How To Turn Plateau's Into Big Successes
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer and I help chess players train deliberately with what I call the Simplified Chess Improvement System. Deliberate chess players live by three rules. Do what matters. Do it well and do it consistently. If you're tired of training randomly and want to follow a simple proven system, this podcast is for you.

Last week I've introduced the three do's or the three rules that deliberate chess players live by. Do what matters, do it well, do it consistently. And on the consistency point I really feel like we as a [00:01:00] society have unlearned what real consistency really means with all of these quick shorts.

We can scroll all Twitter, whatever, we can ask AI for any answer and get it immediately. So somehow we don't know anymore what does consistency mean and what does it mean to really stick to the right process when results are not immediate. With the most important things in our life: with health, with wealth, with chess improvement, with work, with business, it really requires some time until you see the results.

So how can you stick to the things long enough? And what does a long plateau actually mean? In today's episode I will talk about my own plateaus as a chess professional and I hope it gives you inspiration as to what a real plateau means and how long you can continue to do the right process even if results aren't amazing. Let's get [00:02:00] into it. 

In June 2015, I became a chess professional. It wasn't just the people around me who doubted me. My coach, someone I trusted, and even the Swiss Chess Federation told me to get a real job instead. They said I wasn't good enough to make a living from chess, especially not in Switzerland, where the cost of living is sky high.

The message was clear. I was chasing an impossible dream, but I had big dreams. I wanted to prove that I could live from chess, that all the years of practice had been worth it. And I also just felt this kind of drive to do something else than just the normal standard way, go to study, get a job you don't like too much et cetera.

I dove into a relentless routine to show everyone that my plan was right. 8 to 10 hours a day of chess. Only later did I understand the value of less. So at the beginning of my chess [00:03:00] career I was all in, just chess every single day. I combined it with sport, healthy nutrition and good sleep, becoming completely obsessed with the idea of becoming the youngest ever Swiss Grandmaster and then after that even taking my chess further.

You see, since November 2013, that's a little bit less than two years, my rating had been stuck around 2400. Even though I earned my IM title in 2014, my rating barely moved. I started my professional career with a rating of 2409. That's 10 rating points more than I had in November 2013. Convinced that with enough hard work, success would come quickly. But reality hit hard. Breaking through a plateau isn't as simple as just grinding away, and I was about to learn that lesson the hard way. 

So here are the results of my first seven months as a professional chess player [00:04:00] and roughly what was going through my mind at the time. So in July 2015, I got up to 2416 rating points, that's plus 7 rating points.

And that's pretty good for a month on high level. I thought let's go, it's all upward from now on. Then August 2015, 2420, I win 4 rating points. A little slow for my taste, but at least winning some points. Then September 2015, plus two rating points. Now, slowly I start getting nervous. Can't this go a little bit faster?

At this pace, it will take me a long time to become a Grandmaster. But then reality hit really hard in October 2015, when I lost 24 rating points in one month. And I was thinking, like, what? I have now been working hard for four months, and I get worse results, and I'm now [00:05:00] lower rated than when I started being a professional.

That's four months in. And I started doubting myself and thinking maybe the other people, the naysayers, they were right. In November 2015, I recovered nine points. At least I was up again above the 2400 Elo mark. So a true IM in quote unquote. In December, I lost again, two points. My new coach, which was Joseph Dorfman at the time, he tells me, keeps telling me you're on the right track.

We're doing the right thing. You're training well. But my patience was really about to expire. I was putting questions, so many things like, should I be a professional? Is this the right coach? Am I doing the right thing? And so on and so forth. In January, 2016, I then won four points. So I'm back to 2408.

That's one point less than I started the professional year with. So that was more stagnation. I really thought I was putting in the best effort possible, but [00:06:00] it was just nagging in the back of my head that maybe I have to go to university at some point because I was still living at home.

It wasn't really making any money. That was really a difficult period, but then I had a breakthrough. So something changed in February, 2016, after all these months of hard work, I finally had a breakthrough. I won 14 points in a month. And again, that's for a high level, when you play, let's say five to 10 games.

That's pretty good on international master level. And especially the two games that I won against other international masters were very one sided. So I felt like I completely destroyed them. This gave me really some confidence and I thought, okay, now something is changing in my results. All the work I put into changing my thought process, openings and calculation were finally paying off.

And from then on, really chess felt pretty easy for half a [00:07:00] year. I continued training, the results came one after another. In April, I made a grandmaster norm, scored very strongly in a closed tournament. In July, I was an outsider in the Swiss championship. But I won. It was actually my first closed Swiss championship I ever played.

And I just immediately won it. It was nearly a record. It was like the third youngest thing ever to win a national title for the adult section. I could have given up in January. Just when one of the best periods of my career was about to start. So that's a great lesson. You're working so long and you don't see anything, but you might be just in front of that big breakthrough.

I felt on top of my game, enjoyed every tournament and I started getting media attention because of this Swiss championship title. I started getting sponsors. I started getting more support from the federation and foundations and the naysayers were like, okay, yeah, now it's a year you [00:08:00] won the Swiss championship title.

You have a second GM norm. It looks like you're doing something. And then, just when I thought I had it all figured out, I lost 34 rating points in one tournament. And again, a little bit of context here, 34 rating points in one tournament is absolutely insanely bad. It's really just, you're playing so much under your rating.

I lost a few games against 2200s. I barely won any games. It was really, really painful. And if you think I won 70 points roughly in this first one year and then I lost 34 points back in one month. So that felt like okay, I just deleted half the progress that I made. This marked, the start of my next and even more frustrating plateau.

So in August, 2016, just before losing those 34 rating points, I was rated 2477 points. Fast forward to [00:09:00] March, 2019. That's a little bit more than two and a half years, if my math is correct. I had a rating of 2479. So I was playing chess full time for two and a half years and I won two tw rating points. Two.

So yes, I did have a traumatic brain injury. 2017 is when the traumatic brain injury started. So a part of it was also health based, but all of my available focus and time I had, I was putting into just improvement. And I had no results to show, but thanks to my experience of breaking through my previous plateau, I stayed calm, but relatively calm. I still did a lot of doubting myself, second thinking, thinking, what am I doing?

Should I get a new coach? Should I do this? Should I do that? That is always going on. But the most important thing is really that I stuck to the routine, no matter how much I was doubting the process sometimes, I was still sticking to [00:10:00] it. And that's really, really important. Sometimes I make changes, but I always tried to work on my chess and work on my health and do my best on a daily basis.

And then, from March 2019, I had the best chess year of my life. I had several 2700 plus performances, so I really had a few performances that were like up to par with world number 30, world number 40, which was amazing. I won another Swiss championship, and this one I won with 7.5/9, really a dominant score.

And I won an international open as well. I started with seven out of seven and I won it one round before it even ended. So that was incredible. Really just such a nice year. Again, I could have given up in these two and a half years, but trusting the process earned me another breakthrough. Why am I sharing this?

What is the takeaway? I see so many people who have the same struggle. But they pivot, jump around, lose hope, [00:11:00] or quit early. And as our world, I mentioned this already a little bit, becomes quicker day by day, the amount of time someone is ready to go through a period without results, but sticks to their training, is getting smaller and smaller. So the slight frustration that kicked in for me after two to three months, now kicks in for most people after two weeks. And again, a little bit of context here. If you're a professional chess player, you sometimes have a full month where you're not playing any rated game. So by matter of definition, if you're defining just results, a plateau of lacking results.

You don't have any results. So you're much more used to a little bit longer periods where things don't seem to move. And then, you know, you train a lot and then you play two or three tournaments in a row and then you might see something or these two or three tournaments don't go well.

Then you're stuck longer and longer. But now with online chess. What is happening with many, many people that I see is: two weeks is a [00:12:00] catastrophe if you're not improving. And that's just not the reality of life. You can't just lose your mind after two, three weeks of plateaus. I have and had students suddenly that got nervous after one and a half months of working together.

And we were really doing great. One student even won 80 points in two months, which is a great result. And he got nervous and he was like, no, we were doing something wrong. We need to change something. He was like, no, that's totally normal. It's actually amazing result. You could have lost 30 points, but we just need to change so many things that this might take some time.

So I was freaking out. Yes. I doubted myself. I hoped for results in the short term, but what I didn't do and what is the main message of this podcast is I continued working hard. So I didn't change everything or pivot or just lose my mind and stop doing the things that matter. I worked hard and [00:13:00] did the stuff that I thought were important. 

And I worked with a coach, I worked with a sports psychologist. I just took it seriously. I worked on my mindset with a sports psychologist and I never fell for quick traps or other quick win temptations. I wasn't like, okay, now I need this secret to win quickly or to go to GM quickly or whatever, because I knew deep down that this doesn't exist and I need to go through this difficult period.

We all have plateaus. Everyone will sooner or later face a plateau. If you haven't yet, that's very cool for you, but probably you haven't played chess long enough for your natural ability of learning just something and then improving it in a game to slowly stop working and plateau will arrive, and it's better that you prepare for it if you haven't had it yet.

If you have it, if you're in it for a long time, it's totally normal. Everybody has it. You will try stuff and [00:14:00] it doesn't seem to work out. The biggest differentiator is if you can stick to it long enough to earn your breakthrough. Again, for me, sticking to it long enough was a little over two and a half years.

It's a long period of time. And this is IM or Grandmaster level. It means if you're now listening to this and like, Oh my God, what? I'm 1300 and I will have two and a half years to break through to 1400, no, it gets harder and harder the higher up you go. So your plateaus will be shorter than mine, but it can take sometimes weeks or months until you see any of your training go into results.

And it's just so important to stick to it because again, that's the huge differentiator. Knowing that nearly nobody, and I'm really talking about 95%, maybe even more people that are not able to stick to a good process when they have lacking [00:15:00] results. Knowing that, it should give you motivation because you can make such a huge difference.

You will have the outlandish results that everybody's like, Oh my God, how did this guy do it? And then your answer will be like, well, I just continued training. I mean it's really not a secret or anything but it's just difficult and that's why nearly nobody is doing it. I really see too many chess improvers freak out by a new opening course or quit their training after a month of plateau and you didn't even scratch the real plateau yet.

So before you freak out next time and try to change everything in your chess training, ask yourself: did I stick to my good training long enough to earn my breakthrough. Now, again, the good training, what does it mean? Deliberate chess players, they focus on: doing what matters, doing it well and doing it consistently.

So if you're doing it [00:16:00] consistently, you have to ask yourself, am I doing it well? Am I doing what matters? And if those two are a yes, then you just need to stick to it. You just need to stick to it and you will see results at some point. Because when you ask yourself this question for nearly everyone out there.

The answer is probably no. I haven't stuck long enough to earn my breakthrough. So do your part, keep the quality high, keep doing what matters, and at some point, likely, when you expect it least, you'll be rewarded with a breakthrough. I hope it doesn't take two and a half years for you guys, but I hope it has inspired you.

Just, again, do what matters, do it well, and do it consistently, and reframe what consistency really is. 

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