The Risks of Over-Optimizing
Why sometimes less structure is better
A quick note before the post today: Zwischenzug is cashing in, baby! Starting next week you’ll sometimes see sponsored posts or deep dives. The reason for this is pretty simple: I love to think about and write about chess, but realistically I can’t keep spending as much time on it as I have over the past year without making some money off of it - especially since my wife and I are expecting our first child in June! So I’m going to start doing some sponsored posts. These will always be with products I use and/or believe in. Anyway, back to the usual post! And if you’d like to sponsor a post in the future please send me an email.
Chess Twitter is all about optimization. What’s the best endgame book? The best study routine? Should you divide your playing and studying time 50-50, or maybe 60-40 is better? But if you listen to strong players talk about how they got good at chess it’s a very different story. Often they describe playing a lot of blitz, skimming through books, or looking at chess positions with friends. They didn’t seem to optimize much of anything.
Of course, usually this period happened when they were kids. Optimizers might say, “That sounds great, but I’m a busy adult, I need to be more efficient with my training.” Even players who got good in this unstructured fashion often assume that if only they had been more structured with their training they would have gotten even better. But what makes us so sure that more structure is better? Why do we prioritize our idea of what efficient study should look like over what strong players have actually done in the past?
I think we should be open to the idea that structure, like most things, is a balancing act. There is such a thing as too much structure, just as surely as not enough. And not only because we can’t keep up with our complicated training plans. Maybe those training plans wouldn’t have worked even if we could stick with them because excessive structure is not only hard to manage, but at times unhelpful and even stifling.
I recently went to one of my five-year-old nephew’s soccer games and I was shocked at the level of adult involvement in the game. Multiple adults were on the field at all times cajoling, corralling, and shouting instructions. The kids didn’t seem to be especially interested in soccer - or, in some cases, even know that they were playing. In such a situation it’s hard to see how anyone learns much about passing, dribbling, or shooting. If they learn anything, it’s that the most important thing is to follow directions obediently. But following directions doesn’t score goals. Maybe this is why we (Americans) are so resolutely mediocre at soccer.
In contrast, in Brazil, where many of the world’s greatest soccer players come from, kids play pickup soccer on the street from a young age. Children of different ages play and compete against each other without adult supervision. This creates an environment where learning is fun and self-motivated. Instruction comes not from being told what to do by an adult, but by imitating kids who are a little older or more skilled. Perhaps most importantly, there’s an opportunity to fail, but also an opportunity to try again.
It seems obvious that this would be a more effective learning environment than the American style of organized soccer. Which makes me wonder, where did we get the idea that more structure leads to more effective learning? The elephant in the room is school. For most of us, this is our most formative learning experience: we have to go to school almost every day for 12 years. For that reason, when adults set about learning chess, they seem to consciously or not try to recreate the experience of school: set up rules and boundaries and then stay within them. The problem is that for most of us school was not an effective road to mastery.
Think about math. If you went to school in the United States you got 12 years of math instruction. 12 years is enough time to get really good at something, so ostensibly we should all be math wizards. But in my experience most people know the math they have to use at work and little to nothing beyond that. Somehow most of us are not learning much in that 12 years of instruction.
Our school system is like an American youth soccer game. It’s more about following the rules than learning actual skills. For a lot of adult life following the rules and fitting in works pretty well - there’s a reason school is designed to prepare us for that - but it doesn’t work so well in chess. In chess there are no prizes for following the rules. Well, you do have to move the pieces the same way as everyone else, but beyond that, in the realm of strategy and decision-making, rules are meant to be broken. There are no stars for doing your homework. You make good decisions or bad decisions. You win or you lose. It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks of your moves, it just matters if they work. It’s strange, come to think of it, how few parts of adult life are like this.
What does this all mean for improving at chess? That curiosity and playfulness are traits to be cultivated alongside discipline and hard work. That structure should be minimized, not maximized: use the minimum viable structure to stay on track and interact with chess in a way that works for you. That creativity may be the most valuable skill of all, not only in how you play the game, but in how you imagine new ways to study and relate to chess.
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