Talk to your pieces with intro
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to next level chess podcast. I am grandmaster Noël Studer and on this podcast I want to help you improve your chess. I'll talk about anything that might impact your chess improvement from mindset to playing against lower or higher rated opponents to the effective and efficient training to make sure that you're not wasting your valuable time when you train chess.

Before we get into today's episode, I just want to remind you that you can get much more chess improvement advice if you visit my homepage, which is nextlevelchess. blog and over there you can find 150 plus articles. You can subscribe to my free newsletter, you can check out my courses, And all of that will be also linked in the description of this podcast episode.

So if you want to learn more from me, make sure to check all of that stuff [00:01:00] out. Now let's get into today's topic. Today I want to talk about my favorite chess device and how you can use it to improve your position in a simple way and know what to do in a position that maybe otherwise wouldn't be as obvious to find a plan and, yeah, to improve your position.

And that favorite chess advice was given to me when I was around 10 years old. So it was really, really simple. Little Noel early on in my career, I maybe started with eight. So it was my first coach. And this player was a Swiss player with around 2000 rating. And in one lesson, he started telling me about talking to my pieces.

And I was very confused at first. I look at him with big eyes. And I also remember that I went home the night and talk, told my parents what I learned. And they also looked at me a little bit. Strangely, but, [00:02:00] hear me out, if you think the same way as little noel, little noel learned that this is a great advice.

So, what is talking to your pieces and why does it help? Talking to your pieces helps you understand and feel the music. your pieces better. In chess, right, we have a whole army of pieces and some of them are usually well placed and in most positions you have at least one piece that is actually not doing that much.

And once you start talking to your pieces, you will realize and you will feel during the game which piece is happy and which means pieces is doing a lot that has a, you know, great purpose on the board. It helps out. It has friends. It's not too deep into enemy territory. It's not dangered. And then you have pieces that are unhappy, which would be say a rook standing on a one, just not doing anything or just the queen [00:03:00] running around, but always being attacked.

So an unsafe queen is unhappy a king with absolute no shelter is an unhappy piece. So all of these things can be unhappy pieces. And the main goal of talking to your pieces would be spotting which pieces unhappy, spotting, which is the unhappiest piece in your position. And then the simple way of improving your position is taking that unhappy piece and deciding where it would be happier.

Then bringing it there and then you can continue with the next, now new, unhappiest piece. And you will improve that piece as well, make it happy. And in chess, We usually say that when all your pieces are standing well, so that would be in the you know, Vocabulary we use today is if you have only happy pieces, then you will have tactical [00:04:00] ideas.

It's mostly like that. Tactics come from a position of strength. Usually, obviously there are exceptions, but usually you get tactics when you have a great position and great positions are positions where all of your pieces play together and thus are happy. So back then in 2006, when I learned this, my coach started putting up positions in front of me and He first asked me, what would you play?

And my mind was just going somewhere like, Oh, maybe I can try this tactic or maybe I can try this idea, but there was no clarity in my thinking. And then he said to me, okay, now one by one, you start talking to your pieces. And so I would start by, let's say the queen moved to the rooks, then go to the bishops and to the Knights.

And for every question, for every piece in my army, I would ask myself, is this happy? Hey, queen, are you happy? Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. I'm a bit [00:05:00] unsafe, but I'm protecting many important pieces. So I'm, you know, medium happy or something like this. So I would go through all of them and I would immediately realize, Oh, there is a knight just standing on B1, not doing anything, not even developed.

So this knight is super unhappy. So if there are no tactical opportunities in that position right now, then it's very likely the best idea to bring in that knight and develop the knight. And then step number two, that he would ask me, say, okay, now you understood that this knight is the unhappiest piece in your army.

Now, what you want to do is ask the knight, where would you be super happy? So you start looking on the board, you start looking at squares and you might realize there's like an outpost that is very nice. So you're saying, Oh, E5, that would be the absolute dream. Okay. By the way, if you can't fully visualize all the [00:06:00] squares, I just say them to, you know, to give an example, but you don't have to fully realize where this is going.

Just realize that it's important to look at the position and to find squares and then to find ways to get to that square. So, if you're finding E5 as a square, the knight is on B1, that's where it starts out. You can then understand that, oh, I can go via D2. f3 to e5 and on e5 this knight will be super happy.

So what will be a logical move? It will be knight to d2, then knight to f3, then knight to e5. Basically having a three move plan just because of these questions. And that's it. Let's say hypothetically you have that position and you improve your knight this way, you then have a new unhappiest piece, which you can move again.

You can do the same thing. At some point, all of your pieces will be super happy. Now, what is [00:07:00] very important is that this idea of talking to your pieces obviously just applies if there are no tactics, no immediate tactics in the position. So I'm not telling you if your queen is attacked to say, well, but the rook on a one is very unhappy.

I have to move my rook, right? That's, there is kind of a relevance of things that are higher than the unhappiest piece, which usually or tactics, tactical ideas. You need to stop them. Or if you can win a piece by force, then by all means, please do it. But if you have a position where you're unsure what you should actually do, and maybe it's not so easy for you even to understand what's structural, so what should you do with your pawns, right?

Then you can at least think about what is your unhappiest piece. understand what it is, ask where it would be better placed. So ask yourself, where would that piece be super happy, and then try to [00:08:00] bring it there. And importantly, also, if this is a, you know, basically impossible route to bring a piece somewhere, just put it somewhere where it's decently happy, right?

We don't always have to shoot for the moon. It's good to know where it would, the piece would stand perfectly, but then we need to be realistic as well. We can't, you know, bring all the pieces to a perfect space, but if they are decently happy, that's already great for you. So this way you can find a plan and then you can execute it.

And again, you have the next plan coming. I want to summarize what I just talked about. Talking to your pieces is a great way to find a plan in a position where you otherwise don't really know what to do. The goal is that you are understanding what is your worst place piece, your unhappiest piece, and then you use that piece [00:09:00] and you bring it to a better square, to a square where this piece is happier.

When you do that for many years, pieces, you most likely will get a position which allows you to use more tactical ideas and more straightforward calculation to win pieces or, you know, improve your position further or create weaknesses for your opponent or go for a checkmating tack. But this whole idea of talking to your pieces only works if there are no immediate tactical ideas.

Both for you and your opponent. Now, I really recommend everybody listening to this to try it out. Try it in your own games. Try it during training as well. When you think about a position and just try to spot the differences of happy and unhappy pieces, and then bring them, you know, wherever you feel [00:10:00] like they might.

be happier. And funnily enough, my favorite chess improvement site had the same kind of idea and they have a course called happy pieces. So if you want to watch a course about this whole idea, which is not connected to me, but grandmaster of a tick Gregorian, the founder and CEO of chess mode has the same kind of chess philosophy as me.

If you want to watch. a course about that. I will link it in the description for you. And yeah, make sure to talk to your pieces. Don't worry. We chess players, anyway, we are already crazy. So a little bit more craziness doesn't hurt. And if you love that podcast and you want to know what's going on, More about chess improvement from myself.

Check out all the links in the description, my articles, my courses, my newsletter, yada, yada, and make sure to come back to this podcast next week. [00:11:00] See you then.