Human skill acquisition in chess (and generally) requires repetitive practice of small building blocks; there are no shortcuts, though AI tools can provide better guidance and make the process more accessible.
Drawing on Chess.com's data, Allebest asserts that mastering chess—or any skill—comes down to the compounding effect of daily, repetitive practice of fundamentals, with AI serving as an accelerant for learning but not a replacement for the necessary effort. ✦ AI generated
Erik Allebest · No Priors · 2026-08-13 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 27:16
“What can you tell us about how humans acquire expertise or you know how to to get them up that ramp faster?”
It's actually quite again quite an easy answer. It's just repetition of like the small building blocks and so it is doing puzzles, it is reviewing your mistakes... you have to put in the repetitions into your brain. You have to store that. It's the same as when you train a neural net... Our brains don't work quite that way but we have to put in the repetitions... you can't really shortcut practice. You have to put in the time.
verbatim transcript · starts at 27:16
27:16with chess.com of humans like learning millions of people at every rating making mistakes and improving. Y >> what can you tell us about how humans acquire expertise or you know how to how to get them up that ramp faster? >> Fortunately and unfortunately it's actually quite again quite an easy answer. >> Oh no. [laughter] >> Yeah. It's just repetition of like the small building blocks >> and so it is doing puzzles, it is
27:44reviewing your mistakes. It is you know if you want to if you want to play certain openings just training. And so there's really not shortcuts to the process. There's shortcuts in the tools. You know, it's we've made it tried to make it as easy as possible to, you know, do your puzzles and to train on your different elements and and we have a whole set of of tools coming later
28:05this year which is going to make it even easier. But you have to put in the repetitions into your brain. You have to store that. It's the same as when you train a neural net, right? like you give it a bunch of data and of course it can train it in parallel where it can do like you know all these different memory channels at once training on these
28:21things. Our brains don't work quite that way but we have to put in the repetitions and I think a lot of people these days because of the immediacy of social media and the immediiacy of of our lives in general kind of forget that like practice is you know you can't really shortcut practice. Uh you have to put in the time. >> I'm gonna ask kind of a a funny
28:42question. feel free to not answer like how do you guys think about cheating at chess.com because you you um you have also dealt with an issue that I think a lot of the world is dealing with now maybe they will call it cheating or not but it is machines can create superhuman output and it can pass off as human performance right >> it's tough right I I I wish humans