Peak Inside Group Coaching: Game Review

In designing my group coaching program, I knew I wanted to include game review. Game review is one of the most valuable things you can get from coaching. Getting another pair of eyes on your games, even if it’s not a stronger player, is incredibly valuable. I’m a huge fan of the traditional postmortem where you analyze your OTB games together with your opponent. But a stronger player will often be able to instantly spot patterns that are hard for you to see. And in contrast to an engine, they can explain the reasons and thought process behind the moves.

So I knew I had to include game review, but in a group of six people, it would be tough to review everyone’s games on a regular basis. After a lot of thought, I came up with a format I’m really excited about:

• Everyone submits one mistake from one of their games in advance. No one else sees the position beforehand.

• In the session, we all look at the position quietly for 5 minutes, then everyone has to write down the move they'd play.

• Then we analyze and discuss as a group for 10 minutes.

• 15 minutes x 6 players = 90 minutes

The format is very simple, but there’s a reason behind each component. In the rest of this post, I’ll go through the reasoning in more detail.

Mistakes

Why am I asking everyone to submit a mistake?

Well, I’ve been working on making my own training, and my coaching, more mistake-oriented. The idea is that by focusing on mistakes, you make your training relevant for what’s actually causing you to lose games right now.

I’m a big fan of just-in-time over just-in-case learning.

Just-in-time: Learn what you need, when you need it, to accomplish the task in front of you.

Just-in-case: Learn everything that seems like it might be useful, just in case you need it.

Many chess players are operating on a just-in-case basis. I call this strategy accumulation of esoterica. To put it in plainer terms, you’re learning a bunch of random bullshit.

The problem is, there’s a nearly infinite number of things you could learn about chess. You might be learning something that’s far more advanced than your current level. By the time it comes up in a real game, chances are you’ve already forgotten about it.

Additionally, it takes a lot of practice to get a concept to the point where you can apply it successfully. If you’re constantly learning new ideas, you might know about a lot of things, but not be able to use any of them effectively in a real game.

I recently re-read the book Pump Up Your Rating by Axel Smith. My favorite advice from this book is to create a list of mistakes and categorize them. I started doing this for all my students, and I’ve been amazed how quickly patterns emerge.

Here’s an example Mistake List from a student I recently started working with. Note that in only six mistakes, several patterns of repeated mistakes are already emerging.

(In case you’re wondering, FPS stands for Fancy Play Syndrome. I took the term from poker.)

Once we’ve identified a pattern of mistakes, we can make a training plan to address it. The benefit to this strategy, compared to accumulation of esoterica, is we already know the plan is relevant. If you can identify the main thing causing you to lose, and stop doing that thing, you’re going to win more games.

One Position

This is mostly to make sure we have a chance to look at everyone’s games in one session. Going over whole games is very time consuming, and many of the moves don’t have a big impact on the result anyway. I’ve noticed that when I try to review whole games in coaching sessions, whether the player’s own games or someone else’s, at some point their attention starts to drift.

I also like that this gives everyone a chance to practice their decision-making in real world scenarios. Puzzles are great, but mostly focus on one specific type of position, when there’s exactly one forcing win. In contrast, mistakes can occur in any type of position. Knowing that the player did in fact make a mistake, we have evidence that this is a challenging position for players within the target range (all groups will be within a 400 rating point band).

That, by the way, is why I’m going to make everyone write down their move. It’s important to practice making decisions, even in positions where there’s no clear right answer.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m really excited about this format for game review. If you’re interested in group coaching, please fill out this application.

See you next week!