Does Size Matter? Different Types (and Lengths) of Chess Material

 As a kid, I loved videogames.  RPGs were my favourite.  I put in literally hundreds of hours into Final Fantasy X, and other games have similar numbers.  At one point, I scoffed at short games.  Why pay $30 for a 15hr game when I can spend $50 for one that lasts for 40+ hours?  It's just math.

And this is only for the PC version.

Fast forward a decade or so and things have changed.  I rarely buy videogames now, and when I do, I don't even entertain those massive 40+ hour ones.  It will take me a year to finish it.  I don't have the time.  A small game I can complete is better than a large one that I can't.  It's just math.

Unsurprisingly, this same analysis applies to chess.  My personal library includes small pamphlets of barely 30pgs to tomes of 600+ pages; a GM YouTube video might last 5min, whereas some Chessable courses last 50+ hours.  Our first instinct is that bigger is better, but we have to be careful that the extra length doesn't switch from benefit to burden.  We've all sat through movies that drag on too long; the same applies here.

I've concluded that, for most people most of the time, shorter is probably better.  Here's why.

First off, this discussion only applies to "chess knowledge", or those chess resources that try to teach you something.  If you have a tactics workbook with nothing but puzzles and solutions, you don't gain a benefit by finishing the book, you benefit by going through the process and improving your skills.  Here, the longer the better, as you get more positions to practice, and finishing the book per se isn't a priority.

By contrast, "Secrets of Pawn Endings" teaches you all about, surprise, pawn endings.  When you get to the end, you will have a firm grasp of pawn endings.  Finishing the book is a priority, and this introduces a tension: too few examples and the student won't fully understand the concepts, but too many risks adding bloat that pushes the finish line too far away.  How well an author handles this tension largely determines how good his or her book is.  This comes down to two core ideas: the minimum effective dose and opportunity costs.

The Minimum Effective Dose

If you want to build muscle, you to go the gym and lift weights.  This gives your muscles a stimulus to grow.  It might take 10min and 3 sets for a given muscle group.  If you do more, your muscles don't grow faster; in fact, if you do too much, you actually hinder your progress.  Ideally, you want to do just enough to trigger that maximal growth response and then no more.

This is the minimum effective dose, the least you need to do to get the result you want.  It transcends fitness and applies to everything: why spend 10hrs on something if it can be done in 3hrs?

With chess, every paragraph of a book, every variation in a course, every minute of video, all of this is a stimulus.  Our goal is improvement.  If it takes 20hrs to learn something from a book, but it was possible to learn it in 10, then the book fails the minimum effective dose.  Literally half the content could have been cut with no loss in improvement.  In other words, you wasted half your study time.  Ideally, we want that "wasted time" to be as close to zero as possible.

Opportunity Cost

Every hour you spend doing something is an hour you are not spending on something else.  If you are studying an opening for an hour, for example, then that's one hour you weren't doing tactics, reviewing games, playing blitz, spending time with family or anything else.

Time is thus a currency, and we have to choose how we spend it.  If we do it poorly, then our training is inefficient at best and stagnant at worst.  If we do it right, then we improve much faster and make much better use of our time.

Every book we buy or video we watch contains an opportunity cost.  It might take 10hrs to read a book and another 15hrs to fully absorb it.  We have to keep in mind, though, that this is time not spent on other things.  It might be a really good book, but would you be better off spending those 25hrs somewhere else?  That's the riddle of opportunity cost.

Putting These Together

Combined, these two ideas point to the following conclusion: we want to find the shortest thing possible that will lead us to improve.  Imagine two books, Book A and Book B.  Book A takes 5hrs to complete, Book B takes 20hrs.  By studying Book A, we literally improve faster because we complete it and adsorb the info in 25% of the time of Book B.  We can then invest that "saved time" into something else, like tactics training, analyzing games or another book.  Even if Book B is 4x better than Book A, the cumulative effect of reading multiple small books will outweigh it.

Ultimately, Book B teaches more than Book A, but it takes longer.  You have to invest considerably more time to fully absorb it and then see the effects in your game.  With Book A, you will see the results much sooner and you can use your "extra time" to further invest in your chess training... or you can just play for fun, satisfied you've done the minimum effective dose for that particular concept.

I firmly believe that a good book / course / video that gives you a solid skill or a useful set of knowledge in 5 / 10 / 15 hours is better than a book / course / video that teaches you everything about a topic but takes 30 / 40 / 50+ hours to adsorb and apply.  As they say, less is more.

For Reference

I graduated law school in 2022, and I have a confession to make: I didn't reach every page of every book.  No one did.  It wasn't necessary and it wasn't required.  Certainly we read most of these books, but we also skipped a significant chunk of material.  You can learn the principles of torts, contracts and the like without needing to read every single word.

The same applies to chess materials.  You don't need to read every page.  If you fully understand the idea by page 6, you can skip the remaining 20 pages.  If you are reading a chapter on an obscure endgame you will never see, skip it.  And, of course, if you are learning an opening that goes into extreme depth, you can almost certainly cut the lines down early.

A surprising amount of chess material is actually reference works.  They aren't meant to be read front-to-back, and they give very little benefit if you do so.  Nobody reads reference books in other subjects; don't feel compelled to read them for chess.

This especially applies to openings.  For example, Kovalchuk's "Playing the Grunfeld" contains over 100 game references in its second chapter alone.  Yes, I counted, and it's not widely out of the ordinary.  Learning all of it doesn't make sense.  Indeed, it would be the equivalent of learning the dictionary.  Skip it. Don't read reference works.

Video Content

When iChess was still around, they regularly sent marketing emails that said the equivalent of, "Master this secret opening system designed to cut down on theory in only 15 hours!"  That seemed to be the default length, 15 hours, and they said it like it was a good thing.  Chessable did something similar, frequently touting the extreme video lengths as a good thing.  "This course comes with over 40 hours of GM explanations!"

Both of these are presented like good things.  Do they not realize how long 40 hours is?  You can do an hour a day and still not have it done in a month.  That's insane.  Worse, that's 40 hours of just watching a video.  You aren't calculating, you aren't solving tactics, you are just staring at the screen.  And then we have to wonder, how good are these videos?  There might be some gold nuggets of wisdom, but how much filler do you have to sift to find those?  Is it worth it?  Most probably, the answer is no, and that's before considering the astronomical costs.  $300 for a video?  Please.

During the pandemic lockdowns, I never left my house and ate many meals in front of the computer.  Sad, I know, but I wasn't the only one.  Anyway, this let me watch videos while doing something I had to do anyway, and over time I was able to watch a lot of content.  With the pandemic over, I've "lost" this studying opportunity, so video content makes little sense for my current studying.

If you can combine videos with other tasks, such as a lengthy bus commute to work, then the opportunity cost is much lower.  If you can't, then you need to find extra hours in your week to watch, and you are stuck with the realization that this video time is probably not the most effective use of your time.

Now, full disclosure, some of my favourite chess moments have come from videos.  IM Josh Waitzkin basically got me into chess, GM Sam Shankland and Surya Ganguly are exceptional presenters, and GM Smirnov's courses pushed me over 2000.  Videos can be good ... but most aren't.  Most are merely average, and I could have spent that time better.

Conclusion

What does the ideal course, book or product look like?  Shorter than we think.  Big books likely don't get finished, or if they do, you likely get more value from having done several smaller ones.  Similarly, large video courses take a long time, and getting most of that info from a smaller time investment probably pays dividends.

When I look at my library of chess books, I have only read one of the biggest ones; I've read many of the smaller ones.  On Chessable, I haven't completed any courses with 800+ lines; I've completed many smaller ones.  Note that Shankland's trilogy of courses has 1,500 total lines, but the total moves (or "trainable length" in Chessable parlance) is shockingly small.  I might go into more detail on this later, but rest assured, Shankland's courses are small according to this classification.

Smaller things are more likely to be completed and thus more likely to provide value.  I've repeatedly praised Smirnov's Grandmaster's Positional Understanding course.  I think it has around 6 hours of lectures and then 250 or so positions to solve.  I think that's a big reason for its success: a minimum up-front cost, and then lots of time spent actually doing chess as opposed to watching it.

That informs my general conclusion: I want to maximize the amount of time I am actively engaged in chess, and that means minimizing the amount of time I am reading or watching content.  I want that minimum effective dose and then to focus my time elsewhere.  That seems like the right approach.