My last few posts have discussed "chess skills" or the component parts that make up your chess ability. I really like this idea, and over the weeks I've been thinking about it more and more. I now think that I was way too conservative, and there are lots of different chess skills, much more than I first wrote about.
An example will help. I'm a young lawyer (I know, I know...). Honestly, I'm just starting out and learning the tools of the trade. Many of these are obvious and taught in law school: forming arguments, statutory interpretation and oral advocacy all jump out. I would call these a lawyer's "hard skills", the stuff you absolutely need to do your job. When we think of what lawyers do, though, it's actually missing quite a lot: interpersonal skills, networking, delegation, time management, all of these matter.
I could have all the hard skills in the world, but if I don't develop these soft skills, I'm a pretty bad lawyer. Of course, no one likes lawyers, so let's bring it back to chess. When we seek to improve, we tend to focus on the obvious "hard" skills, but I bet our "soft" skills play a surprisingly big role as well. Let's take a look.
Hard Skills
By "hard skill", I mean the things we traditionally associate with chess skill:
- Pattern recognition, or how FAST we can see moves
- Calculation, how ACCURATE our moves are
- Visualization, how DEEP we can see
- Board Vision, how WIDE we can see
This is not everything, but it captures most of what makes a good player good. Sure, there's a knowledge component, and masters undoubtedly know a lot of theory and common plans. When you sit down to solve a puzzle, though, you largely rely on these four skills, and it's precisely these areas that most of want to improve at. Indeed, there's nothing else that matters... right?
Enter soft skills.
Soft Skills
Have you ever completely outplayed your opponent, reaching a dominant middlegame ... but you only have a few minutes left whereas your opponent has literally all of his time? We inevitably blunder under time pressure and curse our luck. Our opponent didn't deserve to win ... or so we think. In reality, our time management was completely off. We used 90% more time than our opponent. No wonder we had a better position, but if we can't convert, then that was a misplay on our part.
Or what about this: how many times have you been completely winning, your opponent clinging on for dear life ... and then suddenly a Knight fork pops out of nowhere? Boom, we lose. Again, we curse our rotten luck ... but as we all know, nothing is harder to win than a won game, and some players have a real knack for snatching rating points out of the jaws of defeat. These players are expert swindlers. If it is all luck, why does it happen all the time for these same players?
Here's one more: you're playing a game, doing well, flying high ... and then your opponent uncorks a move that you didn't even consider. Like a deer in the headlights, you freeze. Our brain barely works. It's hard to focus. Our heart starts beating faster and sweat begins to drip. The game is still even, but we make several poor moves and completely fall apart. Why? Because we lost control of our emotions.
All three of these are somewhat strange. Time management, swindles, emotions, none of these matter when solving a puzzle. You can analyze a game perfectly and never refer to any of these ... but undoubtedly these factors decide games just as much as tactics and strategy. Maybe even more.
Some Examples
Here are some examples that I've thought of in the last week. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and I present the following in no particular order, mainly for discussion purposes:
- Grinding: I would define this as playing equal positions, especially endgames, by keeping a drop of poison available. It's really easy to take an equal position and trade everything and make a draw. It takes real skill to keep winning chances and convert such games. Carlsen is obviously the prime example, but you can also watch how the best blitz players win equal endgames to get a sense of this skill.
- Punishing Mistakes: Honestly, I consider this perhaps the most important chess skill. You need to recognize that an opponent's move is somehow wrong and then find the best way to take advantage. I've seen this called the "Killer Instinct", which is apt.
- Swindles: I want to call this luck, but that doesn't explain why some players constantly get lucky. Swindling is the ability to take a losing position and make something out of it, chicken soup out of chicken poop.
- Time Management: Arguably, time decides more games than anything else. If you use all your time in the first 20 moves, you have to play the rest of the game at warp speed. Mistakes inevitably appear. The excellent chess teacher IM John Bartholomew has an entire YouTube series devoted to using the clock as a weapon.
- Tilt: When you make a mistake, what happens? Do you shrug it off? Immediately fall apart? Immediately play another game and make more mistakes, entering a vicious cycle? This can completely change the result of any given game (or, with blitz and bullet, tank our rating in a single session!)
- Mindset: This gets nebulous, but how is your mindset during a game? Bobby Fischer famously had a burning desire to win; I'm often happy escaping with a draw. Some people have the tenacity to dig in late in a game and find extra energy, whereas others wilt. Different mindsets influence how much we use our hard skills.
- Positivity: Arguably the same as mindset, but it feels different. Do you get excited about your position or do you get worried about your opponent's threats? When I ask people why they didn't play a certain move, one of the most common answers is being afraid of a certain reply. Do you live in fear? Do you constantly over-estimate your opponent and under-estimate yourself? Or do you hold your head up high and stride forward confidently, trusting in your abilities?
You might quibble about whether some of these are soft skills at all. It might help to view this "soft skills vs hard skills" as a spectrum. We have 100% hard (calculation), 100% soft (positivity), and then others in the middle.
And now for the interesting bit: most of these, maybe all of them, can be trained. You can get better at them just as certainly as you can get better at calculating.
Training Softly
First off, some of these skills have dedicated books on them. For example, GM Smerdon's excellent book on swindling, "The Complete Chess Swindler," or the recent course "Grind like a Grandmaster". If you can read a tactics book to improve you tactics, why not a grinding book to improve your grinding?
You don't need these resources, though they certainly don't hurt. Simply put, you need to know what skill you want to improve ... and then go train it. The focus is on the training. It doesn't matter if you win or lose, merely whether you are working on this skill.
Time management is the easiest example. Go play some online games and tell yourself, "I will never have less time than my opponent," or "I will always be within 30s of my opponent's time," or something similar. Play a bunch of games and you will get better at playing faster. It might not be comfortable, but it won't be as uncomfortable as you started.
For Mindset and Tilt-proofing, you can use GM Grigoryan's approach from ChessMood: create a new account where you will intentionally lose a piece by move 4 or so, and then see what you can do. You have no pressure to win (you are dead lost objectively), but can you still pose problems to your opponent? Can you stay mentally engaged? Can you keep having fun? You might lose 95% of your games, but if you are improving these elements, then they are all victories, victories for your long-term improving.
For learning to punish mistakes, I might as well throw a plug in for my new video course: Smithy's Minis. Studying miniature games really helps improve this skill. (Indeed, it's precisely this skill that inspired this entire article!) The course is free, so check it out. I've also written extensively about miniature games, here and here. I'm a big believer!
The take-away: most of these are different from regular chess training. The focus is not on finding the best move or on learning a new piece of knowledge. Rather, you are trying to use your current abilities in a certain way. Figure out what you want to improve, then go improve it.
Conclusion
Chess is a tough game. Our base chess skills determine our results, but so do these "soft" skills. For some players, these soft skills may be the biggest thing holding them back. Actively training and improving these skills might make a big difference.
Full disclosure, I have never trained these skills this way ... yet. I have "trained" them in my regular games, for example, when I notice that I'm way behind in time and need to speed up, or when I know I am losing and so I consciously look for swindles. This is good, but clearly a focused training session would improve the skill faster.
I almost certainly will train these in the future. I am still finalizing my training plan, and I am balancing chess with my budding career, so I don't know the exact details yet. It probably won't be too soon, as I want to focus on visualization, blindfold chess and raw calculation first, but I will get to it. And I will document my journey here, 100%.
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