Do You Study Chess, But Does Your Mind Know How to Learn It?
Unlearning to Learn
As Jonathan Rowson explains in Chess for Zebras, it is extremely difficult to give a definitive answer to the question: “How can I improve at chess?” There are countless methods, theories, and approaches that have been successfully applied across different ages and skill levels. Yet, even when many people try everything, they still fail to achieve the results they expect.
Doing the “right things” will almost always lead to some improvement, but that improvement does not necessarily translate into significant progress. Even when following everything that should work, advancement can be minimal or inconsistent. In this article, I am not trying to answer that question directly. Instead, I want to guide the reader toward a different way of understanding learning itself, both in chess and in life.
The title of this article is Unlearning to Learn. Rowson uses a powerful metaphor: the chess player who has every resource—books, lessons, videos, time—but still fails to improve is like a bucket with a hole in it. No matter how much water you pour in, it never fills up.
Throughout my career as a chess player and coach, I have encountered many similar cases. Students who have abundant resources and genuinely dedicate time to training, yet whose progress remains limited. There seems to be a cognitive hole: a flaw in the way they learn. Not because they do not study, but because they learned incorrectly from the beginning, and that flawed learning prevents new knowledge from being stored in a stable way.
In other words, the problem is not a lack of information, but the mental structure into which that information is supposed to settle. The student is constantly learning new things, but everything dissolves through a pre‑existing pattern already installed in the mind.
Many then ask: How do we plug the hole? Without realizing that, in reality, the hole is not the problem—the bucket is.
Translated into less metaphorical terms, human beings—and chess players in particular—try to solve every position using the knowledge they already possess, whether that knowledge is correct or incorrect. This knowledge has been formed over time and is deeply influenced by our idiosyncrasy, psychology, culture, and past experiences. If this foundation is flawed, whatever new knowledge we attempt to add will inevitably be affected.
I remember a friend who was trying to learn English. He was highly motivated: a new job opportunity had opened doors for him, and he was willing to invest time and effort. Yet something was not working. He would learn a new word and, hours later, forget how to pronounce it. Even words he had previously known started being pronounced incorrectly. It was not a lack of interest or practice; he was carrying a flawed learning structure from the past.
That was when I told him something that initially felt uncomfortable: to learn English properly, you first need to unlearn what you think you know.
If we place this situation in a chess context, the same story repeats itself. We learn a new line, a new opening, or a new strategic concept, but in practice we keep making the same mistakes. Worse still, when we try to recall what we studied, we cannot access that mental “file.” The knowledge was not stored correctly.
This is where the idea of unlearning comes in—a concept that is difficult to accept because no one wants to move backward. Yet unlearning does not mean erasing everything or starting from scratch. It means looking at the same positions with different eyes, without prejudice and without the illusion that we already possess absolute truths.
At this point, the reader might think the solution is to eliminate all previous ideas and replace them with new ones. But understanding does not work that way. True comprehension is not installed overnight; it is in constant construction and reconstruction. Learning implies reviewing, questioning, and often reformulating what we already believe we understand.
This article is inspired by the first chapters of Chess for Zebras and serves as a conceptual foundation for what I aim to teach: a deeper, more conscious, and more coherent way of learning. An approach we might call neurolinguistic chess, where the way we think, label, and structure ideas determines the real quality of learning—not only in chess, but in any discipline.
Learning chess is not about filling the mind with information, but about reorganizing the way we think about the game. As long as we continue to interpret positions through poorly constructed beliefs, progress will remain fragile and inconsistent.
Unlearning is not moving backward; it is creating the mental space necessary for genuine understanding to emerge. It is questioning what we take for granted, revisiting our certainties, and allowing ourselves to see the same positions with a more honest mind.
This is only the first step. In the following articles, I will ground these ideas in practical training methods, where language, attention, and thought structure become real tools for improvement. Because chess is not played only on the board—it is played, above all, in the way we think.
