... maybe one can only be truly autodidactic in a cave somewhere, alone with nothing but one's own thoughts, a stick and dirt to write in...
Priceless!
I venture a guess that most of the kids who play chess-- even at an elite level-- do so after some instruction on the subject (shocking, I know).
Every one of the talented chess players I know has one or more elite coaches.
I had a very successful scholastic chess career and never had a formal coach. A coach can help, but it may not be absolutely necessary. The article below says that knowledge of famous games, which can be acquired through self-study, is a good predictor of success in chess. When I was a kid I read and re-read all chess literature within reach. As I've said before, a male tendency to obsess over a small domain may partially explain why there are more male prodigies.
http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12551/745/How to Spot Top Talent: Greg on Chess
By IM Greg Shahade
February 9, 2014
There is one very reliable sign to how much potential and how strong a young chess player is or is going to be, and it’s probably not what most people would think.
It’s not how quickly a student solves tactics or sees combinations (although these two things always seem to be correlated with the main point of this article). It’s not the student’s positional understanding. It’s not even how much they claim to study chess.
Instead it is “How likely is this student to recognize a famous game/position and know the players involved?”
Do they know that it’s Capablanca vs Botvinnik in the AVRO tournament or Fischer vs Petrosian or Karpov vs Unzicker?
I think that if you gave a quiz of 100 famous chess positions and simply asked children “Who was playing this game?”, and didn’t ask what moves should be played or anything chess related other than historical/biographical information, the players who performed the best at this test would end up being the strongest players ten years later.
