The Pareto principle

“Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt”

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Mathematics and chess have always been related, both requiring constant calculation, geometric concepts, and concentration to solve all the problems that appear. It doesn't necessarily mean that someone good at math is good at chess and vice versa, there are different cases for everyone.

However, mathematical concepts such as the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, could be used to explain some peculiarities of this scientific game, and could even help us become better chess players.

The Pareto Principle

This phenomenon states that 80% of the results come from 20% of all causes. There are many examples to ensure this, most of the time 20% of the people who work in a company are responsible for 80% of the results. To have a better and clearer example, we can simply go to school, where few people out of a big group used to do most of the work.

This is not a mathematical law, but it is a good point of view to understand better the world in general, and it is something that we can also use for our chess to say something like:

80% of your results come from 20% of your training

I don't know about you but for me, this is something a bit difficult to digest, does it mean that most of the time we spend training is useless? and that only 2 out of 10 hours of training are valuable? Yes and no.

Considering this concept as the law is also bad, but it illustrates how important it is to organize our training program in the best possible way, trying to dedicate our time to 20% of the things that will help us achieve 80% of the results. But then comes the question:

What is that 20% of your training that is going to get 80% of your results?

In my personal opinion, I think that watching YouTube videos, playing bullet games, and spending 3 hours a day studying the opening is the 20% that will get 80% of your results, the most horrible results in your chess career .

To be honest, it is not easy to find what will give you the best results, since we are all different, we have different ways of learning and different weaknesses to fix. However, the more active your training, the more results you will get.

In the past, I have seen better results when:

• I stopped reading books blindly to read them with a board and pause to analyze by myself what is going on and then check the lines with a chess engine.
• I stopped watching videos on my bed to put my laptop on a table with a board and stop the video at critical positions to think by myself
• I stopped looking for tips to improve my visualization to start playing blindfold games at chess.com

And the list goes on...

I believe that the Pareto principle applies to training methods and to find the areas we should focus on to obtain the best results according to our level. Unfortunately, there is no scientific study that I can show you to back up my idea, but thinking logically, you need to train different things as your rating increases. As a 1600 player you probably don't need to spend more than 10% of your time analyzing the specific lines of one opening, but if you are a 2400 player then a single mistake in this stage can determine the outcome of the game.