Why don't you get what you want in chess? How to train well
Good morning everyone!
Have you ever felt like you are training so hard but you do not still get the results you want? If the answer is yes, today is your lucky day because you will find out why this is happening (and why it is so common even more than you think).
If you are an ambitious player like me, you are probably spending a good time practicing chess and you have been increasing your chess rating as well, but at some point, you noticed that it does not matter how hard you are training, you are not able to overcome that last limit. It seems out of your control, you train; you do your best in the tournaments but you still do not get it and the reason behind this is that you are not training correctly. But, what does it mean?
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Benjamin Franklin
Many chess players think that the more books they read, the more puzzles they resolve, the more theory they know, their chess will be better, they sometimes even spend more time in their training sessions thinking that it will get their chess at the next level, and suddenly, they are sad with their results and keep the same level
This fact reveals one important key: it does not matter the number of hours you spend training, what matters is the quality of those hours
The truth is that chess is not like any other sport, while in soccer you can improve a good part by doing exercise more time every day, in chess, you can spend 3 hours training per day and lost against an opponent who just trains 1 hour.
Ok great, now I know that I am not training well, and I just losing my time, what can I do? How can I train properly? Well, to answer that question we should learn about our brains and how they master skills.
In order to that, we must know the four stages of competence, it was presented in 1969 and developed the next year by Noel Burch.
According to this model, when we learn a new skill, we move through the next levels:
- Unconscious incompetence – we don't know that we don't have this skill, or that we need to learn it.
- Conscious incompetence – we know that we don't have this skill.
- Conscious competence– we know that we have this skill.
- Unconscious competence– we don't know that we have this skill, but we don't focus on it because it's so easy.
Does it mean that chess could be easy? The answer is a complete no, however, we can master some skills which will help us to improve our game, and we will apply them so well that we will not think too much about it!
Let’s take an example, imagine that you found out you are losing many games and you do not know what is the reason, you are in the unconscious incompetence stage, then what you need to do is analyzing those games (which is another important factor to train properly, I will discuss this in another blog), and during that process, you found out that you lose because you do not calculate correctly, great! Now you moved to the conscious incompetence, now you know what factor of the game you need to improve. It is here where many people think that reading an article of how to calculate properly they have the work done, and then they analyze their lose games and they found out another factor (because now they think they are calculating well) and do not improve at all.
It is in this stage, that we need to look to another fact: you need to spend a good part of your time mastering JUST this skill. The opening can wait if that is not the reason of your losing games. But how much time do I need to spend? Many people believe that master a skill takes 10.000 hours, others think that just 20, I think that both are so extreme. In my experience, 21 days of practicing the new skill are enough to master it (That is what it takes to form a new habit, according to some scientists).
After this, you will be in the conscious competence stage,you now calculate well and you apply this knowledge in your games, then with practice, you will realize that you do it almost automatically! You will be in the unconscious competence and you will have improved a lot.
So far so good! There is much content to cover yet (how to practice to master a skill, how to analyze my own games, etc), but training well is a great step to start.
