The feeling to focus on
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer, and as always, on this podcast, I wanna help you simplify your chess training and to help you improve your chess consistently the right way. And today, I wanna talk about how I believe many people use the wrong metric to judge their own training.

Specifically, they think about how they feel during the training, but that's actually not as good of a judgment call on if the training was helpful or not. And what I try to do is focusing on the feeling after training.

So I'm sure you know that feeling lying in your bed and you're really satisfied with [00:01:00] yourself because you've done some hard things today. And for me, on these days, I sleep the best. It's one of the feelings that I like most. I'm like, "Okay, yeah, that was a great day." And this is a pretty good indicator of how good my day has been.

It applied to chess when I was training and competing actively, and now it also applies anywhere else in my life.

And as I mentioned, most people don't use that metric, but they try out training and it's difficult. And so they feel like, "Oh yeah, it was difficult while I tried it." And they go, "Well, nah, this is difficult. I'm not going to do that anymore." And they hope that they will find the training that is super fun and super easy and it feels flawless. But it's not existing.

The right training should feel difficult, and that's why I try to judge my efforts [00:02:00] by seeing how I feel afterwards.

And so recently, this came to my mind because I walked up the famous mountain Rigi in Switzerland, it's really beautiful, with my wife, Alessia, and some friends. And we didn't have to walk up because there are actually several cable cars bringing you up there in no time. But we did spend a few hours sweating hard, walking up the mountain.

And the view and the feeling of being up there for me is, it's such a huge difference if I walked up or if I just took the cable car. And that was the night that I lay in bed, again tired, with sore muscles. But there was a strong feeling of peace and just contentment with that day, and that came from earning that view through hiking up the mountain.

And it's the same for me with going to the gym. I rarely love doing the exercise while I'm at the gym, but when I walk out, I'm like, [00:03:00] "I'm so happy I did this." Again, a very good indicator of, yeah, this is good for my health. This is good for me, so I should do it more, even if it's not the funniest thing in the world.

And there's something fun that happens when you keep choosing the hard version or when you keep judging it by how did you feel afterwards. Because slowly, slowly, not with everything, with gym this is pretty hard for me, but with many other things, I start to enjoy the hard thing itself. And part of that might just be your brain anticipating the feeling that comes afterwards, and so already giving you these good hormones and emotions while doing it.

And there is also a second effect that runs even deeper, because we enjoy activities more when we are good at them.

So when we do the hard thing more often, as you get better, you finally get to enjoy that thing on a [00:04:00] different level. And this is really true for chess. I've seen this with many of my students, because it's such a deep and interesting game, right? But it's a little bit frustrating if you keep hanging pieces and you can't really dive deeper into the strategy and the more sophisticated ways of playing chess, just because, well, at the end of the day, you play a game, whoever hangs the last piece will lose, right?

And I believe that's a strong motivator for many adult improvers to want to get better. Of kind of like, I wanna get past that phase so now I can actually enjoy the full beauty of chess, and I can actually try to apply some of the things that I hear these grandmasters talk about. And obviously, you'll never get to that exact same depth as a grandmaster, but you might get to the enjoyment of like, oh, yeah, this was a positional plan that actually worked, and it worked without anyone blundering pieces. And that's just so much more beautiful, also in my [00:05:00] vision of how chess should be played.

For me, it's the same reason why I really wanna get better at Padel. Because it's a super fun sport, and the most fun part are the super long rallies. They are super long and a lot of recoveries and kind of crazy saves, and I'm a very defensive player, so I really enjoy these saves.

But then when I make too many unforced errors and my opponents too, you don't have these rallies. And so it's less fun actually. Sometimes I catch an impossible ball, and the next ball is super easy and I just hit it into the net, and that's frustrating. And so the game would be funnier, the sport would be funnier if I actually got better at it. The way to get better at it is doing the hard things.

Wherever you are right now listening to this, if you're nodding along, but you're not taking a deliberate action and you don't have something deliberately difficult in your chess training, this is the moment to stop and say, "Okay, I gotta do something about this."

And there's [00:06:00] three steps. Step number one is: commit to 60 minutes per week. For a month, you just say, "I do 60 minutes of something that is really difficult, and afterwards I will feel good about it." During it, it will be hard and you might feel like, "Ugh, this is annoying." But judge it by how you feel afterwards.

Second step is: plan that hard training in your calendar. Pick a time and a day where you are pretty fresh. So if you're feeling the freshest on the weekend, then do the hard thing on the weekend. Don't do it at 10:00 PM after having had a long work day and been with your family and you're completely exhausted. That's not the time for the hard training.

And then point number three is: get a resource with hard positions that feels just like it's a little bit above your level. So it's really stretching your current knowledge and skills.

If you're 1500 and 2000 Chess.com or FIDE, those are roughly equal. Could be 2200 Lichess in [00:07:00] rapid or the equivalent, Real Chess Training is the resource for you. That's my test product that every single week you get a six-position test, and you get 45 minutes, and you really need to think deeply about these positions, take your decisions in those 45 minutes for all the six positions, write them down, then you get a walkthrough of what you could have seen, what was a good decision-making and so on.

And there's also a free sample test that you can get. Should be in the podcast description, the link to there. If you're lower rated, I highly recommend a Step Method workbook mix. This is a little bit less like Real Chess Training because there aren't really positional examples, but it's a mix of tactics. It's a mix of things that you would have learned in the Step Method. You don't even need to go through the real books, let's say. So you just get a workbook mix, and you check online. There's a lot of indicators. I also have an article on this. But online there, you just write Step Method, and you go on their website, and they [00:08:00] have indicated the rating ranges. So you get it for your rating range, and you solve these for 60 minutes.

If you are a little bit higher rated, so Ray Cheng's 600 Practical Chess Exercises is a great tool too. This is for roughly 1700 plus. When I say ratings, I usually say them Chess.com Rapid because just the most people actually have that rating.

And if you're even stronger, like for title players, go get Aagaard's calculation book. I talk about this sometimes, that this has been one of the most transformational books for me. And yes, this is really hard. This is really difficult. That's why it was so transformational. And you'll likely get a headache if you do it for an hour. But only do it if you're really a title player or very, very close to that because Aagaard's stuff is really just super difficult.

The common denominator is just that doing the hard thing in chess means sitting down in front of a [00:09:00] position and having to make a decision, just like in a game. No engine, no hints. And the more you do it, also my Real Chess Training students that are there for a few months now already, they feel that. You start enjoying it more, and you start to get better at it, which also helps with the enjoyment.

And that's the nice thing. That if you stick to something long enough, you can do the hard thing, and the hard thing can become more enjoying. Or sometimes maybe not, but still what you're getting is that feeling that I talked about in the beginning of lying in bed and feeling like, "Yeah, I really did something to improve my chess today, and that really feels good. I can sleep tight.

Hey, guys, just two quick things before you take off. If you enjoyed this episode and want more structured chess improvement tips from myself, check out my

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