The Four Stages of Competence

How to master chess ideas intuitively

According to some experts, chess grandmasters need to learn over 300,000 “chunks” of information. While you won’t need all of those chunks every game, you’ll certainly need more than a couple, which raises a problem. How are you supposed to hold all of them in your mind at once? If you have to think about them, you won’t be able to.

Many people think of chess as the ultimate thinking game, but thinking is overrated (at least conscious thinking). To effectively use so many ideas, most of them need to be working under the surface, intuitively. The challenge of chess training then is not simply learning new ideas, but learning them to the point where they are nearly automatic and do not take up your attention.

The Four Stages of Competence provides a useful model for how to get chess concepts working intuitively.

1. Unconscious Incompetence - You suck and you don’t know it.

2. Conscious Incompetence - You suck, but now you know it.

3. Conscious Competence - You can do it, but you have to think about it.

4. Unconscious Competence - You can do it without thinking.

Kokcharov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s go through the four stages in more detail with an eye to how they work in chess.

Unconscious Incompetence

Of course, there are far more chess skills than you’ll ever completely master, so at any given time there are many skills or ideas in the zone of unconscious incompetence. The challenge at this phase is how to become aware of the skills you need to master but don’t yet know about.

An outside pair of eyes can be very helpful in this step. A friend, training partner, or coach might be able to instantly spot weaknesses that you’re blind to. I used to ask all prospective chess students, "What is your biggest weakness?" I don't do this anymore because I found that after working with them, I almost never agreed with the student on what their biggest weakness actually was.

Self evaluation is notoriously challenging in other contexts as well. It may be that the famous Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby incompetent people supposedly overrate their own abilities, is just a byproduct of everyone being terrible at self assessment.

A good coach can point out areas that need attention, but thoughtful review of your own games can also provide a lot of insight. It’s not enough to just note your mistakes, you have to look deeper. What kinds of mistakes occur over and over? Is there an underlying thought process error or gap in knowledge that’s causing these mistakes? These questions can be clues to areas you need to address.

Conscious Incompetence

This is often the most painful step and the one where you’re at greatest risk of abandoning the process. It can be extremely frustrating when you’re aware of a mistake but not yet able to correct it.

For a while I was using the Headspace app for meditation and one of the guided meditations had a story that stuck with me. Every day you walk along the same path and fall into the same pothole. At some point, you start thinking, “Oh yeah, this is the part where I always step into the pothole…” And then you step into the pothole. But after that continues for a while, one day you realize in time and simply step around the pothole.

This seems to be how it goes with chess improvement. “I know I’ve been losing a lot of games because I push too many pawns around my king and create weaknesses, but whatever, I want to attack that bishop.” It takes some time for the adjustment to sink in well enough that you can actually implement it in-game.

The risk is that you become so frustrated at this step that you give up and go back to square one. It’s an odd - and frustrating - feeling to know you’re about to make a mistake and make it anyway, but this seems to be an essential part of the process. Take consolation in knowing that if you’re aware of the mistake, you’re well on your way to correcting it.

Conscious Competence

Congratulations, you can finally do the thing! The mistake most people make here is thinking this is the end of the process. Remember, there are far more skills in chess than you can consciously be thinking about at any given time, so just because you can do something when you are completely focused on it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it effectively in a real game. I find that I can consciously try to change one or maybe two parts of my game at a time. Beyond that, it needs to be happening unconsciously.

Many people make their chess training too hard: books that are too advanced, puzzles that are too hard. They build up many areas to a level of conscious competence, meaning on a good day, with plenty of time and concentration, they can do the thing. But in a real game all these skills are in play at once, plus others you’re not thinking about, plus the clock pressure and your opponent, and it all comes crumbling down. For a skill to be consistently useful in a real game you need to get it to the phase of unconscious competence.

Unconscious Competence

This is when you can use the skill effectively without thinking about it. If you’re not thinking about it, how do you know it’s there? One way goes back to the game review from the first phase where you identified patterns of mistakes by examining them closely and thinking carefully. When you deeply understand the cause of those mistakes, they’ll seem obvious. You may even find it hard to believe you ever played those moves.

You might also notice potential for the same mistakes during the game. There can be a feeling of “stepping around the hole” where you recognize a pitfall but are not tempted to fall into it. Often, you notice the biggest differences in your opponent’s game. Opponents who were challenging for you now seem easy to beat. Or you start to recognize entire categories of mistakes in your opponent’s play that were invisible to you before.

Now it’s time to move on to the next thing. Go back to step one and load the next skill onto the conveyor belt.

Wrapping Up

1. Use game review to identify areas of improvement.

2. Don’t give up when you recognize a mistake and make it anyway. This is part of the process.

3. Don’t stop working on a skill when you can barely do it with a lot of effort. It needs to be automatic to use it consistently in a game.

4. When you really have a skill down, go back to step 1 with the next skill.