Simple, not easy
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Hey and welcome back to Next Level Chess. I am Grandmaster Noel Studer and today I want to talk about a very important distinction and something I feel doesn't get enough attention in the chess world, which is the distinction between simple and easy, because chess improvement will never, ever be easy.

But it can be simple. Now I'm not a native English speaker, but I think I know the distinction between the two. And if you search it online. Easy means something without effort, while simple means something without complication. So making push ups, for example, won't be easy, right? Because well, it's just strenuous to make some push ups.

But you can have a very simple push up [00:01:00] training plan. So you could say, every day, you I'm doing one pushup more. There is no complication. Everybody can grasp what that means, but. Doing 20 push ups in a row won't be easy, right? So that is, for example, in fitness and health, you can also make many simple plans, but likely if you want results, it won't be easy.

It will be hard, it will be annoying to go to the gym, but you will get the results. And in chess, you get exactly same, but sadly, I see many people online trying to find the easy way to improve their chess. They try to find the best chess opening to win against every opponent. Well, that doesn't exist. And if that opening would exist, well, because everybody is Googling it.

What is the best chess [00:02:00] opening to win easily in chess? People would know, and we would just. all play the same opening and it will stop working as well. So there is no easy way and you really need to stop searching for the easy way. What you should do instead is accepting that improving your chess will be mentally, um, strenuous.

It will be hard. You will need to do things that aren't that easy. But instead your aim should be to make chess improvement as simple as possible. You don't need to have 37 opening courses, work on an end game book, an opening repertoire, uh, strategy, tactics, calculation, everything at the same time.

Instead, you can really simplify what you do in chess training, and [00:03:00] then you will be able to have a plan that is simple to follow. But when you study chess, it will be hard. And just as a side note, anyone online trying to sell you something that is easy and guaranteed to win you a lot of rating points.

Well, they probably just want your money because again, it doesn't exist. Otherwise, if there was easy way to just improve your chess, a hundred percent guaranteed, everybody would do it. Everybody would be a grandmaster and it wouldn't be, you know, worth it, worthwhile anymore to improve your chess. So just forget this easy part.

Now, you might ask yourself, how can I make chess simple? And a very, very simple way of training is following my one third rule, which says [00:04:00] that one third of your training time should go to playing and analyzing. One third of your playing time should go to, uh, solving tactic exercises. Or if you haven't done that yet, Learning the tactical motives.

So. For example, watching a course about pins, forks, and all of these basic tactical motives. And then third part, so the last third of your chess training should go either to end games, openings, or strategy, and just one at a time. So a super simple chess training plan, and that's usually what I do when I start working with students as well, would look the following way.

You train six days a week. You have one day where you don't do any chess. On two days, you play and then analyze those games. On the next two [00:05:00] days, you, uh, train tactics. So you solve tactical exercises or watch videos or read books about tactical motives. And then the final two days you work on what is most pressing at the moment.

So this is either openings strategy or end games to keep it as simple as possible. You don't mix those. So you don't do 20 minutes opening 20 minutes strategy, 20 minutes end game. You just do two full days of end games or openings or strategy. And then you have a very, very simple training plan. Now, again, While you train, the amount of time you spend on that will be hard.

That won't be easy. Playing games is not something easy. You need to focus. You will play against better opponents. They will outplay you. You need to analyze your games. You need to understand your mistakes. The same goes for solving tactics. Solving [00:06:00] tactics is difficult. It's meant to be difficult. The whole idea of doing something, training something, is pushing yourself to a limit so your mind understands, okay, it needs to get better, it learns something new, right?

In fitness, I've opened this podcast with fitness, the idea is to exhaust your muscle so the muscle understands, okay, I need to get stronger so I can do that the next time. So you want to go a little bit over what is possible at the moment. It needs to be hard. The whole idea of my chess improvement advice of You know, my idea of when I work with students, what I teach in my courses, everything is based on this principle.

You can't make it easy, but you can make it simple. That should be your approach. Understand you can make it simple. Don't run after easy things. Those are [00:07:00] usually scammers, unethical people trying to sell you quick hacks that stop working. That's not the idea. And that's it. Once you understand this principle and you can follow it, you will improve your chess.

It will be hard, but it will be worth 

it.