The Improvement You're Seeking Is In The Losses You're Avoiding

What is the most important skill in chess? Many would say tactical vision. I could argue that many players need to work on captures before they graduate to more complex tactics. Or perhaps time management, which remains a very underrated skill. But if I had to choose one, I would make it learning to lose productively.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how playing consistently is the most important part of any study routine. I recently updated how I document and track study plans for my coaching clients. This isn’t to say the plans are complicated - they’re usually very simple - but I realized I lacked visibility on what my students were actually doing. When I started tracking more systematically, I found something odd: many of them were not playing chess!

There could be many reasons for this. Sometimes work and family responsibilities get in the way of playing chess, I certainly understand that. But I think the biggest reason is fear of losing.

It seems that many of us have internalized the message that losing is shameful and needs to be avoided at all costs. Part of this comes from school, where we receive the message that we’re supposed to get 100% on every test and homework assignment. (My issues with school could be a whole other post, or ten.)

This is unfortunate because losses contain the best clues about what we need to work on. If you avoid losses, you deprive yourself of the most valuable lessons you could be getting.

I’ve previously written about the cave strategy, where you retreat to a cave, study assiduously for months, and emerge to win a tournament. The good thing about the cave strategy is it lets you get good without experiencing the pain of losing; the bad thing about the cave strategy is it doesn’t work.

Some players try to bargain with me here. What if I make my study incredibly intense and game-like? What if I do really hard calculation exercises with a clock running and loud music blaring in my ears?

Well, maybe. GM Raven Sturt is one player who attributed a leap in strength to doing very intense calculation training. But I doubt most players will be able to summon the same level of intensity day after day as Raven.

More to the point, this is all unnecessary. You make your life so much easier if you are just willing to lose. Then you no longer need to devise convoluted training plans to simulate playing - you just play and learn from your mistakes.

I’m generally skeptical about claims that learning chess improves your performance in other areas of life, but if there is one important thing chess has to teach everyone, it’s how to lose. There are even times I’ve wondered how my students - who are usually very successful in their professions - have accomplished so much without learning to lose. Have they been on a non-stop winning streak in every area of life except chess?!

But I’ve realized that the ability to lose, or tolerate failure, is highly domain specific. I’ve been playing chess for a long time and am more or less at peace with where I’m at. A loss in a crucial OTB tournament game still stings, but losing a random game online usually doesn’t throw me off. But when I made a (ultimately not very important) blunder in my business recently, I was pacing around the house yelling at myself.

I think it all comes back to identity, to which activities you believe really reflect on you as a person. Many people get into chess to prove - perhaps to themselves - how smart they are. When they lose, it seems to show the opposite, and this is very painful.

Of course, there are a lot of problems with this logic. Chess is a game, not an intelligence test. Many smart people are bad at chess, and some GMs are real dumbasses. Nonetheless, it can be hard to get the subconscious to embrace this logic, and the pain of losing remains.

This is a battle well worth fighting. If you can accept losses and learn from them, you’ll unlock not only one of the biggest keys to chess improvement, but a skill you can use to grow in other areas of life as well.