The age question is hoary in chess. Indeed, one of the earliest discussions of the now-universal player ranking system called the “Elo rating” (named for its inventor Arpad Elo) was in a 1965 article in The Journal of Gerontology. Using his novel statistical analysis, Elo found that the peak age for master-level chess performance was around 36, with a slow steady decline after that.
That was then. Today, chess is only getting younger. Neil Charness, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has long studied the question of chess and performance. “Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster at age 15,” he says. “Then Judit Polgar beat his record.” And then Sergey Karjakin beat Polgar, by doing it in 2002 at age 12. “The record of the youngest age to achieve grandmaster status,” Charness tells me, “keeps getting beat.” More recently, the 13-year-old Wei Yi became the youngest to rise above a 2600 rating. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s current top-ranked player, was the youngest player to reach number one, at age 19. In a process akin to the “Flynn effect,” or the global rise in IQ scores over much of the last century, chess ratings have risen over time. Charness notes that “younger players are getting skilled faster than they used to,” thanks, in part, to better tools and better feedback: Sophisticated computer engines, databases, the ability to play players of any level at any time of the day.
http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/learning-chess-at-40
oh wait wrong emoji 
