing in order to reach the game’s highest levels had steadily fallen. In the nineteenth century, it was possible to start playing chess at seventeen and still become a grand master. Among players born in the twentieth century, though, no one who started playing after the age of fourteen became a grand master. By the end of the twentieth century, Ericsson found, those who went on to become chess masters had started playing chess at an average age of ten and a half, and the typical grand master had started playing at seven.
The most famous, and notorious, study demonstrating the power of early deliberate practice on success in chess was conducted by Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist who, in the 1960s, published a book titled Bring Up Genius! The book argued that with enough hard work, parents could turn any child into an intellectual prodigy. When he wrote the book, Polgar was single and childless, and thus in no position to test his theory himself, but he set out to change that, winning the heart of a Hungarian-speaking foreign-language teacher named Klara who was living in Ukraine but was persuaded to move to Budapest by Polgar’s letters, which detailed how together they would raise a family of geniuses.
And then, amazingly, they did just that. Laszlo and Klara had three girls, Susan, Sofia, and Judit, and Laszlo homeschooled them all in an academic program that focused almost exclusively on chess (though the girls also learned several foreign languages, including Esperanto). Each girl began studying chess before her fifth birthday, and they were all soon playing eight to ten hours each day. Susan, the oldest, won her first tournament at age four. At fifteen, she became the top-rated female chess player in the world, and in 1991, when she was twenty-one, she became the first female grand master. Her success was an impressive confirmation of her father’s contention that geniuses are made, not born—and Susan wasn’t even the best ch
ess player in the family. That was Judit, the youngest, who became a grand master at fifteen, breaking Bobby Fischer’s record as the youngest person to claim the title. Judit’s overall chess ranking peaked in 2005, when she was the eighth-highest-ranked player in the world, with a rating of 2735; she is now universally considered to be the best female chess player ever to walk the planet. (Sofia was pretty good too; her top rating was 2505, at which point she was the sixth-best female player in the world, a stunning accomplishment for anyone but a Polgar.)
If the story of the Polgars is a little spooky, the tale of Gata Kamsky is downright creepy. Kamsky, born in Soviet Russia in 1974, began to study chess at the age of eight under the supervision of his father, a short-tempered former boxer named Rustam. (Gata’s mother had left the family when he was a boy.) By twelve, Gata Kamsky was defeating grand masters; in 1989, he and his father defected to the United States, and they were installed in an apartment in Brighton Beach and given a $35,000 annual living allowance by the president of Bear Stearns, who believed that Kamsky was destined to become world champion. At sixteen, Kamsky became a grand master; at seventeen, he won the U.S. chess championship. For all his youthful accomplishments, though, Kamsky got as much if not more recognition for what many considered to be the draconian circumstances of his upbringing. Under his father’s tutelage, Kamsky practiced and studied chess fourteen hours a day in the apartment in Brighton Beach; he never attended school, never watched television, played no sports, had no friends. His father became well known in the chess world for his violent temper, frequently screaming at Gata over losses and errors, throwing furniture, and, at one match, allegedly physically threatening his son’s opponent.
In 1996, when he was twenty-two, Kamsky quit chess altogether. He married, graduated from Brooklyn College, attended medical school for a year, then got a degree from a Long Island law school but wasn’t able to pass the bar exam. His story seemed to be a cautionary tale about how early practice and aggressive parenting can backfire. But then in 2004, Kamsky returned to competitive chess. He started with small tournaments at the Marshall, and within a few years he had surpassed his adolescent achievements, winning the U.S. championship in 2010, nineteen years after he’d first won the title, and then winning it again in 2011. He is now the top-rated chess player in the United States and the tenth best in the world. The effect of those ten thousand hours—although in Kamsky’s case, practicing fourteen hours a day throughout his childhood as he did, the true figure might have been twenty-five thousand hours or more—was apparently too powerful to be derailed even by an eight-year hiatus.
8. Flow
When Spiegel and other chess players talk about the childhoods of players like Kamsky and the Polgars, it is often with a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, they acknowledge that a childhood organized obsessively around a single pursuit is unbalanced, if not unhinged. On the other, they can’t help but feel a little jealous: If my father had made me play for ten hours a day, imagine how good I’d be now! The first time I visited Spiegel’s class, she had just returned from a week of helping out at a high-level youth chess camp, five days of analyzing chess problems with the best nine- to fourteen-year-olds in the country. It turned out to be not much fun, she told me. “I felt so stupid,” she explained. “It was painful for me to be there because the kids were so much faster than me. I had to ask a nine-year-old to explain a game to me.” At one point, she said, she actually slipped away to a bathroom and cried.
While I was writing this chapter, I kept a cheap chess set on the coffee table in my office for reference, and occasionally my son, Ellington, who was two at the time, would wander in and start messing around with the chess set. When he did, I’d take a break. I taught him the names of the various pieces, and he discovered that he liked to knock them all down and then arrange them in attractive patterns on the board. I knew, logically, that Ellington’s interest in the chessboard was no more unusual or meaningful than his interest in the paper clips in my desk drawer. But at times, I found myself thinking, Hmmm, he knows the difference between a rook and a knight, and he’s only two. Maybe he’s a prodigy! If I teach him now how all the pieces move, and we start playing an hour a day, then by the time he’s three . . .
Tempting though my Polgaresque fantasy was, I resisted. I realized that I didn’t actually want Ellington to become a chess prodigy. But when I tried to figure out exactly why I felt that way, I found it wasn’t easy to explain or to justify. I felt that if Ellington studied chess four hours a day (let alone fourteen), he would be missing out on something. But I wasn’t sure if I was right. Was it better to spend your childhood, or your life, a little bit interested in a lot of things (as I tend to be), or a lot interested in one thing? Spiegel and I often debated this question, and I have to admit, she made a convincing case for the benefits of single-minded devotion—a case, in fact, that reminded me very much of Angela Duckworth’s definition of grit: self-discipline wedded to a dedicated pursuit of a goal.
“I think it’s really liberating for kids to understand what it’s like to be passionate about something,” Spiegel explained one day at a tournament. “They’re having momentous experiences that they’ll always remember. I think the worst thing is you look back on your childhood and it’s one blur of sitting in class and being bored and coming home and watching TV. At least when the kids on the chess team look back, they’ll have the nationals to remember, or one great game they played, or a moment when they were full of adrenaline and trying their hardest.”
It may be difficult for an outsider to fully comprehend the allure of chess mastery. When Spiegel was trying to explain it to me, she often referred to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who collaborated with Martin Seligman in the early days of positive psychology. Csikszentmihalyi studied what he called optimal experiences, those rare moments in human existence when a person feels free of mundane distractions, in control of his fate, totally engaged by the moment. Csikszentmihalyi came up with a word for this state of intense concentration: flow. He wrote that flow moments most often occur “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.” In his early research, Csikszentmihalyi interviewed chess experts, classically trained dancers, and mountain climbers, and he found that all three groups described flow moments in similar ways, as a feeling of intense well-being and control. During that peak state, one chess player told Csikszentmihalyi, “the concentration is like breathing —you never think of it. The roof could fall in and, if it missed you, you would be unaware of it.” (One study found that physiological changes among expert chess players in tournaments mimicked those of athletes in competitions: muscle contractions, increased blood pressure, and breathing rates three times normal.)
You simply don’t experience flow if you aren’t good at something—I will never feel it at the chessboard. But Justus and James feel it all the time. During one conversation, I asked Spiegel whether she ever felt that her students were sacrificing too much to succeed at chess. She looked at me like I was crazy. “What’s missing from that idea is that playing chess is, like, wonderful,” she said. “There’s a joyousness to it. That’s when you’re happiest or that’s when you’re most you or that’s when you feel your best. It’s easy to think of it in terms of the opportunity cost, but I think Justus and James think of it as there’s nothing else they’d rather do.”
9. Optimism and Pessimism
Psychologists have long suspected that a person needs more than intelligence to achieve chess mastery. But for over a century, researchers have been struggling to figure out just which skills are the important ones. What separates the chess champions from the also-rans if not pure IQ? The first person to study that question seriously was Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who helped create one of the earliest intelligence tests. In the 1890s, people in the chess world and beyond were captivated by the odd phenomenon of blindfold chess, in which masters played chess blindfolded
against multiple opponents at once. Binet sought to understand the cognitive ability behind this unusual skill. His hypothesis was that masters of the blindfold game possessed photographic memories. They must have the ability, he thought, to capture a precise visual picture of what was on each board and to hold it in their memories. Binet began interviewing blindfold-chess players, and he quickly discovered that his theory was completely wrong. The players’ memories weren’t particularly visual at all. Instead, what they remembered were patterns, vectors, even moods —what Binet described as “a stirring world of sensations, images, movements, passions, and an ever changing panorama of states of consciousness.”
About fifty years later, in 1946, a Dutch psychologist named Adriaan de Groot picked up on Binet’s research and began testing the mental abilities of a collection of chess masters, and his results challenged another long-held belief about chess skill. It had always been assumed that an essential element of chess mastery was rapid calculation; that on each move, the best chess players were able to consider many more possible outcomes than novices were. In fact, de Groot found, a typical chess player with a rating of 2500 considered about the same number of moves as a typical player with a rating of 2000. What gave the higher-ranked players the advantage was that the moves they contemplated somehow turned out to be the right ones. Experience had given them the instincts to know intuitively which potential moves to take seriously; they never even considered the less promising options.
But if the best chess players don’t have better visual memories, and they don’t analyze potential outcomes more quickly, what does set them apart from novices? The answer may have more to do with their ability to perform one particular mental task that relies as much on psychological strengths as on cognitive ability: a task known as falsification.
