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.
The Training Types
Playing Games: This seems obvious. You can't improve if you don't play! This might be too obvious, actually, because we rarely consider playing as a form of training. There is a reason the most repeated advice going back decades has been "play lots of long, slow games". My friend NM Matt Jensen has found that most adult improvers don't play near enough, and he has this as one of the highest priorities in his free training plans. Verdict: Long games a contender for the "one thing" and easily qualifies for the 20%. Less clear if faster games help, but we'll save that for another day.
Analyzing Games: This goes part and parcel with the above. You play a game, then you look to where you can improve. By definition, this focuses on your individual weak areas. It's also holistic, covering openings, middlegame, endings, tactics, etc. Without this, you might make the same mistake 10 games in a row. It's indispensable. Verdict: Definitely a strong contender. Definitely 20%.
Calculation, Tactics & Pattern Recognition: I will discuss all three together, though I think each one of these is distinct. They get trained in the same way, though: tactical puzzles. Harder, more complex positions focus on pure calculation, whereas easier positions favour pattern recognition. As the saying goes, chess is 99% tactics, and calculation is the prime skill. Verdict: Definitely part of the 20%, but I think the above are more universal and more deserving of the "one thing" characterization.
Guess-The-Move Training: This may be the most under-rated thing on this list. Take a game and guess the move of the winner. If you do it in a game-like setting (so don't move the pieces, track your time, stay focused without distractions, etc), then it's as if you are playing against a master. You get exposure to all aspects of the game and get to compare your thoughts with a master. Verdict: This may be it.
Endgames: "Study endgames" has been advice going back forever ... but not every game goes to the endgame and the vast majority don't reach a theoretical position. I have played nearly 2,000 correspondence games and have come across maybe 50 of the "100 Endgames You Must Know". Practical endgames are more ... practical, but even here we are dealing with only one phase of the game. Verdict: Not part of the top 20%.
Openings: The exact same critique: openings only deal with one phase of the game. I'd rank this a touch higher than endgames because every game has an opening. Knowing what to do on the first moves will set you up for success later on, but clearly it's not the most important thing we can do to improve. Verdict: Not part of the 20%.
Watching Content: This is a huge category, and in my view it includes the best educational videos (both paid and free), the best pure entertainment streamers and everything in between. These can be interesting, inspiring, illuminating... but it's watching someone else. It's primarily passive. Even my favourite Waitzkin videos, as good as they are, are passive learning. Do you expect to get better just by watching these? Verdict: Not part of the 20%.
Books and Courses: Hot-take alert. I don't rate books and courses that high. Yes, I love chess books. I've bought dozens, maybe even hundreds... and I've read a good chunk of them. I can clearly point to two books / courses (Tarrasch and Smirnov) that made a clear, measurable increase in my ability. The vast majority did not. Further, most books tend to focus on a single topic, which lends itself to a similar criticism as endings and openings.
To clarify, you can clearly use books to do most of what I have mentioned: guess-the-move, calculation, analyzing games all jump to mind. It's doing those things, though, where the improvement happens. As we all know, there's a big difference between passively reading something and actively engaging in the material. I think books and courses complement our other training, but are not a distinct phase themselves. Verdict: Close, but not part of the top 20%.
Looking at the Results
Remember, the 80/20 Principle does not say to never do the "bad" stuff. Rather, it tells us what to focus on. Given a choice, we should prioritize doing something in "good" 20% tier as opposed to the "bad" 80%. That makes sense, and I don't think anyone will argue too hard that spending an hour doing calculation drills vs watching Hikaru play bullet has the same improvement effect.
Nor do I think my inclusions into the "good" 20% club are that controversial. Play slow games. Analyze your games. Focus on calculation and tactics. These are all active forms of learning and have been repeated ad nausea.
Where I might get pushback is with openings (well, maybe not much pushback here), endgames and books. Again, I'm not saying that we never do these. I'm saying that these have less of an impact on your results. Said another way, imagine two people each spend 100hrs on training chess. One focuses on analyzing games and calculation, and the other focuses on reading endgame books. What does your intuition say?
Me, I say that books follow the same 80/20 rule. Most books are merely average and barely give you much improvement; a select few will give you great results. If you only read those books and spend the rest of your time on active learning like in the 20% I mentioned, that seems a much better time allocation.
Said another way, if all books and courses are included in the best 20%, then what is excluded? Just openings and endings? By definition, there has to be more in the 80% than in the 20%, and I think the vast majority of books fit into the 80%. It's never a mistake to analyze some games or do calculation practice, but it might be a waste of time to simply read a bunch of books. That's the clinching argument for me.
Creating an 80/20 Training Plan
With all that set, let's craft a training plan that covers all our bases and focuses on the "good" 20% that produces most of our results. Don't ignore the things on the bottom, but rather, focus on the things at the top.
- Play Serious Games. This is the ultimate factor. I used "serious" because if you are just playing for fun or not giving 100%, it's not that useful for improvement. Longer games are clearly better, but you can fit this into your schedule as it allows. In my opinion, Guess-the-Move and training games against the computer both count as playing, so long as you treat it seriously. However it is done, some form of playing should form a large chunk of your training plan.
- Analyzing Games. These complement the above; indeed, if you don't play games, you'll have nothing to analyze! This outranks calculation and tactical problems, simply because if you analyze games, you will train your tactics and work on calculation in real game settings while also improving the rest of your game. I'd wager this should be nearly the same time investment as with playing.
- Deep Calculation, Tactics and Pattern Recognition. It feels like cheating to put all of this in one step. For Pattern Recognition, you want to train lots of easy tactics and ingrain the patterns, whereas with Deep Calculation, you want to train only a select few positions and analyze them as deep as possible. It's a very different type of training, but it all feeds into the same core skill. I would suggest doing 5-15min of easy puzzles as a warm-up (perhaps Puzzle Storm or similar), and then push your limits with hard puzzles. This can be an entire training session by itself.
- What's nice is that these three most important elements can all be trained without spending a penny. You can play games, analyze them and do free tactics on all the major sites.
- We now begin our transition into the "inefficient" tiers. These are still important, just less so. First, Books and Courses on various topics. This is where you'll learn about chess, so strategy and positional play and all that good stuff.
- Next, learn Opening Principles and create a Simple Opening Repertoire. This gets you started on the right foot, and once you've finished, you never need to touch this step again. "Simple" will depend on individual level, but the intention is to get this done in just a few hours, no more. The less time spent here, the more you have for the good stuff above. Eventually you may need to build a bigger repertoire, but most amateurs can rely on opening principles for a very long time.
- Finally, Endgame Principles and the Most Essential Endgame Theory. Similar to above, the Endgame Principles will guide you in unfamiliar positions, and you don't need to learn all (or even most) endgames. "Silman's Endgame Course" is probably the best bet here. Again, aim to invest the minimal amount of time necessary to get the most out of this.
How might this look in practice? Let's suppose you train chess 1hr a day, so 7hrs a week. We want the majority of our week to be on the first three items, so we might spend two days playing serious games, two days analyzing them and/or playing Guess-the-Move, and then two days for hard calculation work. Every day starts with a 6min tactical warm-up for pattern recognition (ie, 10% of our time). That leaves the final day free to read a book, learn some openings or whatever else.
This is just a sample. You can organize it anyway you want. If you spend most of your time on the first three items in this list, you are applying the 80/20 Principle right!
Conclusion
At the risk of repeating myself, I'm not saying that openings, endgames, etc have no place in your training. Of course not. Rather, I'm saying that other things are a much better time investment. You will improve faster if you spend more time on playing, analyzing and calculating than doing other training things. At least, that's what the 80/20 Principle suggests.
All of this assumes you are actively trying to improve. If you have no ambitions to improve and just want to have some fun with this great game, all the power to you. You can do what you want. If you want an 80/20 structured training approach to get better, though, then hopefully my ideas here have pointed you in the right direction.
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