Well, 2023 is nearly done and 2024 is about to begin. I figured I would take this moment to summarize my year in chess: what I've done, what I've accomplished and what I hope to achieve in the coming year. This will act as a time capsule, something to compare with this time next year, and it lets me celebrated some of my achievements.
Happy New Year, everyone! Here's what I've done.
So far, no surprises. Nothing I've said is new. Here's my personal twist: save your very best games in a separate spot. At the click of a button, you can revisit all your favourite chess moments, your brilliancies, your crushing victories. Heck, whenever you play an interesting game, one that fascinates you or gives you a rush just from remembering it, save it here as well.
I've done this for years, and I'll share the concrete benefits I've received from it.
Once you see something, it's very hard to unseen it. Even if it is small and barely noticeable, if you see it once, you will almost always see it, as a great Seinfeld episode once showed.
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| There's a red dot, George. |
This effect becomes even more powerful if you see it for yourself. Remember those "Where's Waldo?" books from school? If a friend found Waldo and showed you, you might remember ... but you might not. If you find Waldo yourself, though, then your eyes will automatically jump to that spot when you open the page. The act of discovery sears the knowledge deep into your brain.
As you might imagine, I can apply this same theme to chess. Essentially, if I tell you something about chess, you know it. If you discover that thing by yourself, you know it. Automatic. Instinctual. Without effort. Today, I'm going to share examples of the sort of things I've discovered about chess, and hopefully this will serve as an exemplar on how you can build your own personal bank of permanent patterns.
Starting November 1, 2023, I began actively training chess visualization, with the goal of eventually playing blindfold games. Exactly 50 days later, on Dec 20, 2023, I played my first blindfold game. It was against a bot and I had infinite time, but nevertheless, a major milestone.
This post documents my training history. Every day, I wrote a small note about what I trained, which I have included in full. I have also summarized it, so you can get a sense of what I did, and then you can check the detailed notes for more information if you care.
I did it! I just played my first blindfold game! It was against Stockfish level 1, only lasted 17 moves and I had infinite time to think ... but I still did it!
It will be fun to look back at this in a few years time, when I'm a seasoned blindfold player and laugh at my indecision. Nonetheless, right now, I'm pretty hyped. The game itself was fairly accurate as well. Funny, because I saw some potential tactics, but I also completely forgot whether some pieces existed or not. Definitely a huge step, though. Do this a few more times and I'll be able to graduate to playing against real people, and then I'll slowly climb the rating ladder until I reach my ultimate goal, playing "good" blindfold chess within 300 points of my normal rating.
Here's the game itself (which is on my new blindfold only account):
https://lichess.org/qsk2eIYR/black
And as proof, here's a video of my attempt. I had tried to get it to record the live board as well (after all, no one wants to watch a video of a blank chess board), but apparently minimizing the tab meant that my recording software didn't pick it up. It's also pitch black because I didn't turn on any lights, so I look like a ghost. So the video isn't that useful ... but it proves that I did it!
Do lots of tactics. Everyone knows this, and most people spend a fair bit of time doing tactical puzzles on various sites. We reach this annoying place, though, where we can sacrifice multiple pieces for any given solution ... and yet we miss much simpler tactics in our own games. Why is that?
I hinted at this in an earlier post, buy my theory is that people are training tactics incorrectly. Rather, many players are doing tactics, but they are not effectively training tactics. Training entails having a plan. Most people don't have a plan beyond "do a thousand tactics and hope I get better." That might work, but it's slow and inefficient. We can do better.
Today, I will share my thoughts on puzzles: what to do, what not to do, the different types of training and my suggestions on getting started. This post got much longer than I intended, even though, ultimately, I'm not saying anything that the chess world hasn't heard before (easy puzzles for pattern recognition, hard puzzles for calculation). Perhaps my explanations for this will trigger a light-bulb moment or two along the way. One way to find out. Let's go.
Pareto's Principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 Rule, has become quite well known. It states that 80% of our results typically come from 20% of our actions. Logically, we should try to focus on the 20% that gives us massive benefits and minimize everything else.
Sounds great in theory, but isn't always easy in practice. How do we identify whether something is in the valuable 20% of the mostly useless 80%? And, more importantly for us, how can it be applied to chess?
Here's my starting point: if you could only do one thing to improve at chess, what would it be? This focuses the query. If a training modality is not a contender for the "one thing", then it is not part of the 20%. Makes sense.
This post, then, will list the most common chess training tools and classify them as either beneficial (in that elite 20% category) or not (everything else). Once that is done, I then go further and try to show how a study plan could follow from these findings. Let's dive in.
"If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles."
In part 1, I showed how to prepare against specific openings, or at least my openings. I covered some common ideas and things to watch out for. Today, for part 2, we will continue preparing against me but in a more general way. Rather than what openings do I like, what kind of player am I?
This takes more work than just looking at a database and recording the statistics, but I think it's more revealing and more fun. The opening is only one aspect of the game, and it's arguably the least important one. Looking at broader tendencies (attacking vs defending, open vs closed, static vs dynamic) will give us a much better understanding of us as a player, which we can then use to inform our training.
Inside, I will explain how to do this and then demonstrate on myself. It should be fun. Let's go.
"If you know your enemy and your know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." That sounds absolutely great, and it applies to chess. Indeed, preparing for specific opponents goes back centuries, but I am more interested in the first part: know thy self.
This week, I have written a two-part process on the idea of preparation. Normally we prepare for a specific opponent, trying to learn strengths and weaknesses. I have never done this, but I have prepared against myself. In other words, if I had to play against me, what would I do? What would I find? If I know this, then I know more about myself, and I can use that knowledge to improve my game.
Today, I will cover the idea of specific preparation. This is what most people think about: what openings do I play, how do they do, what vulnerabilities may appear, that sort of thing. The second part will cover general preparation, which basically encompasses everything that isn't opening related. Without further ado, let's prepare against Smithy.
