Realistic goals for adults？

I know that analysis is important for improvement, but for a beginner like me, it is impossible to analyze without an engine (I can't understand the details of why a move is good or bad), so I always use the game review function, but the explanations are often unhelpful.

Is reading absolutely necessary? Often times I don't know what to do in the middle game so I have to make random moves.

Analyzing with the engine can help, but only if you spend time in order to understand why a certain move is good or bad (sometimes it is a part of a tactical sequence, sometimes it weakens your king or a square, or maybe you just hung a piece). So it can be either very simple, or very complicated. Sometimes you will not understand it however hard you try. That either means the move is just too computerish, or you lack some knowledge that you need to gain by passive learning.

In any case, chess.com review explanations will not help you too much, perhaps in a decade or 2, some scary AI is invented that can do this in a better way. Today that is impossible, you will not get everything on a silver plate, you will have to make an effort to learn something passively (through videos, courses, books or whatever other option is out there), and combine that with what analysis gives you.

That is just how it works, someone 400 rated will be worse than you in understanding analysis, but someone 2 000 rated will be better. Sometimes you will be able to extract something purely from analysis, some people do it better than others as well, but it works better in combination with passive learning for most of the people.

It showed that the best move was a stalemate lol
This function is definitely strange.

Age 11. But I hadn't touched a chess piece in thirty years when my brother-in-law talked me into joining chess com.

Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do.

Strategy is knowing what to do when there is NOTHING to do.

Read this: GM Larry Evans' method of static analysis - Chess Forums - Chess.com

My posts # 4, 7-to-10 and especially 12.

Then play over the three sample games on pages 1 and 2, reading the notes.

It is not stalemate because black can move his pawn. After he does, it will be checkmate on the next move.

You can move your pawn.

In my opinion, yes. I feel like I have a elo rating climb from 100 to around 400-1400 in a few months by just watching YouTube and learn from mistakes (even through my profile still say I'm around 400). About how long I think it's depends on how dedicated and genius you are

Getting from 1000 to 1500 is doable within a year, you just have to keep an open mind, analyse games and learn to see the best moves. A typical 1000-level player doesn't see any best moves but is just chucking pieces one by one. It requires seeing the board with the mind's eye and learn to imagine how to strategically improve the position.

I was rated 400 chess.com rapid rating at age 27 without having any chess experience.
After one year I reached 1200 rapid.
After two years I reached 1600 rapid.
After three years I reached 2000 rapid.

Also study Tyler1 (username on chesscom: big_tonka_t) for what is possible to achieve as an adult learner. He went from being literal 200 rapid elo to 1900 rapid elo in like 10 months.

A persons IQ will predict their learning ability far better than their age.

Levels of cognitive decline also vary alot from one person to the next - metabolic dysfunction is a very strong predictor of cognitive decline. A person who is very fit may experience very minimal decline... Also... alot of the past IQ data on drops in IQ over time was muddied by the Flynn effect, newer research suggests average real IQ drop by age 60 for a healthy individual may be between 1-3 points. And actually the Flynn effect has just recently reversed to where the younger generation is slightly dumber than the previous, but that's another topic. The biggest declines are in short term memory, those can be as big as 5-9 points, but meanwhile crystalized intelligence actually increases and compensates some for that. But ultimately if you're someone with a 140 IQ short term memory even if you did lose 9 points by age 60 you'd still be in the top 2% of the population and running circles around everyone else when doing short term memory tasks.

The other thing is intelligence best predicts performance in a given time window. But learning is usually not a time-restricted task. Certain people can spend years thinking about / studying a topic... others have short attention spans. Some of that is personality related, but it's also related to the strength of the nervous system. And infact... this is positively correlated with age, since the brains development of impulse control / acting based on more long term reward, which is related to executive brain function, doesn't complete until age 28 or so.

Unfortunately these ignorant dogmas about age and learning ability have led to alot of age discrimination in hiring, but that's a tangent.

first of all you get adult as 18 years old not 16. and secondary, all brains are different and you can probably improve as adult also if you practice. Just they say that it's easier to learn as a child because brain is learning and accepting new skills

1500 and even 2000 is a possible goal for an adult, provided that you aim to progress every year, not wanting quick results.

I am rated over 2400 online (https://www.chess.com/member/ppandachess). I created a free course that will teach you a training plan to improve. Feel free to check it out: https://www.panda-chess.com/daily-improvement-plan

Before setting some rating on chess.com as your goal, you need to know that these ratings aren't accurate at all and rating system here suffers from number of problems. For instance, such ratings as 100 or 200 simply shouldn't exist, that's a level of random-move bot.

Chess.com does nothing to fix the problem.

FIDE - does. They employ Jeff Sonas and they've recently conducted this

So untrue. I began chess competition OTB at age 23 and went from 1450 to 2100 in like six seven years.

But (too many) people sure are stupid, believe tales, rumors and gossips and LOVE made up rules for life. Yeah, so they do. And if YOU do aswell, that's your choice of life.

I would say that adults cannot improve as rapidly as children do, simply because adults lack the neural plasticity of children - our neurons have already formed most of their gangalial connections by adulthood.

But that doesn't mean that an adult's progress will be capped. Just that he or she will improve more slowly than a child would.

The gear icon on the top right allows you to increase the depth, which will produce a more accurate analysis

@hikaripotchama

- Did you get any use out of that Space / Time / Force lecture that I linked you to?