We’ve all heard the “10,000 hours” idea: that enough repetition eventually makes anyone an expert. A new chess study is complicating that story. According to the study, ‘Not All Practice Is Created Equal: Longitudinal Evidence From Over 40,000 Chess Players,’ published in Psychological Science, researchers tracked more than 44,000 Chess. com players over six months and found that how people trained mattered a lot more than how long they played. Players who trained with focused, feedback-driven training improved about 3.6 times faster per hour than players who just kept playing games.
If you’ve ever spent hours doom-scrolling through practice reps, extra sets at the gym, endless flashcards, another round of the same video game, and didn’t feel like you were actually getting better, this research might explain why.
The study that put the "practice makes perfect" myth to the test
The advantage for Daniel A. Southwick of the University of Pennsylvania and his team was rare: real, time-stamped data, not the hazy recollections of how much people practiced. Chess. com told them exactly what each player did: played rated games, reviewed past games move by move, watched short video lessons, solved tactics puzzles, and showed how each player’s skill rating changed over time.
Over 90% of everyone’s time on the platform was spent playing games in real, competitive matches against other players. It’s like the chess version of just showing up and playing pickup basketball for hours. But that wasn’t where the real gains were happening.
