Go See God

How hard to you have to work to improve?

Want to know the secret to improving your calculation? It’s really simple: Do four solid hours of solving studies. Four days in a row.

I have to admit, when the legendary trainer GM RB Ramesh suggested this at a guest talk in The Chess Gym, I almost spit out my coffee. Four hours? For four days? I barely have time to work on chess at all!

But when Ramesh talks, you have to listen. He’s worked with many of the top Indian players, including the Praggnanandhaa siblings, who will be the first brother-sister pair to compete in the Candidates tournament. It’s a testament to his presence as a coach that just about everyone in the call seemed fired up to give it a try. Maybe not the full four days, but at least one day, four solid hours.

It got me thinking about how I could reconcile this kind of ultra-intense training with our philosophy of doing a little each day. Because the truth is, you can improve without a superhuman time commitment, if you are consistent and focused. We have members sharing tournament wins and all-time-high ratings all the time.

I remembered a poem that the running coach Steve Magness uses to describe his approach to training:

Mostly easy, 

Occasionally hard, 

Vary it up, 

Once in a while, go see God.

This is a good reminder that it’s not either-or: a good training program probably has a lot of variety. And I can see the value in the occasional all-out training session. It’s the idea that the training should be harder than the competition. That way, when you get to the real competition, it feels easy.

I asked my friend Benji Portheault, a performance expert who worked with the English national team at the last Chess Olympiad, how often it would make sense to do the hard session. He said we don’t know what’s optimal for chess, but distance runners typically do their long run once a week, so maybe this could be a guideline.

Realistically, most of us are going to be bound by time commitments anyway. It would be very hard for me to fit in an uninterrupted four-hour chess workout. You should also keep in mind your current baseline. If you can’t remember the last time you worked on chess for a solid hour, I don’t think you’re going to make it through four hours, even if you set aside the time. For most players, a solid one hour calculation session with all-out focus would be very challenging. I think this would be a good guideline: once a week, do a hard calculation session, a little longer than what you’re comfortable with.

Another idea would be to see the tournament itself as the hard session. This would be more like marathon runners, who never actually run the full 26 miles except in the race itself. Going to a chess tournament for a day might be an easier sell with your family than locking yourself in your room with a chess board for that same day. At least, you’re less likely to be interrupted by your kids, or perhaps more importantly, distracted by social media. And I think seeing tournaments as part of your training routine (not the culmination of it) is quite healthy anyway.

No matter which approach you take, it’s worth thinking about how you could push yourself out of your comfort zone, at least occasionally.