Duckfest Digest 08 Messy Methodology

Messy Methodology

In my first blog post I announced this would be my primary platform to share my journey towards being a better chess player. Mainly, because I enjoy creating these posts, but also because I imagined my content would be valuable to other players. The idea was pretty simple: In order to become a better chess player, I need to study, I need to work on my game play and learn new things. By sharing my experience, others can benefit from all the things I tried, good or bad.

But as it turns out, it’s not so simple. The problem is that the learning process is way messier than people I realized beforehand. I wasn’t so naive that I expected the road towards my goal to be straight and without obstacles. I knew it would be challenging and that’s all good. It would make the result more satisfying in the end.

My plan was to look for weaknesses in my play, find a way to prioritize them and then work on each of them, step by step. If what I’m doing works, I’ll continue and if something doesn’t work, I’ll have to adjust. That way I’ll improve, slowly but steadily, on a tricky meandering path of progress. In reality, though, it was neither a straight road, nor a meandering path. It was chaos. It was like managing a multidimensional todo-list. It was like a cacophony of ideas screaming at me at the same time. Or, to put it in visual terms, my way to progress looked like a scatterplot.

Planning for progress

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

-Zora Neale Hurston (American folklorist, whatever that may be)

Identifying your weaknesses

But as it turns out, it’s not so simple. The problem is that the learning process is way messier than people I realized beforehand. I wasn’t so naive that I expected the road towards my goal to be straight and without obstacles. I knew it would be challenging and that’s all good.

It’s difficult to identify all of your weaknesses, as many of your weaknesses can’t be identified by you. They exist because you are unaware of them. But even if you only look at the weaknesses you are able to identify, it’s probably still a pretty overwhelming list. As described in poker perspective, I try to use a more long term perspective and I ask myself the question: If I want to perform better in my next 100 games than I did in my previous 100 games, what should I do? It’s not easy to find a reliable answer to this question. Let’s assume, you are able to identify a few key priorities to work on. Then you also have to process and manage all other things you notice or have questions about (for example, when you notice a weakness in your play that is not a high priority to work on, do you just ignore it, or write it down for later? Then, it only gets more complicated because of the varying degrees of abstraction level.

Multi-Dimensional ToDo List

I think the underlying reason the process of improvement is so messy is because of this:

There are many things that you need to work on to become a better player and they vary greatly in terms of abstraction level, ranging from developing an understanding of theoretical concepts on one end of the spectrum and learning and training concrete moves on the other end of the spectrum and everything in between.

Depending on the abstraction level, the way to improve changes. It changes how you learn, what resources you need, how you study, what you need to practice and how you monitor and track your progress.

A couple of examples

• Improving your time management might require you to focus more on your time during a game. It might need you to develop a different mindset or maybe prepare more opening lines so you can speed up your game. Monitoring and evaluating how well you are doing is not easy, might be a bit of a guess.
• To improve how you play the Caro-Kann might require memorizing the main lines. It might require consuming video content to better understand the main ideas. You might need to deep dive into your game history and see if you need to work on specific lines.
• Improving your tactical abilities can perhaps be solved by training puzzles.
• Learning how to respond to the Fried Liver Attack can be done by extensive research in the opening, watch video content, look at all possible lines and practice them Or maybe it’s sufficient to find out what moves are most important not to play and memorize them.
• Improving end games, might take studying, practicing drills, and doing some puzzles. Or maybe you can find someone to explain the most important concepts to you and that will be enough (for now).
• Becoming better at playing closed positions, might require reading books or watching videos online.
• When you discover your results with the London system are great, except when the opponent plays g6, can be addressed on multiple levels. Maybe it’s enough to discover you should play Nc3 and e4 instead of e3 and c3, maybe it’s better to look for content about the PIRC defense, about the modern defense and get an idea of the mid game themes.
• Playing fewer blunders is hard. It’s almost impossible to study for but it requires focus and consideration during the game. It can be trained, and there are systems to support you (look for check, captures and attacks). At the same time, it’s nearly impossible to eliminate them as they happen almost exclusively in moments when you don’t pay attention. Blunders are by nature very evasive. A mental coach might be a better solution than studying or game analysis.

These examples illustrate what I mean. But, keep in mind, that as another level of complexity and uncertainty, it’s not always clear what the best way to improve is, so you also need to evaluate your approach and see if it needs improving too. And these are just examples. It shows only a fraction. In my first month on chess.com, I played 270 games and played 900 inaccuracies, 700 mistakes, over 500 blunders and 100 missed wins. That’s a lot of things I need to work on. In each game I analyze I can spot dozens of things I need to work on. usually linked and interchanged with other areas that need improvement as well.

Let me show a simplified version of my plan:

a Structure for my Studying

These are some of the things I've tried to create order in the chaos, listed somewhat chronologically.  This is not full or reliable review, just me briefly sharing some thoughts.

Playing with PGN
As I mentioned before, earlier blog post, I fell in love with the game analysis offered by chess.com immediately. The game review and analysis provided useful and direct feedback on my game play. In every game I saw things I could improve. A couple of obvious blunders or mistakes, but mostly minor mistakes and a lot of inaccuracies. As long as I did better than my opponent, I was fine. So, I took the time to analyze my games and made notes. Slowly however, I came to realize that these post game notes (annotations) were game specific and almost impossible to retrieve. It could be I was looking at a position that I had analyzed earlier, but I had no way to tell! It was like all my notes and findings ended up in a void and were lost forever.
It occured to me that I should put all my findings, all my ideas and all lines I researched in one place. So I merged all my notes into one single PGN. That was a terrible idea. I have never abandoned an idea as fast as this one.

Getting a Grip with Google
The next (obvious) step was Google Documents. Just a simple file where I could log my ideas and findings. As simple as it sounds, it works amazingly well. I could do a lot of things very easily:

• list positions to look into later
• dump my thought and ideas while I was analyzing a position
• write down my thoughts on my strategy and what openings I wanted to study more

This was the perfect solution. For a while.
Simply having one or more documents as a dump for everything is super useful and I still use it. But it has a few shortcomings, the main one being its inability to handle decision trees. Chess is a very path dependent game and a simple document was not handling that well. At least, I couldn’t make it work.

To summarize, Google Documents and PGN are almost polar opposites of each other.

• Google Documents is simple, is extremely user friendly and is a great way to write down ideas, but is totally unequipped to manage information on dozens of specific positions
• PGN is designed to work with other chess tools and is good for managing information on specific positions and lines. But, as a format it’s bad at everything else.

Searching for Software
Maybe it was time for an investment in some real chess software. After some research I learned that Chessbase was top notch, but free alternatives were available. So I gave ScidvsPC a go which offered almost the same features and should suffice, especially for a player at my level. I felt like a pro, starting with the big boy software. How wrong I was. Saying that I was overwhelmed is an understatement. I’m not going to blame the software, it’s probably great. But I was not ready for this complexity. And it also didn’t give me what I was looking for.

What I desperately needed was a way to visualize positions and how they related to other positions.

Somehow, I found Chesstree.com, a website that provides chess trees. It’s flawed and doesn’t provide the automated imports it should. But even in manual mode, with some work, I got exactly what I needed at the time: a visual representation of my ideas.

Lichess Studies
This looked like the most viable option, after the Scid turned out to be too complex for my needs and Google docs combined with a picture of a decision tree was too simple. This should work and a video by Eric Rosen convinced me to give it a go. As a feature, ‘Study’ is amazing. I’m hesitant to recommend Lichess on my chess.com blog, as it is a competitor. On the other hand, none of my readers are unaware of Lichess, so there is no harm in suggesting to check out Lichess Studies, as it’s their best feature. Some people have created absolutely excellent studies. that ’ve learned a lot from.
But, as a tool to organize my openings it wasn’t working at all. Basically, it’s still very game oriented (and in PGN format), it doesn’t provide an overview and it’s not great at managing unlimited branches. The best application I see is to use it after you’ve done your research, when you already know what to play and you just need a neat way to store your final solution.

Other tools
Before I reveal the solution that turned out to be my savior, let me share some resources that I consider beneficial to my chess
openingtree.com (which I use almost daily)
DecodeChess (I have not committed to it, but also have not abandoned it)
AIMChess (I have not committed to it, but also have not abandoned it)
iChess (I have not committed to it, but also have not abandoned it)

Conclusion
Creating a system to become a better player is challenging. First of all, it’s difficult to fully identify what elements of your game need improvement. Each aspect of your game that you work on works differently, some are easy but most of them are continuous works in progress. They all require different solutions and need different efforts, different tracking and different follow up.

As mentioned in my previous post, “why I chose to study openings”, I layed out my reasons to work on some form of opening repertoire. Part of my motivation was to have better access to opening moves while playing. Part of it was to have a place to dump my findings and thoughts, to organize my ideas. And to have at least one area that I had some form of control over.

That’s all for now. In my next article, I’ll explain what eventually worked for me.

The tool that provided a solution to at least some of my problems.

Spoiler alert…

My solution was Chess Position Trainer.

It still is, actually.