Episode 95 - You Can't OUtsource Chess Improvement
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I wanna talk about outsourcing AI, creating basically everything with AI. But why it doesn't work in chess, and why in chess? Well, you are the only one that actually can push forward your real chess improvement.

So we live in this super fast-moving world. And with AI coming up, it's like, oh, everything seems possible. I always get this ad from base44, this is an AI company, where it says you can create anything that your mind thinks of, or something like that. It's like, oh my God, that sounds amazing.

You can build apps, you can learn quicker, you can have a pocket therapist. By the way, I highly recommend you're [00:01:00] real humans as therapists, but that's just aside. You name it. But the problem is that chess improvement is not something you can outsource. So let's talk about this, and this is super important, and that's why so many people get frustrated with chess improvement specifically.

Just as you can't outsource training for a marathon, improving your thought process at the board isn't something you can hand off to another person or AI. You need to sit down, you need to use your own brain, you need to struggle to make mistakes, and to improve through that effort.

And that's what makes chess improvement so valuable in this super hyper-connected, fast-moving world right now. While the world is racing and everybody wants to move towards faster and easier, which by the way, spoiler alert, not really healthy, chess improvement works the way it worked 30 years ago. It forces you, [00:02:00] for long-term results, to go into these deep thinking modes, to build your character.

There is really no other version. At some point, if you just do the knowledge part, if you just do the spaced repetition stuff, at some point you'll get stuck. What will define if you long-term improve your chess are the skills, and for them, there is no other version than putting in the work.

And I shortly wanna talk about the ratio of knowledge to skills. So yes, knowledge is needed. If you don't know that you should control the center, then well, it's hard to find good moves early on.

But as mentioned, the ratio is extreme when we think about learning something, so some new knowledge. For example, learning what a fork is can take five minutes. Now, improving your skill of seeing forks under game-like circumstances consistently [00:03:00] can just be a lifelong journey. Even grandmasters sometimes miss forks during games.

And so what should be the right way of training is extremely limited knowledge and a lot of training to acquire skills. Now, here is the danger specifically in chess. Because knowledge and skill look the same. Both happen in your brain. It's different in other sports. Watching someone run a marathon obviously doesn't make you a runner, and I believe there will be very few people out there that believe that if you just continuously read about marathon training and watch others run, that you will somehow run faster.

Not going to happen. But in chess, this same assumption is everywhere. Watching a chess video feels like real improvement. Hearing someone say you should look for candidate moves and then see them [00:04:00] do it makes you feel that you could do it better as well. But the problem is the skill isn't built.

You know what to do. You don't have the skill at all of doing it consistently under game pressure.

And the chess industry there really isn't a big help for you because there are two sides. One side is consuming content is so much easier from a customer side. And second, it is way easier to create knowledge products for businesses, and it's also way easier to sell them.

That's why we ended up in a chess world where 99.9% of the free and paid products are knowledge transferring things. It's like I teach you something, and then you hear it, and then we just both pray that you can actually execute it. And almost nothing that gets taught in the chess world is actually forcing [00:05:00] you to acquire skills.

Now let's take a quick jump back to my childhood. How did I get better at chess? As a kid, I was lazy but highly competitive. So I didn't really care about another lesson on strategy or the Philidor Rook defense or whatever my coaches would bring up. What I wanted is to first beat my dad. That's how I learned chess.

That's who I wanted to beat first. Then my friends, then people in my club, then win local and eventually national and international tournaments.

And my coaches just basically told me, "Well, if you wanna do that, you need to solve a lot of puzzles, learn from your own mistakes, play a lot of games, make these mistakes, talk with the coach through those mistakes, and then occasionally have some lessons about whatever strategy, knowledge, or whatever I need."

So it turns out, without [00:06:00] knowing it, I was basically forced into the right ratio. Very little knowledge, and only when I was ready for it, and a lot of decision-making, a lot of skill acquisition, a lot of making mistakes, failing, learning from it, making mistakes, failing, learning from it.

And this is really how chess improvement is done. There is no way around this. So to get to a similar point in a hyper-connected world, here are the two things that you need to do.

Point number one, and this is frustrating for many, but I'm sorry, that's just how it is, reduce your knowledge intake drastically. Really worry only about the fundamentals you can actually apply. If you are like 95% of other adult improvers out there, you already have way more knowledge than you're applying, so you don't need more knowledge. You need to figure out what is the fundamental of this knowledge and how can you work on applying it in your games.

And then the second thing. Solve hard game-like [00:07:00] positions, solve puzzles, do difficult stuff, get corrected, play your games, improve with those games, analyze those games.

And remember that ratio, it should be a lot of the second thing, a lot of decision-making, a lot of hard thinking on your side, and very little consuming and watching others do. Sadly, nearly everybody has it completely twisted.

And this is exactly why I built Real Chess Training. Because every Monday, you get six hard positions and 45 minutes on the clock. There's no engine, there's no walkthrough until you have actually struggled. Nobody tells you if this is a tactic, if this is a positional exercise. You have to write down your decisions, and then only when you finish these 45 minutes of struggling, of deep thinking, you unlock the analysis and you can go and see what would've been the right thought process, what were good candidate moves, why certain moves are better [00:08:00] than others.

So that's skill first, and then as a bonus, you get some knowledge, but only what you already tried to apply, maybe couldn't fully apply, and what you're ready for.

So if that episode resonated with you and you are in the 1500 to 2000 chess.com rapid or FIDE rating range, this is the training that really matters, that really makes a difference.

And I have a link in the description both to Real Chess Training, or if you want to first try it out, you can get a sample test for free. So you get these six positions, you work on them, you then watch the video, then you see how does this training feel for you and then you can sign up after that.

And while it's not as comfortable as lying on your couch and watching a video, this is a training that actually pushes you to improve your game. And as an [00:09:00] addition, at least for me, when I do these hard things, I can go to bed in the evening and I'm saying, "Mm-hmm, I'm really proud of what I did today."

If that sounds for you, check out Real Chess Training or the free test. There should be in the podcast description a link you can click, and see ya in the next one.

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So thank you, thank you so much for listening, and thank you for spreading the word about the Next Level Chess Podcast. Now, that's all from me. Thank you for listening, [00:11:00] and see you next time.