Everything we’ve talked about so far involves the development of intuition. I believe
that this is one of the most important and underestimated aspects of chess improvement,
but it is certainly not the only element of performing well in serious, over the board
play. In addition to working on my chess intuition, I’ve also spent a fair amount of
time working on optimizing my over the board play. This chapter is about these aspects:
what I’ve learned about what to do and what not to do in applying all the learning that
I accomplished over the past three years.
Improving chess intuition increases the number and quality of arrows you will have
available in your quiver, but you still have to use them well. Here are some of the most
important things I’ve learned in my chess journey about what goes into optimizing the
quality of your OTB play:
- Mindset matters the most. A lot has been written about this elsewhere, so I won’t go
into it too much here, but your frame of mind - positive, negative, scared, confident,
jubilant, furious - makes an enormous difference in how well you play every move. When I was
in my teens, this factor almost by itself accounted for over 600 rating points of difference. Identify
the frame of mind where you play the best and learn how to achieve that frame of mind
consistently. In all seriousness, doing this well will be worth hundreds of rating points
over doing it poorly.
- Depend on your intuition, not your memory. Since I did so much memory work, it was
tempting to try to just play my games from memory as much as possible, even if I didn’t
understand why a given move was good. I almost always found this to be a mistake. If I
kind of remember that I’m supposed to play a particular move but it doesn’t really make
sense to me in a game, I have gotten into trouble far more often by playing that move
than by playing a move that makes sense. Often I have mis-remembered the context for
the move I thought I was supposed to play, and even when I haven’t made a memory error if I
don’t remember why it’s good then the following moves are often bad. It’s far better to play a
decent move you understand than a great move you don’t. And that’s if you remembered it
right. The point of the memory work is to expose your brain to good patterns for
you to generally apply, more than it is to give you specific information to handle each exact
position you reach.
- Improvement is a journey. There is a great Japanese saying that helped me, “If
in your journey you fall down seven times, get up eight.” Very few improvement journeys
are smooth and easy. My own certainly hasn’t been. Chess can be an unforgiving game
and when you inevitably lose, the most important thing is to pick yourself up and learn from what
happened. Of course, you should analyze your games and identify mistakes and points
where your intuition was problematic, and fix these as usual, but also where you were
managing your time badly, where your emotions were getting the best of you, and how
your thought processes could have been improved. Be objective about how you could
have done better and take tangible steps to improve.
- Humans benefit from having other humans around. This last point is one of the most
important ones, and it has nothing to do with optimizing the quality of your moves. One
of the most important aspects of over the board play for me has been the fact that it is in
person with other human beings. Optimizing your OTB experience isn’t just about winning
games. You can find community in the chess world in many ways, but playing in person is
one of the most natural ways to spend time with other people who love the game like you
do. Over the board tournaments and the side events that accompany them (meals, skittles,
game analysis, whatever) have been some of the greatest joys for me since getting back
into playing. People in a strong community motivate and support each other, and that is
absolutely the case in a good community of chess players. Find your community and nourish
it - joys shared are doubled and problems shared are halved.
In the next chapter we summarize our findings and how to build and execute your own plan for
chess improvement.
