As a chess coach, I find blunders one of the hardest issues to address. If a player lacks knowledge – for example, they don’t know what a backward pawn is – I can explain that easily enough. And if they lack skill – say, they stop their calculation too early – we can work on that as well. But blunders don’t seem to be a lack of either knowledge or skill.
Noel Struder made a great recommendation on Perpetual Chess recently. Just before you make your move, you write down the opponent’s time on your scoresheet next to their last move. Then you check your move one more time. I tried this in my last tournament and I think it really helped and saved me from a mistake in a couple of cases and led me to find a better move in another. I still made a blunder on one move where I was too excited to do it. But it gives me hope as a practice to cut those instances way back.
It can help to sit with your student and look at their games and talk about what situations the blunders happen in. For the student it might feel like random situations. The chess trainer should be strong enough to recognize similarities. Some people blunder just as they are mopping up a win, some end up in time trouble too often and some play too fast in early middle game because they don’t slow down after the opening phase.
Aiden Rayner (from https://dontmoveuntilyousee.it), has a series of articles on working memory and how it is limited to seven slots. Not managing these well may lead to blunders, if not understand him correctly. It’s worth a read.
From a completely different area of study (mathematics), Craig Barton has a interesting section on "Silly Mistakes" which I think are analogous to "blunders" I am going to exerpt from it at length here, (attempting to remove the math parts).
> I used to think students who make silly mistakes were lazy and careless. A missing unit of measurement here, an incomplete final step there, and before you knew it crucial exam marks where disappearing down the drain. Silly mistakes were the bane of my life. My technique for stopping my students making such mistakes? Repeatedly tell them not ot be so careless, of course.
> Strangely this did not seem to work.
> [...]
> Having considered Cognitive Load Theory and the workings of memory, I am not so sure anymore. [Example where student misses key step]. Now this could be a silly mistake, but it could also be the result of cognitive overload.
> [Continued example showing how much a non-expert student has to keep in mind while answering the question]
> We can see here how domain-specific expertise, and the associated way of thinking that accompanies it, can help this process. For an expert, this question has a relatively low intrinsic load. They are likely to immediately recognise this as a [blah] problem - indeed, they may have solved an unconventional one like this in the past - and will easily be able to retrieve the answers to the calculations with little burden placed upon working memory. Hence, they have the capacity left to complete the problem, check it makes sense, and also assimilate it to their long-term memories and hence learn from the process.
> Here are a selection of other 'silly mistakes' that may indeed by the result of cognitive overload. In each case, notice how it is the final stage of the process where the mistake occurs - in other words at the very point when working memroy is likely to be feeling the greatest strain.
> [Series of examples]
> What I do now
> Where a student makes what I would have previously dismissed as a 'silly mistake', I now ask myself if carelessness really is the cause, or could it be cognitive overload? If it is the latter, then telling the student to be more carefuly next time is likely to be a fruitless exercise. Instead, I need to equip them with the knowledge they need to successfully solve such problems, and ensure as much of it as possible is automated.
> But this is a long-term solution, making use of the principles of explicity instruction together with the practical strategies described in the chapters that follow. However, there are more intermediate steps we can take to reduce the extreaneous load, and hence increase the chances of our students solving problems like this successfully.
To translate into chess terms. "Often, blunders aren't a result of carelessness, but of the player suffering from too much going on in the position. The long-term solution is to get better at chess. The medium-term solutions involved (breaking down the process into simpler pieces (eg checklists), looking at shorter lines / more variations, try and say as many (general) things about the position rather than trying to find the best move". (The medium term solutions come from the rest of the chapter, and not all of that chapter translates directly to chess.)
I watch this Ben Finegold video before every game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDgRR7SGf0M
Seems to help.
Noel Struder made a great recommendation on Perpetual Chess recently. Just before you make your move, you write down the opponent’s time on your scoresheet next to their last move. Then you check your move one more time. I tried this in my last tournament and I think it really helped and saved me from a mistake in a couple of cases and led me to find a better move in another. I still made a blunder on one move where I was too excited to do it. But it gives me hope as a practice to cut those instances way back.
Nice article and thanks for the recommendation of my course!
It can help to sit with your student and look at their games and talk about what situations the blunders happen in. For the student it might feel like random situations. The chess trainer should be strong enough to recognize similarities. Some people blunder just as they are mopping up a win, some end up in time trouble too often and some play too fast in early middle game because they don’t slow down after the opening phase.
Aiden Rayner (from https://dontmoveuntilyousee.it), has a series of articles on working memory and how it is limited to seven slots. Not managing these well may lead to blunders, if not understand him correctly. It’s worth a read.
From a completely different area of study (mathematics), Craig Barton has a interesting section on "Silly Mistakes" which I think are analogous to "blunders" I am going to exerpt from it at length here, (attempting to remove the math parts).
> I used to think students who make silly mistakes were lazy and careless. A missing unit of measurement here, an incomplete final step there, and before you knew it crucial exam marks where disappearing down the drain. Silly mistakes were the bane of my life. My technique for stopping my students making such mistakes? Repeatedly tell them not ot be so careless, of course.
> Strangely this did not seem to work.
> [...]
> Having considered Cognitive Load Theory and the workings of memory, I am not so sure anymore. [Example where student misses key step]. Now this could be a silly mistake, but it could also be the result of cognitive overload.
> [Continued example showing how much a non-expert student has to keep in mind while answering the question]
> We can see here how domain-specific expertise, and the associated way of thinking that accompanies it, can help this process. For an expert, this question has a relatively low intrinsic load. They are likely to immediately recognise this as a [blah] problem - indeed, they may have solved an unconventional one like this in the past - and will easily be able to retrieve the answers to the calculations with little burden placed upon working memory. Hence, they have the capacity left to complete the problem, check it makes sense, and also assimilate it to their long-term memories and hence learn from the process.
> Here are a selection of other 'silly mistakes' that may indeed by the result of cognitive overload. In each case, notice how it is the final stage of the process where the mistake occurs - in other words at the very point when working memroy is likely to be feeling the greatest strain.
> [Series of examples]
> What I do now
> Where a student makes what I would have previously dismissed as a 'silly mistake', I now ask myself if carelessness really is the cause, or could it be cognitive overload? If it is the latter, then telling the student to be more carefuly next time is likely to be a fruitless exercise. Instead, I need to equip them with the knowledge they need to successfully solve such problems, and ensure as much of it as possible is automated.
> But this is a long-term solution, making use of the principles of explicity instruction together with the practical strategies described in the chapters that follow. However, there are more intermediate steps we can take to reduce the extreaneous load, and hence increase the chances of our students solving problems like this successfully.
To translate into chess terms. "Often, blunders aren't a result of carelessness, but of the player suffering from too much going on in the position. The long-term solution is to get better at chess. The medium-term solutions involved (breaking down the process into simpler pieces (eg checklists), looking at shorter lines / more variations, try and say as many (general) things about the position rather than trying to find the best move". (The medium term solutions come from the rest of the chapter, and not all of that chapter translates directly to chess.)
There is an excellent blunder section on Aimchess. You are given 2 moves in a position, 1 is a blunder, 1 isn’t.