Why Is Chess So Hard?

Getting better at chess should be easy.

Before you throw your shoe at the computer screen, let me explain. According to psychologist Robin Hogarth, there are two kinds of learning environments, which he calls kind and wicked. Kind learning environments are constrained, consistent, and predictable. Lessons learned from experience are reliable. In contrast, feedback in wicked learning environments is delayed, inconsistent, or unreliable. Lessons learned from experience in wicked environments are often misleading.

Within this framework, chess is a kind learning environment. (In fact, it’s sometimes cited as the classic example of a kind environment.) The rules are well-defined and they don’t change. You get to repeat the same patterns over and over. Good moves lead fairly reliably to good outcomes (winning the game), and bad moves lead to bad outcomes (losing).

And yet as anyone who’s tried to get better at chess knows, it’s not easy. In fact, it’s often difficult to make any tangible improvement at all, even for smart people who are working really hard.

I’ve taken on some new students recently, including novice players, a level I haven’t coached in some time. One student asked whether he should devote more moves in the opening to deploying pieces or pawns.

“The pieces!” I shrieked, thrilled to finally know something useful. “In the opening, you should focus on getting your pieces out.”

Yet these sorts of quick wins – compact nuggets of chess wisdom that can be described, understood, and implemented fairly easily – dry up very quickly. When I work with players at, say, the 1800 level, the biggest thing holding them back is rarely a lack of chess knowledge. Their blockers are more psychological, even spiritual.

Ike Haxton, a poker champion who’s been working on his chess game, said that while he’s found chess to be a kinder learning environment than poker, there is a catch.

Isaac Haxton @ikepoker

@natesolon The relationship between making good moves and winning games is extremely kind. The relationship between thinking good thoughts and making good moves, much less so.

Ike makes a great point, but rather than “thoughts” I would say “thought process.” The difference is that whereas you’re generally aware of your thoughts, your thought process is often subconscious. The challenge then is to change patterns of thought that you may not even be aware of. I think this is what GM Jonathan Rowson meant when he said, “Your autopilot needs your tender loving care.”

So what’s to be done? Hogarth recommends asking two questions:

1. What’s missing?

2. What’s irrelevant?

These questions square with my experience in chess and poker. Weaker players often focus on factors that are true but irrelevant. In contrast, strong players often have a surprisingly simple thought process, but an uncanny knack for honing in on the most important factor in the position.

For example, in this position I’ve found that many players want to play 1…c4 to secure a “good” vs. “bad” bishop. While it’s true that it often plays well to have your pawns on the opposite colored squares as your bishop, this is far from the most important factor in the position. One of the more important factors is the fight for the center. By releasing the pressure on the center, c4 gives White free rein to play f5, which will lead to a crushing attack in short order.

Writer and chess master James Altucher recommends breaking down anything you want to learn into “micro-skills.” James isn’t wrong – it makes sense to break a big project down into manageable chunks – but many adults miss the step of recombining all the micro-skills into a coherent gameplan. The learning researcher David Perkins calls the tendency to separate skills into isolated parts “elementitis.” The intention is to learn how to combine the skills later, but “later” often never happens.

It’s like you spend all your time practicing how to hammer in nails, but then someone hands you a toolbox and asks you to fix a broken engine. To complete the task, not only will you have to know how to use many tools in the box besides the hammer, but even more importantly, you’ll have to know which tool to reach for to accomplish each step, and how to combine them all together to get the job done.

This seems to be roughly the situation many chess players find themselves in. They spend much of their training time drilling tactics like forks, but in a real game they need to apply knowledge not only of tactics like forks, pins, and skewers, but also completely different types of thinking, like planning, psychology, time management, and so on. The challenge is to get all these different parts working together to win more chess games.

Perkins has a simple suggestion to counter elementitis: “Play the whole game.” In chess, this could mean literally playing whole games, but there are also forms of training that address the whole game.

One is analyzing with stronger players. A computer can tell you the best moves, but a strong player can tell you how they think about a position, which is often more valuable. This player doesn’t have to be a coach, it can be any strong player you can wrangle into talking with you. It also doesn’t have to be a grandmaster. In fact, it’s probably better if it’s someone just a little above your current level. If you’re currently 1200, you’re more likely to be able to understand a 1500 player’s thought process than a grandmaster’s. When you find a stronger player to talk to you can prompt them with a question like, “How would you think about this position?”

A great place to do this is the postmortem, the traditional post-game analysis with your opponent in chess tournaments. If you play in an over-the-board tournament I would highly recommend that you do a post-mortem, especially if you played against a stronger player. Don’t be afraid to propose analyzing the game together – it’s a tradition in chess tournaments and most players will agree to it, as long as you didn’t rip the head off their king during the game or something.

Another great whole-game exercise is “solitaire chess.” Two recent grandmaster guests on the Perpetual Chess Podcast, Gregory Kaidanov and Alex Fishbein, both cited solitaire chess as one of their core training methods. You can do this method either on a computer or with a book and a physical chessboard, but either way the basic idea is the same.

Pick a game by a player you want to emulate and play out the game “as” that player. Play out the opening moves until you get to a position where you would start thinking. Then cover the rest of the moves so you can’t see them. Each time it’s your turn, go through your thought process as you would in a game (you can even use a clock and scoresheet to make it more realistic). When you’ve decided on your move, check it against what actually happened in the game. Then put the move played in the game and the opponent’s on the board and repeat the process for your next move, continuing in the same way for the whole game.

The advantage of this technique is you get to see how a strong player navigates the whole game from opening to middlegame to endgame. Additionally, you get experience with all types of positions that occur in a chess game, not just the ones that make good puzzles.

Ultimately, chess is not as kind a learning environment as it seems. While the rules are the same every game, patterns that look similar can play out differently depending on subtle differences in the position. Crucially, everything depends on everything else: a factor that is the key to one position might be irrelevant in another because of how it reacts with other things that are going on. Getting a sense for what truly matters in the position requires playing the whole game.