The wrong confession...perhaps?

[Matt Mackenzie]

I think what *is* clear is that you can't become a top class player without plenty of study, even if the precise amount is hard to quantify.

Past greats such as Capablanca - who claimed they reached the top without doing much work - were never telling the whole truth one suspects.

[NickFaulks]

Who has sufficient free time to do that?

What do you mean by "free time"? If that's what you do, it's what you do.

[Joey Stewart]

Past greats such as Capablanca - who claimed they reached the top without doing much work - were never telling the whole truth one suspects.

Definitely not, they might have been content to rest on their laurels at times but on examination of their games you'll see an unnaturally high accuracy implying that they knew those openings much better then they let on - carlsen is a good modern example, even though he professes to be lazy and not into deep opening study he very rarely gets into trouble and understands the quiet variations he plays with great depth.

[John Clarke]

Capablanca was reputed to have studied over a thousand rook-and-pawn endings in his early days. Sounds like plenty of work to me.