Toward A Simplified Theory of Chess Improvement
Strange and Unusual Goings On?
Awhile back I got frustrated with chess once again and decided to quit for awhile. I didn't know how long I would stay away, but I knew I needed to clear my mind and take a break. I'm not sure how long it lasted, but it was long enough to make a difference.
After awhile, I began to just play virtually mindless bullet chess when I was bored, just to kill time. From there I started playing some blitz again and noticed my results were better than when I had been "taking chess seriously" by trying to train and study, solve tactics, study books, etc.
Just by taking an extended break, I played better when I came back to chess.
I'm not sure why it seems to work that way, but it has happened every single time I took a break from chess and then returned to playing. I always play stronger when I return than I did when I decided to take time off, especially if I had been actively studying and trying to improve prior to the break.
A New Plan
What could all of this possibly mean? I think it means that, if I really want to improve, I need to listen to what my own mind is telling me about what I need to be doing rather than trying to force myself to conform to what other people suggest concerning methods of chess improvement. As my results continue to improve and my ratings continue to go up, I only need to look at what I'm doing now compared to what I was doing before (when my results and ratings were suffering and my frustration level was high) and adjust my practices accordingly. If the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, then I have almost certainly been approaching my chess improvement in an insane way.
The character Sherlock Holmes once said, "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." So let's apply that principle to my situation regarding chess. The vast majority of credible chess teachers, authors, and coaches agree that doing certain things in the various areas of chess is what anyone needs to do in order to improve their play -- i.e., solving tactics, studying books, playing over grandmaster games, studying openings, studying endgames, etc. These, among others, are pretty much universally acknowledged as necessary for chess improvement. However, regardless of what other people say, I must instead place more weight upon my own personal experience, which necessitates making the following shocking observation about my own chess:
Doing the above mentioned things did not help me improve.
It doesn't matter who says what. It doesn't matter what the grandmaster coach recommends. It doesn't matter what the strong player on the online video insists on. It doesn't matter which books you buy. It doesn't matter whether the assertion "chess is 99% tactics" is true or not. It doesn't matter what the kibitzers on the Twitch stream believe about what you should or should not do.
The only thing that matters, in my case and in your case, is the truth of the situation at hand and in my situation, doing what other people recommended for improving my chess did not work.
Therefore, it was time to stop the insanity of repeating the past over and over again. It was time to try something radically new that goes against the grain and speaks to my situation over and above what everyone else says is right.
It is time for a new plan, and that plan is this:
1. Play chess.
2. Analyze my games.
3. Recognize when I need to take a break and do so.
That's it. That's the entire plan, and the difference between this plan and my previous attempts is I know this plan is going to work.
How can I possibly know this?
I know this because the evidence proves it. When I was "studying" chess by compartmentalizing the various aspects of the game and trying to study those aspects on their own, I experienced decline in my play and in my desire to continue. However, after taking a break from it all, upon returning to chess and simply playing and reviewing my games afterward, I have experienced an increase in my playing strength, an increase in positive results in my games, an increase in performance against higher rated players, and an increase in my desire to continue improving as a chess player.
The Problem
The problem in the beginning is that we do compartmentalize the various aspects of the game, as I said above. We tend to spend time "studying the opening", then we switch and spend time "studying the endgame," then we switch and spend time "studying tactics," and so on, and then ultimately attempt to apply what we think we should have learned in these aforementioned study sessions to the games we play and end up making the horrifying discovery that we are unable to do so. Why are we unable to do so? We are unable to apply that which is supposedly learned through a compartmentalized study of the various aspects of chess because, when we compartmentalize our study of the aspects of chess, we are taking those aspects of the game out of their natural and essential context. When we take our studies of the various aspects of chess out of context, we are removing them from the only world in which they have existence and meaning. That world is the world of our own actual games. Essentially, when we compartmentalize our study of chess, we are getting the proverbial cart before the horse. We might be learning something, but outside of our actual games we have no anchor with which to secure the things we have allegedly learned, thus leaving us to struggle with how these principles/strategies/lines, etc. are supposed to fit into the actual games we play. The actual positions we encounter in our own games appear to never truly resemble the examples from the books/videos/websites we studied before. As a result, we think we are applying something we learned only to discover that, because of some different feature of the position in our actual game, what we thought we learned and understood does not apply and we become discouraged in our failure, thinking we didn't really learn much at all. Ultimately, the discouragement and disappointment over so much time and effort given with no return on our investment builds until we finally give up altogether.
There is, however, a better way.
The Solution
I believe the solution to the problem of compartmentalizing our study of chess is actually surprisingly simple: We need to put our study of the aspects of chess back into their proper context. The proper context for the study of the aspects of chess is within an actual game, for outside of that, things like opening theory, tactics, positional play, middlegame and endgame, pawn play, and all of the other aspects of chess have no meaning. Each aspect of the game is related to all of the others, and none of them make any sense outside the context of an actual game of chess. Therefore, in order to gain a practical mastery of these aspects of the game, we must change our practice of study-and-then-play to play-and-then-study.
We must play actual games, then learn the various aspects of the game of chess through the analysis of our actual games. By doing this, we retain the context within which the aspects of chess have existence and meaning, we learn the concepts and their practical application, and we are much more able to apply what we have learned to our actual games because we learned them in the context of our actual games to begin with.
Afterword
Of course, none of what I've written here is particularly new. We've known for a long time that the review and analysis of our own games is central to chess improvement. However, one thing I am suggesting is, I believe, somewhat novel. I want to make clear that I am suggesting that we eliminate the systematic compartmentalization of our study of the aspects of the game of chess.
Resources such as books, videos, courses, articles, etc. about the individual aspects of chess can still be helpful as reference material, perhaps to clear up some specific misunderstanding or answer certain specific questions that may arise in the course of analyzing our own games. However, they should not be used as the primary tools of instruction for actually learning the aspects of chess with the expectation of then being able to apply knowledge of those topics within our actual games. Again, attempting to do so is a backward approach that removes what we are trying to learn from its proper context and is, I conclude, ultimately detrimental to our improvement as chess players. While there is much more to be said on this topic, my hope in publishing this article is that someone else out there who is trying to improve at chess will find in it some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, as I believe I have.
