Quality Chess Blog

Inspired by Willy Hendriks’ book Move First, Think Later, I want to write about a subject I have been thinking about for some time.
 
Before I get to that topic, I will say a few words about the book. Hendriks swings between clever insights, self-professed modesty and falling for the Dunning-Kruger effect  🙂 which he even portrays in the book. One of the big highlights for me is his estimate that a tournament of nine rounds with a score of roughly either +1 or -1 on expected score is just as much about chance as anything else. There is no reason to over-interpret, Hendriks explains.
 
Something similar happened in Wijk aan Zee this year. My student GM Sabino Brunello scored 11/13 and qualified for the B-group. It was quite an overscore, though he was one of the pre-tournament favourites. When asked by journalists after the tournament why he had scored so many points, he correctly said that he had no idea and that he had actually played rather badly for a while and only regained the recently lost rating points with this result. Sure, he played well, but chance was also a factor, as well as something called the winner effect, which I will probably write about another time.
 
I have been a chess trainer since the late 1980s, when I was still a relatively weak junior player. Obviously I was a poor trainer for the first 10-15 years, but since then I have learned a lot and now feel that I can consistently help people get better at chess. I still prefer to see myself as an expert on chess literature rather than as a trainer, but I have taken on a few more training jobs in the last few years than I previously did. Also, I now feel confident enough to charge a rate that makes it worth my while to engage intellectually and emotionally with the work of improving someone’s chess. However, there are definitely trainers out there who offer better value for your money than working with me; especially as many chess professionals are struggling to make ends meet and therefore need all the work they can get.

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On request I will talk a bit about goal setting this week. In the general style of this blog, it will not be a to-do-list or in any other way clear advice that will work for everyone. It will be my own reflections and experience with goal setting, which probably will be more interesting for the older readers, while the really young and restless, might find the lack of commitment to any position frustrating. But I will try to give advice to them as well.

In what is known as “coaching” the most famous goal-setting acronym is SMART goals. The idea is that your goals should be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-dependent.

The idea behind this is rather obvious. The goal will be easy to track when you are on course to its completion. The famous metaphor used in relation to this kind of goal setting is an aeroplane, which will be off course 95% of the time, but will always arrive at the right destination more or less on time. (The oldest source I have heard this from is Tony Robbins in the 1980s, but many have repeated it as if it was their own since then, so maybe it is even older? I think it is a Robbins original, because a lot of people repeat his ideas in book length as if they were their own.)

This kind of thinking will definitely appeal to some, specifically those with no second thoughts. You set your goal, you do the work, you arrive at your destination after some problems on the way, but still more or less as you expected.

But obviously this brings us back to the basic question I like to ask about more or less anything: what is the function of setting a goal?

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“Good judgement comes with experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.” – Tony Robbins

A lot of the people I know suffer a lot when they lose a chess game. Especially younger guys, though I once had the pleasure of being insulted by an old guy rated 600 points lower than I, after I surprisingly prevailed in 22 moves.

I used to be a poor loser myself. Not a poor loser like Korchnoi, who fantasizes throughout the game about insulting the opponent after it (despite the result), but the introvert unhappy loser to whom a loss is a sort of autoimmune disease.

But at some point along the way I realised what could be called the problem with failure: It had no beneficiary effect on me.

Actually I never looked at it like this before, I just reacted to the chemical reaction of emotions in my body, believing that it was real and that it was as important as it felt. It was only later, when I got seriously fed up with feeling awful about a game I love, that I started thinking about function.

But before we go there, we need to ask ourselves: what is failure actually. Is it a result below expectations? And if so, then who’s? Is it the feeling we get when we lose? And if so, then why do we get this feeling?

At first I did not have a clear answer to any of these questions. I just knew I had to rethink my reaction to “failure”. I also had no idea what the benefits of failure were supposed to be. Now I would probably talk about a wiring in the brain left over from the caveman, which has little to do with chess. But the cables are still there and we have not yet learned to produce new ones.

So, at some point I decided to change the rules. I wanted them to work in a way that made sense to me.

I decided that I would only be unhappy with my play if my effort at the board was not up to scratch. I would no longer be a victim to whether or not the opponent had a good day. I would not kick myself for not having done work that I had not done after last time I struggled with the same issue, because feeling bad about it the last time had not worked, in the sense that I had not done the work subsequently.

As a result, I did not mind when I missed winning two pawns in a blitz play-off for the Danish Championship 2006 (against Steffen Pedersen), even though losing this game left me 6th rather than 1st in the bizarre (but entertaining) gladiator system. Actually some guys were really shocked with the indifference I took the loss, but to me it was far from indifference. I was actually a happy loser!

Obviously I was not happy to lose and I had fought hard against it all the way. Actually I had recovered from a 0/3 start to play for the championship in the last round. There was no indication that approaching chess from a positive standpoint was damaging to my results. Actually, the following year was my best year in chess: I beat some great players, won a few nice events and surpassed 2500, the final need for the GM-title.

Later on when I worked with Sabino Brunello, we talked a lot about this. Sabino used to be devastated by defeats. Actually it was so bad that if he failed to solve an easy exercise, he would feel worthless.

I did not believe that it was working for him. Because the only possible function with feeling like this would be if it improved his game. It really did not.

Over the six years we worked together he transformed entirely as a person. Obviously he matured just by growing up, but I think our discussions about mental approach helped a lot too. These days he seems happy when he loses and even happier when he wins!

Is it working? Check out the C-group of Wijk Aan Zee this year and judge for yourself.

Conclusion:

If you beat yourself up when the results do not go in your direction and it does not motivate you to work harder, probably you will find what I had found: What you can do with anger and pain, you might be able to do at least as well with joy and harmony.

Personally I have the rule that if I feel I let myself down; then I am allowed to be angry. But after I started trusting myself to do my best, I often did. There have of course been times when I played below my level. But trusting that I am on my own side, I am no longer angry with myself or have other negative emotions. I just try to find out why I made the mistakes. Even when I lost in 12 moves (!) with White a few weeks ago I did not feel especially bad. I simply realised that I was not ready to play such a morning round and that I should not put any value to this game. Besides, I am retired 😎 .

One thing that confuses younger people asking me for advice is when I tell them to decide first which day of the week is your day off, then do solving 20 minutes a day for the other six days of the week. Get into a regular habit of doing this basic work. Then get back to me in a month or two.

Last night I talked to a friend who was considering getting some chess training. Being in his 40s he immediately understood the value of doing 20 minutes a day and said he would do it. I am not sure it was a great career move, but I think I convinced him he did not need the training first, but needed getting used to thinking first.

If there is one thing I have learned over the years it is that the worst thing you can do for your long term improvement prospects, is to start by taking on more than you can. Burnout is quite common. Actually it is the norm. Certainly there will be stories of those who just keep going and this is the way we all would like to see ourselves. I am not saying that you are not the exception, but if you are like me, you have probably tried this high-performer strategy before with something. I have tried it with fitness and guess what – I am not as fit as I want to be. So this time around, I have started my fitness program with 20 minutes of rowing each morning. It will not give overnight success, but it will work wonders long term. We all know this. My next challenge is to stop eating chocolate. This will definitely be more difficult – so I did not start with this .

If you decide to take on the challenge, then please say what you intend to do below. It can be endgames, tactics, positional play and so on. 20 minutes thinking a day.

What I recommend you focus your training on are a few things:

•    Concentrating
•    Being able to turn on your concentration by demand (we will talk about anchors later on)
•    Focus – know what you are trying to do before you do it and slowly getting better at doing just that
•    Candidate moves, the three questions or a principle of whichever subject you are studying
•    Decision making – please write down your solutions before you check them out. This is alike to making a move in a game. From research and just watching myself, I have come to realise that we need to distrust what we see. Do not write long essays, but write the move you want to play and the 1-2 key points, be they tactical or otherwise. If you are working with the three questions, write down what you think (reasonably quickly – remember it is just for directing your focus).

At this point there are always some people who will ask me to recommend “the best” material. My main point is always the same: that you can take that book from your shelves, collecting dust, and get a lot out of it. You do not need to buy a new book.

But I am also a writer and a publisher and I have opinions on what I think are really good sources of material. For players under 2300, the Yusupov series is brilliant training material. Even 2200s will sweat over some aspects in The Fundamentals triplet, though some of it will be easy sailing. But as you are building a new habit, this is not a bad thing.

For those over 2300, I recommend my Grandmaster Preparation series, as well as Practical Chess Defence and the Quality Chess Puzzle Book.

For endings the best books by far are Müller & Lambrecht’s Pawn Endings and the Dvoretsky Endgame Manual, though I also have a soft spot for some other books. At the moment I am putting Endgame Play together and for those wanting practical experience in the endings; this will be a good book too.

After writing the draft for this (I will try to stay 1-2 weeks ahead of the publication of these blog posts, so I write them when I am best situated to do so and not when I “have to”) I noticed one comment to last week’s blog post that explained by example quite well why you should not start with two hours a day:

We all know that we cannot start a physical training program with full on two training a day. Maybe we can go on for a few weeks, but we will eventually burn out. Even if we managed to go on and on, it is only for the professional that spending this much time would be desirable. It just sounds hard.

But as with physical exercise, those who try to do this in chess also run out of steam, which is what I think is the main problem with this post. I do not think that the problem is that he does not love chess enough; I think the problem is that he thinks he should love it unconditionally. (Barry, please comment on this if you feel like it. I would love to have a dialogue about this, especially here on the blog where it might be useful for others as well).

It is all about setting moderately challenging targets for long term change. I will return to this in about a month in a blog post about why we should try to train at 110% of our ability.
Until then, please set a moderately challenging target for your training, such as doing some, consistently. My suggestion is 20 minutes six times a week, but maybe you need to start with four times a week.
Next week we will talk about “the problem with failure”.

Pushed by an eager chess fan, wanting to improve, I am starting a weekly blog post on chess improvement. The idea is that we discuss a subject each week; I will come with some inspirational text and maybe a game fragment or similar. Then we discuss it and hopefully all become wiser.

As this is something just decided and as I am going to London Wednesday to look at the candidates, I do not have a lot to say today. Also the meter on the car is running out in a four minutes and I have to pick Rebecca up from nursery…

Thus I will start with a simple question:

“Why do you want to improve in chess?”

Please give your honest reply, especially before seeing other people’s replies. Here we are talking about answers that can take any form.

I will give my answers to why I want to write a novel here: because I just cannot imagine a life where I have not done this and the mere fact that I have not yet achieved this feels unnatural and painful. Maybe this is stupid, but this is the way it is.

After you have written your comment, you could read the following very interesting article by Hollywood success coach Michael Neill: The loaded goal