I Played Chess For 2 Years Straight Every Day

During the pandemic, chess boomed, and eventually, I picked up the game at age 28. I had only played a handful of times and decided to start streaming. My initial online rating was around 800 on Chess.com and I quickly realized I was bad at the game. I am the type of person that can’t stand being bad at a game. So I decided to dedicate as much time as possible to training. Two years later and my elo is around 2400 for most time controls and I have came to the realization that it wasn’t worth it.

To make a long story short, for someone my age, it is not worth the time and effort one must put in to achieve these levels in the game of chess. This is something I was somewhat aware of, but after doing 30,000 puzzles, hundreds of opening courses, and studying the endgame to an absurd degree, I realized that it was a waste. Why? Not because of the game itself, but because there is no point in playing FIDE rated tournaments at the top level if there is no way to make money with the game. Of course, there is always streaming and content creation. But let’s be realistic here and say the average person is not going to see success with those sorts of endeavors. In reality, the only people with that ability to make money in Chess are the top 100 men and women, and even then, they have a very limited income.