Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

Charness points to research by Nicolai Krogius, a Russian grandmaster and psychologist, that shows a positive correlation between the age at which one first learns the game and later success in tournaments. This idea now seems so ingrained that Carlsen is held as a fascinating outlier; “at 5 years old,” one account marvels, “an age by which any aspiring grandmaster should at least have made a start—Magnus Carlsen showed little interest in chess.” “If you’re talking about two novices,” Charness said, when I asked him about my daughter, me, and chess, “your daughter would probably pick things up about twice as fast as you could.”

Source: nautil.us