The Simple Path to 1500 Lessons From My Dad’s Chess Journey
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer, and today I want to talk about my favorite adult chess improver. And you guys, I'm sorry, you have no chance. It's my dad. It's not my dad because he's so good at improving chess, but it's my dad because he's my dad and I love him.

So I want to talk about his chess improvement because my dad was pretty lazy, didn't really do much in terms of chess improvement and he only started playing chess competitively when he was already in his 40s and yet he managed to reach an all time high of 1677 FIDE rating points and today I want to share how he did that and what you can learn from him.[00:01:00] 

So when I started playing chess, that was around 2005, 2006, chess improvement was way simpler than nowadays. Not just for kids like me, but for adult improvers too. Take my dad, for example, as I mentioned, he taught me the rules, but he never studied the game on his own. I basically had to force him to do anything at all.

Because he accompanied me to tournaments, he decided to play in them too, instead of being bored, just watching me, he just spent his time playing chess. Despite putting in minimal effort into training, he reached a 1531 national rating, that's from the Swiss Chess Federation. And now, after the rating bump, nowadays, so FIDE increased the rating points of many players, he would be rated 1677 on FIDE.

That's higher than many adult improvers who invest [00:02:00] dozens and dozens of hours every week, every month in their chess. So the question is, how do they do it? And why is it so much harder to do the same nowadays? 

So one of the most important things is to realize few things actually matter. One of my favorite stories when it comes to my dad is his opening knowledge. So I taught my father some basic ideas in the Scotch game, and then for a while he played online and he played in tournament games, and one day he comes back after such a tournament game and he tells me the Scotch doesn't work. I was like, "What do you mean the Scotch doesn't work? Show me, how did the game go?"

So we go through the game and now guys, this is just very short visualization. So don't worry, we're not talking a lot about chess moves on this podcast. So we go e4, that's [00:03:00] the pawn in front of the king. e5, right? Now the normal way of doing the Scotch would be moving the knight that is closer to the king, knight f3 out.

Black plays knight to c6 and now our d4 square is protected by our knight and we go d4 and then we enter the Scotch opening. Now what did my dad do wrong? He went e4, great. His opponent went e5 and now he played knight to c3. So that's the wrong knight. This knight is only protecting our own pawn at the moment.

His opponent would go knight to c6 and the only thing he remembered is that he is supposed to play d4. So now he realized, "I can't play d4 because this square is protected twice by your opponent's pawn and by your opponent's knight. So d4 is not possible." And he came back to me and told me that I was teaching him an opening you can't play.

The reality was: he just knew so little about openings that he moved his wrong knight and that was it. He still just [00:04:00] developed his pieces and actually managed to win some of these games. He also could have easily messed up a theoretical endgame because he didn't know what to do. 

I mentioned that already. He didn't study a lot, so he didn't study a lot of theoretical endgames, what to do in rook endgames, this, that, that. He barely knew how to promote a pawn to a queen, and that's it. And if you'd asked him for common opening plans, his response would have been just develop the pieces. That's basically it.

So he really wasn't a sophisticated chess player, but that's exactly the point. You don't need to be a sophisticated chess player in order to break through 1500, maybe even 2000 online. What my dad did very well was focusing on the basics. He was pretty good for his level at spotting hanging pieces and avoiding [00:05:00] blunders.

That's all he cared about. He knew a few tactical motives. Forks, pins, double attacks, and understood they were so important. And on every move, he really just checked, "Okay, can I capture something? I can't capture anything. Okay, what could be a logical move? Can I develop? Maybe, okay, let's develop another piece."

Or then before he made a move, "If I do this move, can my opponent capture a piece?" And that was his thinking. Very, very rudimentary, very fundamental. He really just focused on that and basically if you would summarize my dad's play, it would be:

Point number one, play with all your pieces. 

Point number two, capture free stuff.

Point number three, trade if you're up material. 

Point number four, complicate if you're down material.

Point number five, check for blunders before moving 

And this straightforward approach also allowed [00:06:00] him to return to chess after prolonged breaks because he wasn't forgetting opening theory.

He didn't know opening theories. There was nothing to forget. But this like basic way of looking at the chessboard wasn't so easy to forget. It's like learning to ride the bike. You don't do it for three years. You get on maybe first few minutes. And then you're just. doing it perfectly fine.

So he didn't play a single game in 2014, actually most of 2013, 2014, and then 2015, and that was the time where I was already old enough to travel alone to tournaments. So he just wouldn't travel to tournaments anymore. And then at the 2016 Swiss championship, funnily enough, that was my first So it's championship that I actually won in the closed highest category.

He won a category prize in his section by scoring five out of seven. So he was starting number 41 [00:07:00] in this tournament. Again, after not having played for two and a half years, you would think, Oh my God, he would score terribly. Nope. He scored very well. He scored five out of seven. He beat the number one rated player in the field and he won a prize. He got the ninth place and I think he got 200 bucks and he was super excited about that. So that's how my dad played chess. 

Now, why is it so much harder to do the same nowadays? Or why don't I see this often? It's something called the complexity trap. Nowadays, I meet many adult improvers who spend far more time on chess than my dad did.

They are far more disciplined, motivated, into the chess world, everything. They are equally successful in other areas of life. So it's not like you can just say, "Oh, my dad is a genius. And those people aren't smart." And yet they achieve far [00:08:00] worse results. One great example was that I recently received a rare money back request from a student in beginner chess mastery. That's my beginner course up to a level of 1, 200 chess. com. That would be, if we translate that, that's like a thousand FIDE, right? So that's way lower than the rating of my father. And this customer was saying that they felt the material was great.

But they needed way more material than what was inside Beginner Chess Mastery to progress from their rating of 800 online to 1 200. And this reflects a common misconception. More doesn't mean better. My dad, who is still occasionally playing online, but really not with focus, really, he's not following my stuff.

Let's be honest. So he is still playing online occasionally. He could [00:09:00] easily benefit from like a lot of stuff that is inside Beginner Chess Mastery because even what I tried to trim down as super simple content would exceed what he ever learned in chess. So my opinion is that you need actually not even everything that is inside beginner chess mastery. If you're actually applying it and being able to see to capture free pieces, to see hanging pieces, to not hang pieces on your own, you will realize, "Oh my God, I need so little knowledge to actually reach the 1200."

So not more, actually less. But the complexity trap leads many adult improvers to believe they need advanced theory to succeed. As my dad's journey shows, the opposite is true. Simplicity wins. So with endless resources, we have books, courses, videos. It's really easy to fall into this trap of [00:10:00] trying to study everything.

But then you get overwhelmed, you get confused, you study material that's not for you yet. You study a book and you're thinking, "Oh, I'm so bad. I don't get this." No, you don't have to get it yet. It's like you're in elementary school, but you're studying stuff that people studying in university need to know.

So it's just not for you right now. And this trap. Is way, way, way worse right now, where we have the internet, we have so many resources than back in 2005, 2006, 2007, when my dad slowly got into playing chess, because well, back then we would just say, okay, here's one book, right? Try to solve some tactics exercises.

I think the only book I ever gave him, he never finished. So that was great. But what he would do is just watch my games. When he played a game, he would analyze it with me. Just ask me, "Hey, what should I have done better?" We didn't analyze with an engine. I would just say, "Okay, here, you could have captured [00:11:00] this piece here. You should do this."

So we really focused on simplicity and it wasn't even possible for him to get overwhelmed because basically there was nothing to get overwhelmed with. So that's a big advantage because my dad didn't even know advanced positional ideas. He didn't know how grandmasters prepare their openings because back then I also didn't know yet.

I was like, maybe when he started, it was like 1800 rated. So the only thing I could teach him was just basic stuff. But nowadays you're confronted with all of these ads from super grandmaster opening courses. You see press conferences of very strong players saying, Hey, you can't play this opening, or you should do this intricate training technique or this sophisticated thing in order to become a GM. But not in order to improve as a under 2000 rated player. 

So not having sophisticated knowledge was actually a superpower [00:12:00] for my dad. And again, I said this already, but I want to repeat it because it's so simple. His chess can be summarized by point number one, play with all your pieces. Point number two, capture free stuff.

Point number three, trade if you're up material. Point number four, complicate if you're down material. Point number five, check for blunders before moving. That's it. 

He would miss opportunities by oversimplifying, for sure, but he avoided those big mistakes, those big blunders, those big tactical oversights that caused so many of you guys listening game after game after game after game.

Now, just imagine how much stronger you would be if you just cut out these huge mistakes. Yep, it makes a huge difference. So what I see with many chess improvers nowadays that there is a lot of overwhelm, there is a [00:13:00] lot of overthinking, there is a lot of abstract ideas. Oh, maybe I should place my knight better.

Maybe I should do this rook on the open file. Maybe I should do this. And then when I analyze also with my students, often I realize that when there is a mistake in a game, they attribute it to some very deep concept. "Oh yeah. Now I understood that this should be that bum bum. My knight shouldn't be on the edge of the board."

And I'm like, "No, the only reason this move is bad because it's losing a piece. Here's the line." That's it. There's no sophistication. There is no intricate belief system you need to have. Whatever. No, it's just like. Look two moves ahead, see that you're losing a piece, and that's it.

That's everything there is. So even in very simple positions where the computer would show, okay, this is just bad. I realized that many adult improvers nowadays, they find these sophisticated solutions or ideas and [00:14:00] thought processes that are just wrong. Chess is mostly concrete and whenever you make a big mistake and the engine jumps up or down, it's most likely because you've lost material due to a very simple blunder or a tactical oversight. That's it. 

So now I hope I brought this point home for you guys and if you want to simplify your chess journey, here is what I would do. To improve like my dad, you need to simplify both your training and your thinking at the board. So for the training, mostly you want to reduce your inputs, stick to one trusted source for advice.

Now, I'm not saying I'm the only trusted source on the internet. You cannot trust anyone else. That's definitely not what I mean, but I just mean that if you have one person, one, content creator, one coach, whatever it is that you really trust and you trust their methods, [00:15:00] there might be not so much benefit to adding more stuff on top because there is more risk of confusion than actually improving more.

The stronger you get, the more you will be able to differentiate what is for you, what's not for you, what works for your personality. What can you take from there, from this book, from that coach, from that source. So then you can start to pick things. But if you're just getting into chess or if you're below 2000, you really don't need something super sophisticated.

So that's why I would recommend sticking to one trusted resource. And thank you so much if that's me. But if that's not me, that's also fine. Follow somebody you trust, do what they say, improve your game.

Then avoid blindly following engine suggestions, especially moves you don't understand. That's a huge problem in the opening, that's also a problem when analyzing games.

Something I realized is that when somebody doesn't understand why a certain [00:16:00] move is bad or good, they come up with theories on their own. And that's super dangerous, right? When my students suddenly tell me, yeah, I learned from this game, this kind of pattern. And I'm like, no, that's the opposite of what you should learn.

You just learned internalize something completely wrong. And it will be way harder to solve that in the future. If you're not understanding something, ignore it for the time being. If we're talking about maths, for example, if a kid is looking at some super sophisticated Einstein kind of theory that you only have to learn in high school or maybe university, I don't think that you're trying to explain this kid what this really does, but you're just telling, don't worry about this.

You will get to this way, way later on, maybe in a decade, you can understand this. Now, let's focus on addition and multiplication, right? So that would be the same mindset in chess. If you can't grasp an idea, forget about it. [00:17:00] For now, focus on the simple stuff. And then focus on no more than three areas at a time and always digest what you're studying.

So instead of working on openings, middle games, endgames, tactics, strategy, how to win won positions, how to come back from lost positions, all of these things at the same time, pick three things. And with my one third rule, I really like having the tactics, playing and analyzing, and then one more topic, focus on these three things, absorb what you learn, try to implement in your games, and then slowly move away.

When you have a new weakness, you want to work on this and improve that. And then at the board, that will be the third time I'm telling you this, but it's so important. Simplify your thinking. Rely on these principles. 

Number one, play with all your pieces. 

Number two, capture free [00:18:00] stuff.

Number three, trade if you're up material. 

Number four, complicate if you're down material. 

Number five, check for blunders before moving. 

And that's it. Chess improvement doesn't have to be as overwhelming as it seems. My dad's journey shows that focusing on the basics Really the basics like sporting tactics, avoiding blunders, applying simple principles can take you further than obsessing over advanced strategies.

So next time you feel overwhelmed, remember, it's not about doing more, it's about doing less, but better. Simplify, focus, and watch your chess improve. 

See you next week.