This is what makes or breaks chess improvement
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I want talk about the difference between students that face hardship and give up, and the students that keep at it and then break through a plateau, because I see both happening very, very regularly. The key thing is that, well, chess is difficult and you will face hardship at some point.

That is really the main thing that I also wanna talk about it today, because if you expect it to get easy, you might be in the group of students that tends to give up early.

So I like talking about that improving your chess is actually simple. It's not easy. There's a huge [00:01:00] difference. There's a full episode on the difference between simple and easy. But if you do what matters, do it well, do it consistently, you will eventually improve your chess. I can't tell you when, but I am very certain that it will be the case. Unless you maybe are called Magnus Carlsen or in your hundredth year of life, then it's maybe harder.

But for everybody else, I think do what matters, do it well, do it consistently, you'll improve your game. So why is not everybody improving their game and living happily ever after? And there are two things. First of all, not everybody's ready to do hard things.

So actually I just see that people are just not ready to put in the right effort to improve their game. If you're not ready to focus well, if you're not sleeping at all well, if you are not doing the things that actually matter, instead just play bullet and pray that you're improving. You're not going to improve.

Or you're just improving at the beginning. And then at some point hit a plateau, [00:02:00] never improve again. And then the second thing is life often gets in the way. And it's easy to fall for temptations, instead of sticking to a simple plan and do what matters, do it well, do it consistently. That's exactly when there is this difference that you can see between students that get back to their plan, push through and manage to break a plateau, and others that are slowly fading out or giving up, leaving chess altogether. Or just playing chess, but okay with not improving or frustrated with not improving, but not improving, nonetheless.

And really the more I learn about myself, about improving anything and seeing thousands of chess improvers, through my videos, through reaching them through my videos, reaching them through writing articles, working with them, seeing them in the community, working one-on-one with people, the more I realized that expectations are such a big factor for people that struggle with chess improvement.

And by the way, also for people that [00:03:00] maybe manage to improve their game, but don't enjoy it as much, really. I talk about it a lot, but expectations are so incredibly important. And what I realized is that most of the students that end up giving up when facing hardship, when facing temptations, when facing a moment of difficulty in their chess, is that they somewhere have this underlying expectation that chess improvement could be easy.

That kind of, when you figure out chess improvement, when it gets clear, when you solve the mysterious puzzle of chess improvement, then suddenly everything clicks. And, I've talked about this a few weeks back that sometimes when we have a good run of wins, we have this thought immediately that everything is now going straight line up, and we will never lose again.

There's somewhere this hope that if I just resolve chess improvement, then it will just [00:04:00] flow naturally. There will be no more blunders, there's no more plateaus, no more hard days. It just always is fun. I can just do what I like and I will improve my game. And that's just not how reality looks like, at least not the reality I'm living in.

I don't know where other people are living, but for me, not the reality at all. For many of my students also not. And so when an inevitable bad day comes, those people who have this kind of hope, struggle way more. Because immediately, if you think that if you solve it, it'll be easy, than if there is a hard day you think, oh, I didn't solve it yet, right? Why does this feel hard? How come I still blunder? How is this possible? Why always me? Why is it so difficult? Where is the next video that promises me that resolves this problem forever? And so, the kind of idea is either something is wrong with my training, so what I'm doing, or something is wrong with me.

And, sometimes something is wrong with your training. If you're not doing right things, that's true. But if you do what [00:05:00] matters, you do it well, you do it consistently, there will also be hard days. There will also be weeks where you don't improve at all. I talked about my longest plateau, which was I think over two years.

Two years of training chess as a professional player, not seeing improvements in the results. That's frustrating, but I stuck to it and then I improved. So even when you do the right things, there will be hard days, and if you have this hope that it could be resolved, you're not going to stick to it long enough for it to matter.

What I find very fascinating is that many experts of other topics are sharing this same view.

So I heard a podcast with Greg McKewn, he's author of the bestseller, and this is one of my all time favorite books. So highly recommended, "Essentialism". And he shared in this episode that he is also struggling to implement things that are essential. So here is what he said. This is a quote from [00:06:00] an interview with Tim Ferris.

Quote: "All of us are going in the wrong direction until we pause, think about it, get clear again. And so that to me, I do not feel like I'm a better essentialist or better at applying these ideas in one sense than anybody else. Certainly not inherently, but I think I admit to it faster than maybe the average person.

And I think that's the key". End of quote. This is so important. Again, you might think, well, this guy wrote a whole book about the essentialism. Now he's nailed it. Now it's like he's resolved it. He is only doing things that matter. He never scrolls his phone. He only spends exactly the time that he feels is important.

Nope, it's not what he's saying. He's saying he's derailing, he's going off the track. If he doesn't come back, pause, admit it, and get back to what he thinks is really essential.

[00:07:00] So all of these things that we care about, might it be essentialism, it could be creating your career. It could be improving your chess, improving anything else. All of these things are like muscles. Even if you are having an extremely strong body, you can't just say, I'm never going to the gym anymore.

You need to sustain it. That's the whole point. So if you get there, doesn't mean that now everything is resolved. It just means that you build up a muscle and now maybe you can work a little bit less hard if you just have to sustain that muscle. But you still have to keep working out so that the muscle is not just disappearing.

And so for chess improvement, that means even when you have a good plan, you found a proper plan. And I see that a lot with my simplified chess improvement system students. That they get into the course, they do the first week, kind of transforms their game. They thinking, oh my God. Yeah. The way I'm training now is really different, and they get to week two, they create their [00:08:00] personalized plan and kind of feels like, oh, now my chess is in a good space.

If they are not paying attention to it, if they just tread along in the next few weeks, they will slowly move back to some things that aren't so important for chess improvement, to doing it with a little bit less focus, to doing a little bit more of the things that they might enjoy in the short term, but don't improve their gaming in the long term.

And after a few weeks like that, they are back to start maybe, or just a little bit ahead of the start and they need to readjust constantly, right? So that's what is important. It's not once you found it perfect, but it's actually realizing that it is all about realizing when you got off track, going back, doing better. Realizing you got off track, going back, basics, do it better.

And this for me is so incredibly true. Like you can ask my wife and she will definitely say that it is true that my instincts are way off in this. So when I improve anything in my life, my immediate instincts are [00:09:00] horrible. I focus on the fancy thing. So if I learn paddle, for example, now I always wanna smash.

I wanna kill the point. That's my desire. I want to do it, I want do the cool stuff. I wanna improve quickly. I'm not like intuitively saying, oh, I need a coach. I just wanna play. I wanna play more, play more, play more, play more. I need to remind myself, oh, it would be actually good to do the basics one.

I feel like I wanna push for a win. I wanna not play the long ball, not do the basics, but I wanna do the cool shots. Like all of these things are my instincts. When I do paddle, when I do poker, when I did chess, whatever I do, I have these instincts. And so, why am I improving at these things? And I believe I improve at most things much, much quicker than, the average person, which is just, I realize it way quicker.

And I'm like, oh, Noel, there you are again. You go with the wrong instincts. What do we know that is the right thing, but is not coming intuitively? Okay, let's go back to the basics. That's the skill that I got very good at. [00:10:00] But you can only get good at this skill like Greg said, and for myself with improving anything,

you can only get good at that skill if you don't have that kind of dreamy expectation or hope that you could figure things out, and then everything ever after will be easy. It's not going to be that way. It's going to be a muscle you need to use over and over again. And sometimes you feel silly because you go for the wrong thing for the 50th time, but you get quicker at realizing it. Okay, let's come back.

Actually, this whole thing is just a huge setup for me to shortly rant a little bit about clickbait. I'm obviously partly joking, but one of the main reasons that these expectations exist is clickbait or over promising marketing. And I don't only see that in chess. I see it everywhere. There are these kind of super strong titles that go into this, if you just watch my video, you will have a great year. Or give me 10 minutes and I'll solve this [00:11:00] problem for you. Do this, like basically at the end of the day, what these clickbait titles are saying is, click my video or give me money. Buy my course, give me money. And then I will resolve all the problems that you have.

But that's just not going to happen. I, for example, as a coach, I can't resolve your problems if you're not helping me. It's just not going to happen. Okay? I can't resolve your chess problems if you're not also collaborating. At the end of the day, I can show you the way you need to execute.

There's nobody else that is going to do the chess training for you. There's nobody else that is going to do the implementation for you. There's nobody else that can, on a daily basis, do what matters, do it well, do it consistently. That's on you. So this connotation that we have in clickbait or in strong marketing of like, if you just buy my secrets, you will improve your game effortlessly, quickly, immediately, forever.

These words that are ringing bell with me. That's not true. Chess improvement is not highly complex, but easy. But [00:12:00] instead, it is very simple. But really hard. And it can suck. That's just how the reality is. And if you feel like you've given up before or if you're close to giving up or if you get frustrated when things are not going your way.

Might be that somewhere, you still have that belief, you still have that hope, if you just figure out the right system, if you just figure out everything perfectly, everything will be easy ever after, and that's just not going to be the case. So the earlier you release these expectations, realize, okay, no, it's not going to be like that.

It's just too good to be true. And improving anything worthwhile, it must be hard because that's the whole point why people, why some people are doing it, but many aren't. It's not that there is a magic thing that there is a secret. All grandmasters, no one, nobody's telling you, but there is this one YouTuber that is actually telling you their secret.

No, that's not how it is. All grandmasters worked a lot on their [00:13:00] chess game. Some are more talented than others, but all of them have spent thousands of hours on the game of chess and some of them sucked. And so that's just the reality, and when you accept that reality, you will be less prone to click on clickbait videos.

You will be much more resilient when things are going wrong. You will feel much less stupid when things are going wrong because you realize it's not you. It's just the whole point. This is supposed to be hard, like imagine going to the gym and you push weights and you get angry because it's hard.

Your muscles are sore and you're like angry the next day. You're saying like, why is this is hard? This is crazy. Why should this be hard? What is wrong with me? Nothing's wrong with you. That's the whole point. We're trying to run a marathon and you're getting angry because again, it's hard.

Nobody told me. Like, no, no, no. This is the whole point. Chess is exactly the same. If you want to achieve a lot in chess, then there will be moments where it's hard and there will be moments where you get stuck. That's totally okay. Do what matters. Do it well. Do it [00:14:00] consistently. Don't believe in the strong marketing.

Don't believe in the clickbait stuff. Just do your basics. Put in the work, put in the effort. Do it for long enough. You'll get there.

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