Stop Cheating on Your Training
Common habits that drain the value from your study time and how to avoid them
Quick announcement before getting into the post today: I’m writing a chess book!
The book is about evaluation, a key chess skill that doesn’t get enough attention. It’s a collaboration with my friend GM Eugene Perelshteyn.
Head over here to find out more and try some free puzzles from the book.
Okay, back to regularly scheduled programming!
The chess world is obsessed with the specter of online cheating, but that’s not the kind of cheating I’m talking about today. I’m talking about cheating yourself out of the value of training by using shortcuts or anti-patterns that sap the value out of your chess study.
While there are undoubtedly some dastardly individuals out there, the cheating you’re doing to yourself is probably costing you more in the long run than losing to the occasional guy using his engine to win internet Elo points.
Cheating on your training often takes the form of not engaging with what you’re studying. You could try to address this by resolving to engage more fully, but this strategy breaks down when you become tired or distracted, which you inevitably will at one time or another. A more reliable strategy is to develop study habits that force you to engage.
Reviewing Games
Academic resources often emphasize the value of note taking over simply highlighting passage from a text. The reason is that highlighting makes it too easy to cheat. It’s possible to read and highlight thoughtfully, but it’s easy to zone out and highlight random sentences. In contrast, you can’t really zone out while taking notes: you have to think about what to write. In effect, taking notes forces you to engage with the text.
Let’s apply the same principle to reviewing chess master games. Simply playing through the moves is similar to highlighting: it can work if you’re engaged, but it’s easy to zone out and not get much out of the exercise. Here too, taking notes is a good way to force yourself to pay attention.
Another more chess-specific option would be to guess the next move. Pick a side to play as, cover up the moves so you can’t see them, and write down what you would do on each move; then compare it to what happened in the game. This technique forces you to engage with the game.
Guess-and-Check Tactics
While convenient, online tactics trainers enable a nasty anti-pattern that takes away a lot of their value and may even make them a net negative for some people. You can play out the solution one move at a time, retrying moves you get wrong, thereby “solving” the puzzle with a guess-and-check method.
The problem is that this encourages the habit of playing the first move you think of without considering your opponent’s response. This is the exact opposite of the thought process you want to be training. In a real game if you go for a tactic and your opponent surprises you with a move you hadn’t considered, there’s a good chance you lose the game on the spot. You need to know how you’re going to deal with your opponent’s responses before you make your move.
If you study tactics from a book and write down your full answer before checking it, you can’t use the guess-and-check method. It’s slower, but you force yourself to train the patterns you need to succeed in a real game.
Opening Preparation
In another study, researchers compared the performance on a test of students who reviewed by rereading the textbook, compared to another group of students who reviewed by writing down everything they could remember from the lessons. While the students who reread the text felt more confident, the students who did the writing performed better when it came to the actual test.
Many chess players review openings by “clicking through” their opening files. Like the students who reread the textbook, they’re likely to be overconfident about how much they know, because when the answer is right in front of you it’s easy to tell yourself you would have got it. Reviewing without looking at your notes makes you feel less confident in the moment, but makes the information stick more in the long run.
Learning researchers call this “retrieval.” The act of retrieving a piece of information from memory builds much stronger connections than simply looking at the same piece of information.
The obvious benefit of using Chessable to review your openings is that it manages your review schedule, but possibly as important is that it provides an interface to review opening lines without showing you the answers in advance. Another way is to copy what Sam Shankland does at the end of preparing for a specific opponent: “barf” all the lines he prepared into a fresh, empty Chessbase file. This forces him to recall all the lines without any cues. If you can’t recall the lines right after studying them, what are the chances you’d be able to reproduce them in a game?
Even grandmasters aren’t immune from counterproductive habits. If you listen to grandmasters talk about their preparation routines, many of them describe spending hours before each game memorizing lines tailored to their next opponent. To me this sounds a lot like cramming for a test.
While cramming gets a bad name, the research suggests it does work - sort of. Cramming is reasonably effective for passing the test, but the information tends to be in one ear and out the other. Students often forget it a few days after the test. Building long-lasting knowledge requires consistent study over a longer period of time. This means that the preparation a GM does for a given game is unlikely to have much lasting value beyond that game.
You can’t necessarily take what GMs say about their preparation routine at face value - they have a competitive incentive not to reveal too much - but based on some comments, Magnus Carlsen might not do as much cramming as his colleagues. He’s said that sometimes he decides which opening to play in the car on the way to the game. It makes me wonder if part of his edge is that he’s worked out a more robust long-term study routine.
The reason some GMs feel compelled to cram before games is that they need to play a lot of different openings because their opponents have the time and expertise to target them with specific preparation.
Fortunately for 99% of people reading this, you don’t have this problem. Unless you’re a titled player, it’s unlikely that many of your opponents are going to hit you with targeted opening preparation. (If you’re really paranoid about this, you might not want to have online accounts associated with your real name.)
Even if they do know what you play, unless your opponent is a very strong player who’s great at researching openings, they shouldn’t be able to do much damage to your repertoire. That means you’re free to focus on developing a single, stable repertoire calmly and consistently over time.
Takeaways
Many study techniques can work if you bring the right attitude, but the most reliable way to get the most out of your study time is to set it up so it’s impossible to cheat yourself.
Chess is a game of decision making. The best study techniques force you to make a decision. Even better is to write down your decision and compare it to the best move in the position.
Thanks to Santo D’Agostino and Barry Hymer for feedback on this post.
Good article Nate. thank you!
With tactics I think it depends on why you are doing them. If you are trying to do high-volume basic tactics to build pattern recognition, there is just so much benefit to the increased throughput you can get on the tactics trainers that it can be worth it to try to take a disciplined approach (make yourself see the whole variation instead of playing the first move that looks winning). I think I can easily do 5 times as many per day on the trainer than I can on paper. If you are trying to train calculation, doing it on paper is a better way to keep yourself honest.