Good luck, Will!

Your goal is to do this with only 10 hours a week of chess study? 

Good luck.

Supposedly Chigorin learned the moves at 16 but didn't start seriously until he was 24, when he got hooked, quit his job and went all in on chess. Didn't lots of those old masters start rather late?
And somehow I seem to remember that Suba said on the first pages in his hilarous book on dynamic chess strategy that he started late, his only tournament before 20 ending with a 0/13 score or something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong! 
Probably could someone well versed in chess history dig up a lot of names but I'm pretty sure that those late-starters all had to work pretty hard to catch up on lost times. A mixture of mega-talent, work ethic and obsession might do the trick though

The main point: He keeps on his academic education. So his approach is more reasonable than the approach of a lot of chess players being successful in becoming a titled player. 

[quote]Now Will is attempting to improve from a Class A chess player to a grandmaster, [highlight]and proposes to do this without failing his degree (an MSci Joint Honours in Physics and Chemistry), without dropping his other hobbies (guitar, Go, Mandarin Chinese and more), and without losing his girlfriend [/highlight](who has not the slightest interest in chess). In general he will maintain a normal student’s social life.[/quote]

:)) Seems he has just wasted 200 pounds then...

I [i]do[/i] think that you can [i]achieve almost anything[/i] if you put your mind to and if you're ready to do what it takes. But it's simply impossible to achieve anything if you're not prepared to sacrifice something else for it. 

Still, there is one chance though: he could try to buy himself the title with some fixed tournaments in eastern Europe, apparently he would then have a budget of 5000 pounds which would probably be enough...

A frequent poster on this forum, TopNotch (an IM) started playing chess at the age of 15.

trw wrote on 10/11/10 at 23:29:31:


I would take all such stories with a pinch of salt.

The topic at hand is an interesting one; do adults face difficulty improving because their brains no longer have the required plasticity, or because real life intervenes. Perhaps a bit of both, but to what degree?

In this guy's case, I'd take a Bayesian approach: what are the probabilities of him improving dramatically, given that (I'm guessing) he's shown no such inclinations over the last decade or so? Put another way, if he had what it takes, wouldn't he be (at least halfway) there already?

I would also answer that GM Julio Becerra didn't learn chess til age 14.