Does practice make perfect?

Shelby Lyman on Chess: Practice, Practice, Practice?
Sunday, September 21, 2014
(Published in print: Sunday, September 21, 2014)

“Practice makes perfect” is an accepted truth, or at least a truism. But how much practice is really enough?

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion — offered in a 1993 paper by K. Anders Ericsson — that 10,000 hours of immersion and practice are necessary to achieve “professional mastery.”

There is a direct correlation, Ericsson claims, between the number of hours and the degree of expertise. The rule applies to such diverse activities as playing the violin and chess.

It is not surprising that this theory — despite its insight into the central role of practice — evokes incredulity in more than a few of us. On the face of it, given our chess experience alone, the idea seems counterintuitive.

Sammy Reshevsky and Jose Capablanca, for example, were child prodigies who, it seems, were fully equipped by the gods at birth to play chess. Intensity, passion, scientific curiosity, stubbornness and competitiveness are also among the characteristics of a world-class grandmaster. The result is an unpredictable and unique synthesis.

Some, of course, are much better than others.

The Russian grandmaster Mark Taimanov offered this impression of Bobby Fischer: “His moves do not make sense, at least to all the rest of us. We were playing chess. Fischer was playing something else … call it what you will. Naturally there would come a time when we would all understand what those moves had been about. But by then it was too late. We were dead.”

With geniuses such as Bobby, the 10,000-hour rule seems irrelevant.

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