When Matthew Sadler returned to competitive chess in 2010 after a ten year layoff, the odds were stacked against him. At 36, he was at an age where most players are struggling to maintain their rating, let alone increase it. And starting from a rating of 2617 he was facing a steep hill to climb. There are no easy points at that level.
Yet he was explosively successful. He started with 7/7 in a rapid tournament in Holland, then went on to scores of 8.5/10 and 8.5/9 in international tournaments in Barcelona and Oslo, competing against grandmasters. He is now close to 2700 “super grandmaster” status, while still working a (non-chess) job.
How did he do it? He credits much of his success to innovative ways of working with engines. Sadler has a lot of interesting ideas in this area, but a simple one that I like is to play practice games against Leela on one node. In computer chess jargon, “nodes” refers to the number of positions the engine has looked at. Limiting Leela to one node prevents it from doing any calculation at all: it plays on pure “intuition.”
The value of this setting is that it provides a training partner that plays natural, “human” moves, and is strong but not unbeatable. In contrast, other engines on lower strength settings often intersperse strong play with random blunders that are not the sort humans would make. By playing against Leela on one node you get a better sense of what it would be like to play the position against a human.
It’s a very simple technique, yet not one that I had ever heard of before. If you want to try this technique, there are instructions for setting up Leela in the “supplementary material” link on the website for Sadler’s book The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement.
Kamryn Hellman has a very different chess journey than Sadler. Whereas Sadler grew up playing chess, Hellman didn’t start playing until age 21. When you look at players who make tremendous progress “starting” as adults, it often turns out they actually played as kids, just not as seriously. But Hellman was literally learning the rules as an adult. Nonetheless, she got to over 2000 Chess.com rapid in two years.
Like Sadler, she developed her own techniques for training. One that I particularly like is maintaining a “Why I’m Losing” document. It’s simply a Word document with a few bullet points for the key reasons for each game you lose. Like training against Leela on one node, the core idea is simple, but not something that most people do.
What I like about this idea is that it provides a framework for looking for patterns across multiple games. Many players look for mistakes within each game, but it’s more impactful to look for patterns across multiple games. Often, it turns out that many of your mistakes are actually variations on the same weakness or error, but you need to take a step back to see it. The “Why I’m Losing” doc provides a simple reminder and template to accomplish this.
As a chess coach and writer, I’m interested in the key ingredients for improvement. What allows some players to improve rapidly, while others stagnate? Despite having very different chess journeys, I noticed that Sadler and Hellman had several big things in common.
Taking ownership over the learning process. There are a lot of resources out there for chess improvement in the form of books, courses, coaches, and so on. These can all be helpful if used properly, but they should also be taken with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, you know yourself better than anyone, and only you can ultimately be responsible for your own improvement.
Creativity in training. To the extent that we think about creativity at all in chess, it’s usually in the form of a creative or unexpected move. But creativity is equally important in training. Both Sadler and Hellman were continuously experimenting with different kinds of training. They both landed on training methods that were simple, effective, yet not widely used.
Comfort with mistakes. Both of the training methods in this post require you to be comfortable with making mistakes. Playing against the computer – even a weakened computer – will result in losing a lot of games and having your mistakes exposed. And a “Why I’m Losing” doc is of course all about cataloging mistakes. To improve on your mistakes, you have to be comfortable enough to acknowledge them.
Love for the game. One thing that comes through on both of their respective YouTube channels is just how much they enjoy chess. At the end of the day, this is the biggest competitive advantage of all because it means you’ll be more focused, more engaged, and better equipped to deal with setbacks.
I bought a video course on Alexander Morozevich during the pandemic, and before exposing his greatest games, he dedicate various chapters about "how to face the defeat", one of the main issues in chess, since some top players setup very high challenges and may collapse, a player like Magnus never collapses, he can play one or two games badly but he always bounces back, a sign of a very strong mind setup.
Well Morozevich said that he loss some 240 games and was far too much for an elite player and what he did is classify his defeats in several different groups like i.ex. one could be, "Catastrophe in the Opening", another "being outplayed by the opponent", another, "a single blunder" and so on. I don't remember exactly but he classified his defeats in 5 or 6 groups.
I guess this analytical approach of "understanding why you lose" is similar to the lady you mentioned in your article. And reminds me the famous Capablanca quote, "you must lose many games to be a good player".
TYVM
Llorenç Boldú.
A deep love for chess: this is the key. It reminds me of something GM Ben Finegold said to Chapin in his book (All the Wrong Moves). Here's the quote:
//At the end of my first lesson with Finegold, he nonchalantly asked me whether I’d like to know the secret of chess.
“Um, sure,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to believe me,” he said. “And maybe you never will.”
I nodded.
“You have to play like you never want the game to end,” he said.
And he was right. I didn’t believe him. But I asked him to tell me more.
“In life, and in chess, people make terrible decisions just because they’re impatient. They want things to end, right now, on their terms. They just want a reckoning, whether or not it’s actually good.
"So they play f4, or they play bishop takes h7, and they just tear everything apart. But you don’t have to play that way. You can play for hundreds of moves, if you want to. You could play for a thousand.
"And if you’re happy with that, your opponent will be like, I want a sandwich, I want a beer, I want to get out of here. But meanwhile, you’re content. You don’t have to go anywhere. You just like moving the pieces around. You just like playing chess.”
I don’t recall what my face did in response, but it did something.
“Okay, see you next week,” he said. //
Great advice!