Episode 57 - The Reason Chess Training Is So Confusing
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer and I'm here to help you simplify your chess improvement because if you are like many, today's podcast episode is especially for you because it's about the confusion you can have in chess training, and I wanna talk about one of the main reasons, and it's because when we train, we don't immediately see the effects of our training in the results.

And sometimes it can take a long time to see what you've done in training pay off in results, and that long time is a very difficult time to go through because you might train the right way and get bad results, [00:01:00] which is pretty frustrating. Or on the other hand, especially early on in your career, you might do all the wrong things, but actually still improve your chess.

And so you are learning how to train wrong. And later on you will pay for that. But before I get into this episode deeply, I just wanna say that I have just launched a YouTube channel. You will find it in the podcast description. You should also find it if you go on YouTube and search for GM Noël Studer, and yeah, I'm excited for this adventure.

I will use the YouTube channel mostly for things that require some visual. I can't talk on the podcast much about positions, explain my thought process, stuff like that. That will all be on YouTube. So make sure to go there, check out the first video. Maybe by the time you hear this, there is already a second one.

I'm not sure about my uploading schedule, but there will be more for sure. Make sure to subscribe so you get the notifications, [00:02:00] all of that good stuff. You know that by now guys. I'm excited for this YouTube adventure, but now let's go back to the reason chess training can be very, very confusing.

So many of my private students are very successful in their careers. But I had the same kind of discussion a few times with some of these private students, and in essence, they told me that they have not tried to improve at anything that was as hard and confusing as chess.

One of my students is a very successful businessman. He also worked in the gym very hard. I think he did a 500 pound squat. Is that reasonable? Does that exist? I don't know. That sounds like way too much for me. But so he set himself goals in many different areas of his life, and now it's time to improve chess. And he's by no means struggling a lot.

Like he is rated I [00:03:00] think around 1800 on Lichess. That's a nice rating. But he says that for the amount of time he puts in and for just how he tries to grasp these areas that he tries to improve at, there's nothing that was harder and more confusing than chess. And it's not the first time that I've heard it.

So yes, chess is a very difficult game, but I think there is one main point that I understood by talking to so many students and also reading from my newsletter subscribers, that really makes it so hard, and that's what I said in the intro. This is this delay after you've put in the work, and this is called delayed gratification.

So I really think that this is the main reason that so many get confused because not only is there so much fuss and FOMO in the chess world, but it's also very hard to understand if you're actually doing the right thing, because let's say you're going to the gym, right? You put some [00:04:00] weights on, you do train the right way.

The next week or two weeks later, you go back and probably you can already raise your weight a little bit. So you have the positive impact in a few weeks of like, oh, I did that the correct way. Boom, let's put on more weight. And you have that kind of gratification. That is pretty quick. Now, in chess, early on, that can also happen, but later on it's very, very common that you're putting in time, you're training, and for the next week, for the next month, you don't see any difference.

And that's what sometimes happens is that you are seeing worse results, but you're putting in the right effort. And if you're not a hundred percent sure about your own input, it makes you think like, oh, I must be doing something wrong. So that's how many people jump around between different things.

It's like you're trying out something new in chess. You listen to someone and you say, okay, let's try this. You do it for two, three [00:05:00] weeks. That didn't bring anything. Let me go on, let me do something else. And so you do something else. And then this doesn't work. The other thing doesn't work. And at some point you might see results, but now it's the problem once you see results or human brain is saying, well, what I did last week must have been right because now I've seen results.

Actually, probably the work you did maybe three months ago was what caused this result. That's the delayed gratification. You're not seeing it immediately. And so what happens? So you're thinking, well, last week I just bought a new opening course. Must be the opening course. So you keep on buying opening courses and now it stops working.

Now you're super confused because they're like, well, obviously it was the opening. Well, it wasn't. So the delayed gratification has a real impact, both when you work well and you don't see results, that's pretty difficult to stay through that. And also, and maybe even more importantly, especially early on [00:06:00] when you're new to the game, you can basically do anything and you will still improve.

Let's say you're playing your first few games. You can actually study, so some opening traps and this will improve your game. Or you can just watch some YouTube video passively and you pick up something and it already improves your game. You don't need to train really the right way with focus, doing tactics, being super focused when you play, analyzing your games, you don't have to do all of that to actually improve in the beginning.

So what you're learning is, well, what I've done must be good because I've done that, and this training must be paying off. But what is happening is that simply because you're new to the game, anything you're doing is improving your chess a little bit, but then later on, you will stop to improve, but what you've learned is all the stuff that you did caused improvement. So it must be that this will continue to cause improvement. Sadly, [00:07:00] that's not the case.

To give an example of how this delayed gratification can happen in chess. I have been a chess professional since I stopped my high school. So I finished high school 2015, became a chess professional. And then quite immediately I had a pretty big stagnation. I wrote a piece about it. I think I also did a podcast about it.

And so then I had a stagnation period of like roughly a year, I think. I did everything. Well, not everything. Let's not be too strong on this. But I did many things right, I would say. I really trained hard. I took a lot of time. I had a very good coach. Grandmaster Dorfman became my coach pretty quickly after I became a professional.

So I did so many things right, but yet it didn't pay off initially. And so many people would stop at some point and say, okay, I've been pro, I train so hard and nothing changes. But then after, I think roughly a [00:08:00] year, I saw a big jump, and I won a lot of rating points. I had very, very good results, so that was a long period.

Then later on, I even got into a much longer plateau. I had a plateau that I was close to two and half years. What does that mean? That means I've been a chess professional for two and a half years. I did most of the things right. And I didn't see improvement in my results. Oh my God, two and a half years now.

Just to calm you down at home. For many of you, you are not at grandmaster level, so it won't take that long. But in general, the higher up you go, the longer the plateaus can be. And also the longer you are stuck, at some point, the longer it can take to make you unstuck. So that's just the general rule of thumb, but I just want to tell you that it can really take time.

The main problem is how do we understand if we're doing the right thing or if we're doing the wrong thing if we can't just look [00:09:00] at our results. With many other things, I would argue that, well, it's not instant. You're not like lifting weight and five seconds later you feel stronger.

But with many things it is pretty linear. What does that mean? It means that you are putting in the work. And if you're putting good work, you see a general tendency that is going upwards and in chess it can really nearly be the other way around. So let me share a story of a student that I started working with in October 2024.

This student had a longstanding problem with time trouble, and it was one of our main aspects that we wanted to work on together. Student also played a lot of over the board chess already. He is in his thirties, I believe, and he had a peak rating of I believe 2150 over the board rating, has FIDE rating.

But he dipped all the way to 2027 when we [00:10:00] started working. So kind of big down swing. And the goal was to redirect the curve upwards and get stronger and just get back up to his highest rating ever. Most importantly work on his thought process and time trouble. Now he got a grand master coach, not very cheap.

A grand master coach. He invested a lot of time. He also took a sabbatical, so he wasn't working for a year. So that was starting, I think when we started working together in October, 2024. And so a lot of time invested. And what happened first month, he won a few rating points. Second month he went down even below 2027.

So where we started? Third month stagnation. Fourth month, horrible tournament. At the low of 2000. So we are working four months together. And what is his result that pay that, that, all of the professional kind of trying to be trained like a professional or semi-professional chess player, [00:11:00] having a good coach and everything.

How does it pay off? Well, it pays off in losing 27 rating points in four months. That's really difficult. But actually, if you are looking at some students, especially if you're stuck for a long time, again, that's super important. That can happen because what we did is working on the thought process.

Now you have to imagine you can't just take a thought process, say, okay, this is how you should do it instead. Completely differently. Oh yeah. Next game. I'll apply that. No, you will be a little bit confused when you try changing something completely. You might think about, for example, let's say you are having, you're playing tennis.

And you're serving, but you're serving the wrong way. You have the wrong technique. So usually what happens, and I know this from my own experience because I had this, when somebody shows you the right technique first, you will get worse. Then you have to do it so many times, until you can get better. [00:12:00] So it's necessary because if you have the wrong technique, at some point you have a ceiling.

You can't get better with that wrong way of doing it with the wrong process. So you need to change. But it's super frustrating because in the short term, when I was playing against friends and so on, I was like, I'm always making double faults. This is so frustrating. I don't want to change this.

So you need to stay through that period and then, boom, you finally see improvements, and that's what happened with this student as well. Eight months after, or nine months after working together, he hit his peak rating for quite a long time. It's not his peak of all time yet, but he won a hundred points, so he was rated 2127 rating points in July, 2025.

So that's a hundred point change in nine months. This is very impressive and I'm very happy with that result and seeing how he plays, seeing his quality of games, [00:13:00] seeing his thought process, I believe there is still way more potential. But actually as I'm recording this, in August, he recently had a pretty bad tournament result wise and lost 30 points in that tournament again.

So we are back at a dip, and this is just how chess improvement can be. So it's so important that we manage to stick to the right process. So do the right things, and then stay through that period of dips, of hardship, of delayed gratification to then actually be rewarded with the right results.

Because if we are shifting too early, we are probably giving up all of the results or all of the things that we worked for, or potentially even worse, we are shifting, we are doing the wrong things. We then suddenly see improvements and then we think, oh, all the wrong things we did must have been the improvements, right?

Because that's what we changed. But in reality, it was the [00:14:00] training we did before we learned the wrong way. We then continue training the wrong way and we get stuck basically forever. So now it's the big question, how can you stick to your training for long enough? There are two super important things that I tried applying for myself and I try applying with my students.

Number one is expectation management, and number two is focusing on the process. So I say these again. Expectation management, focusing on the process. Let's talk about expectation management. This is something very hard for me. I just mentioned that I launched my YouTube channel. My first video has been performing extremely well of the 24 hours, and I already feel that when you have such a success, the expectation skyrocketed up. So it's really a constant work for me to work on my expectations and to keep them [00:15:00] low. Now, the problem in chess improvement is that the internet is full of big promises. Of quick and easy results that try to lure you in.

It might be YouTube titles, it might be blog article titles. It might be course titles. It might be just descriptions of things basically saying, if you are clicking here or if you are buying my stuff, chess will be easy. You will improve so quickly, and it will all be effortless and great. And when we have these expectations of quick improvement.

We are drawn to the wrong things. It's basically putting us in a vicious cycle where we search for the next quick hack. But actually after listening to this podcast episode, you should understand that it takes time to improve your game. So the quick hacks, mm, probably not the right thing.

And if you're always on a endless, vicious cycle in these quick hacks, this quick hack, that quick hack, that quick hack, you also, even if at some point you hit the right [00:16:00] thing, randomly getting to the right process of training, you wouldn't let it enough time. That's what I see with a lot of students actually. A lot of students also in Simplified Chess Improvement System. They get into the system, they change their training, they start training well, but after two weeks they're like, ah, where's my results?

And I'm like I told you, I tried telling you from the get go in this course that I'm sure you can improve your game. If you're doing everything I'm outlining, you will get results. But they won't be instant and they won't be easy. That's so important. So try to lower your expectations instead of saying, I need to find a way to improve right now, right here, say, okay, I'm just trying to aim for, that's the second point that we are going to talk about, the right process and I'll be patient and see how long it takes for me to improve. And I expect, and this is super important, I expect that it [00:17:00] can be that I'm doing the right things and I might even get a dip.

Especially when you work on things like thought process, like time trouble. These things really require a big change. So when I work with students on time trouble, I'm very harsh. I'm usually saying, Hey, this is our only focus for a while, and it will be better for you to make huge mistakes but not get into time trouble than getting into time trouble.

So we are trying to change something as big that there will be probably games that you lose because of that change in process. At some point it'll pay off huge, but you need to go through that. So that's super, super important. And just a side note, there are students that can see quick progress.

That's usually the outlier and not the norm. That can be if you're new into chess, yes, you can see quick progress. If you haven't messed up too many processes yet and you just need a little tweak, yes, you [00:18:00] can see quick processes. If you are lower rated, it's easier to have quicker progress then if you are higher rated.

If I would get, let's say somebody that is stuck at a international master level for seven years. Let's say hypothetically and I need to work with them. I'm going to tell them well just don't expect anything in like the first few months. Probably we need to change a lot of things if you still want to become GM. So let's work on the fundamentals, but that will take time.

Okay, let's go to step number two. The most important thing. Once we reduced our expectations, it basically gives us what we need to focus on the process. So instead of going to look at your results and saying, well, my results are going up, so I must be doing something right, or my results go down, so it must be bad.

You wanna just look at your process of training. Am I doing the right things? Am I doing them well? As I say, as [00:19:00] I stress in the Simplified Chess Improvement System a lot, I have these three do's that I outline in this course. I say, do what matters, do it well, do it consistently. So if you review your weekly training or your monthly training, whatever it is, and you can say, yes, I did what matters.

I focused on tactics, I focused on training, and I analyzed my games the right way. I did it with good focus, so I did it well. I did the right tactic solving process. I didn't just guess the move, but I did it the right way and I did it consistently. So I didn't just say, oh yeah, I'll take five days off of chess and pray that I'm getting better.

No, I am putting in the effort. If you can say yes, I do what matters. I do it well, I do it consistently. I can tell you at some point you will see results. With the people that are basically eternally stuck, right? That say, well, I'm trying everything, but I can't improve a chess. Maybe chess improvement is not for me. Up to now, I [00:20:00] always found something with do what matters, do it well or do it consistently that is not going well.

So focus on the process and only review the process. What I tell my students often is just click the no rating mode on Lichess. For example, if you're playing online on Lichess, I know this exists, I don't know if on chess.com it does, you can just hide your rating so you're not seeing your opponents rating, but you're also not seeing your own, you don't see a graph, you don't see nothing.

And then, when you do your review, your weekly or monthly review, you first review your process. You say, how did I do? How happy am I with what I did? Did I do what matters? Do it well, do it consistently. Once you do that whole review, you can, if you're curious, peak at your rating. So you shortly go, yes, rating on, and then you see if you were going up and down.

But you shouldn't let the review of the process be influenced by your [00:21:00] results because if you understand delayed gratification, when you're doing the right thing, you are really not sure when it will pay off. And usually, I've talked about this in the past as well, chess improvement's not linear. So it's not like if you win a hundred points, as with the student that I mentioned in this episode that won a hundred points in nine months.

It wasn't like 10 points every month, but it was like first four months minus 30 points. And then basically the next few months he won. A lot of points, 130 points in total, and then again, one month, boom, 30 points down. So it's usually looking a little bit more like a roller coaster and not like a straight line.

So what happens if you put in the time, the effort, the energy for long enough, you usually get rewarded with a period where chess feels kind of simple. You feel like, oh yeah, everything is flowing. Now I'm feeling in the zone. Then comes the next problem. I can talk about this, [00:22:00] or I think I did talk about it already in a podcast episode, that when you're having the good result, now comes the danger that you're thinking, well, I'm unbeatable.

Why should I do the right process? I win every single game. Let's go. And you just stop training the right way because you're thinking, well, I'm genius. I still win, right? So for one week, you still win all your games or most of your games, you stop doing the right things. And, as you know by now, you will get punished maybe three months down the line.

Now I think some of you listening might have this question. Well, I would like to focus on the process. I understand that I should lower my expectations. I understand delayed gratification. But I don't really know what is the right process. Now, to that, I wanna say two things.

First of all, nearly all of my content is trying to help you do the right things. These three dos that I said, do what matters, do it well, do it consistently. So if you're [00:23:00] just going to consume my content and actually to apply what I'm teaching, you will get pretty close to a good process. But if you wanna take it a step further and say, okay, I don't wanna leave this up to chance.

I wanna be sure that I'm doing the right things. I wanna have a complete kind of holistic chess improvement system. Then you can check out my course Simplified Chess Improvement System. This is really the main aim of my course. It's giving you the guidelines of what you should do both in training, but also during games.

And then if you're unsure, there is a community and you can ask me, Hey, I've been doing that, or this was my training plan. I've been stuck. Am I doing the right process or am I missing something? Is something going the wrong way? Should I course correct somewhere or do I just need to be patient? So this way, I hope that my students really know, okay, I'm doing the right things.

This is approved. This has [00:24:00] helped so many others. There's over a thousand students at the moment in this course. So you really get the safety of knowing I'm doing the right thing. I just need to continue doing it, going through these difficult periods, going through these, you know, dips that can happen, but then I will come out stronger.

I hope this podcast episode helped. You understand that if you are seeing bad results, it doesn't need to mean that you're training the wrong way. And the other way around as well. If you're seeing good results, doesn't mean that you're doing everything correctly. So, focus on the process, lower your expectations, and if you wanna have this system, a holistic system, and ask me questions about your own training, then check out the Simplified Chess Improvement System. As always, there should be a link in the podcast description wherever you listen to this. See you the next one.

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