You Can Achieve More Than You Think!
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm grandmasterster Noël Studer, and I help chess players train deliberately with what I call The Simplified Chess Improvement System. Deliberate chess players live by three rules to 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.

Let's talk about your potential, and I would argue that your potential is higher than what you believe. Talking of potential, what do you think is your potential? How many points can you win? Well, I think it [00:01:00] depends a lot. It depends on your time horizon. It depends on how much you're ready to do, but my idea is always if you're ready to do the right things, if you're ready to train well, then you will be able to achieve so much more than you think is possible. 

And I've gotten this conviction just by observing other sports and by realizing that in chess, the competition is pretty tame. So today's podcast is really about understanding why in chess we have so much potential. If we are doing stuff the right way, we can outperform so many people and just comparing it to other sports where it's just way more competitive so we can be super happy to be in chess, where we can have outstanding results, not by training 10 hours a day, but by training smarter than most people. Enjoy. 

Most chess players train randomly, inconsistently, or without a plan. That means if you train the right way, you can outperform [00:02:00] 99% of players, even those who seem naturally gifted. Sounds good.

Here is why and how. Being part of a sports class in high school and working for the Swiss Olympic Athlete Commission gave me unique insights into how elite athlete train. Over time, I realized that compared to other sports, the competition in chess is weak. This means that you can achieve outstanding results just by training the right way without being a genius or spending five hours a day on chess.

Most chess players think improvement means grinding six to eight hours a day. But let me share a secret. Even when I became an international master, my training was quite chaotic. You could argue it was a mess. Actually, it was so disorganized that my athlete friends in high school called me the lazy guy.

And I have to say this pretty true. I didn't train that much. While my swimmer friends were waking up at 5:00 [00:03:00] AM to train 90 minutes before school, that's true story. They usually came to school at eight and they trained already once. I was in my cozy bed while they trained in the gym. At lunchtime, I ate whatever food I felt like eating, and there was certainly no gym involved there.

And while they completed a third session in the evening. Usually, sometimes they had only two that was good for them, but sometimes they had a third session. I watched trash TV and I have to say I was the king of trash TV watching. I was really informed what was on the trash TV in the German and Swiss television.

Now I'm not as informed anymore, luckily, and do some more reasonable stuff with my time anyway. Yet somehow I was still one of the top junior players in Switzerland. My swimmer friends trained 25 to 30 hours weekly pushing their limits every single day and still weren't a among the very best. So [00:04:00] they trained so hard and they weren't like they were competing in Swiss championships, but they weren't like outstanding, even in Switzerland.

And the international competition was even harder. So this is crazy. You train crazily hard, and they weren't even in the Youth Swiss national team. So this is just crazy. And compared to it, I was training lazily, had basically a secured place in the youth Swiss national team. I was sent to European and World Championships in the youth categories every single year.

And my training was just so much more random, so much less intense, less hours, less structured. I didn't care about food, I didn't care, about basically anything. That's when it really clicked for me. Compared to other sports, chess competition is relatively tame, and that's a very nice way of saying it.

In most sports, you have to train like it. Elite athlete just to compete. But in chess, the average competitor plays some [00:05:00] online blitz watches, random opening videos, and solves puzzles inconsistently. Now obviously the higher up you go, the better the training gets, but I can tell you, even on grandmasterster level, most training is not as intense as you will see it in other sports. 

Just when I compare with friends that I have from skiing, from swimming, from many different sports, if I look how they train and I look how I trained or my competition trained, holy cow, that's a huge difference. But if you break it down to the amateur chess player even, then we even get a bigger and bigger difference to other sports.

So the thing is, if you commit to training the right way, you can outperform 99%. And I didn't just choose this random number because if you go to chess.com and you see the rating of Rapid, you will be in the top 0.36% if you have a 2000 rapid rating. And I would argue someone with a 2000 [00:06:00] rapid rating more often than not, has a rather random and haphazard way of studying chess and doesn't train like a triad lead or, whatever swimmer, bicycle race or whatever it could be even on amateur level.

I'm training for a half marathon now and already there, I see again, holy cow. People that train for a half marathon, they can really take it super serious. They are dialed in. They don't do that much, but when they do it, holy cow, it's intense. It's really intense. 

So for me, everything changed in 2014 when I placed fifth in the under 18 world championship. I just missed the medal finish because of worst buchholz. So same points, worst buchholz. That was super frustrating and this means that I had this frustration, but I also got a lot of motivation from it because I thought, " Wait a moment, if I can finish top five in the under 18 World championship as a Swiss chess player, and Switzerland doesn't really have that much chess tradition, [00:07:00] what would happen if I trained like my swimmer friends?" 

Like, imagine the intensity, the kind of professionalism they put into their training. If I put that into my training, holy cow, where would I end up? So that's what I tried to find out. I said, okay, I'll become a professional chess player. So half a year later, I became a chess pro.

But initially I made the same mistake most ambitious chess players do, and I really see this so often and I understand why you're getting there. I just was a few steps ahead. I started grinding 10 hours a day, mistakenly believing more training equals more improvement. So I see a lot of people just trying to put the maximum amount of time into chess and forgetting about how well you do it, what you're doing. Does this really matter? Am I really focused? 

And I was the same. I tried to start 7:00 AM, let's train, let's train, 10:00 PM, still training. And that didn't really work. I wasn't training [00:08:00] smarter. I was just training more. And by that, I risk my health, my improvement, and even a little bit my sanity because if you keep just doing chess, well, we know what happened to some of the famous chess players. They are going kind of crazy. 

So then in 2017, everything changed dramatically. I suffered a brain injury that limited my training from 10 hours down to just two to three hours per day. On some days it was even less than that. I was devastated. At first I thought like, okay, finish. Chess is over. If I have this, if I can't fully focus for the full day, I have no chance at competing.

However, then with the limitation, it actually forced me to focus on what matters the most and doing it extremely well for these two, three hours in average that I had for real good high quality chess training. And something crazy happened when I did these two, three hours, highly focused training. I started to see better results [00:09:00] than training 10 hours a day.

And, as you might think, I had more time for other stuff. I was more happy in general, just more calm and I realized that it's not about how much you do, but it's really about how well you train and if you train what really matters. That then later on, brought me to these three dos that I often talk about now to what matters. Do it well, do it consistently. If you do this, it's pretty simple to improve. 

So even at the grandmaster level, I was a grandmaster when I had the brain injury, focus training produced astonishing improvements. So the exciting part here is, you guys listening are probably not on grandmasters level. So, if you're just seeing in pure points,

winning points if you are rated 500 is way easier. So a hundred points from 500 to 600 is way easier than from a thousand to 1100, is way easier than from 1700 to 18. [00:10:00] So it's like the lower rated you are, the easier it is to win a certain amount of points. From 25 to 2,600 is a huge jump if you compare it with other rating.

So, you're not on grandmaster's level, so I had astonishing results. You can even have better results in terms of amount of points, even if you are not a pro, because, well, I just had two to three hours a day. 

And what I see very often, what I talk about often as well, is that many people think that chess improvement has to be super complex, right?

You need to have the perfect plan. You need to have super sophisticated stuff. You need a complicated system. You need to be a genius. You need to have talent. You need to have this super memory that can remember all the games like Magnus Carlsons, remember all these ancient games.

It's really not like that. As I've mentioned before, chess improvement can be pretty simple if you focus on doing what matters, doing it well and doing it consistently. You can improve your game, but there is one big problem. No good system [00:11:00] can make it easy or immediate for you. So this is super important to understand if you're thinking about your potential in whole.

Your potential is high, and I would say you can achieve way more than you believe you can achieve, but only if you're thinking long-term. If you're thinking short-term, oh, how much can I win in the next week? Oof, probably you overestimate it. There is this quote. It's said to be from Bill Gates, but also sometimes Tony Robbins, whoever said it, they say most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade or two.

I would break that down for chess, you can say most players overestimate what, how much they can improve in a month and underestimate how much they can improve in one, two, or five years. So if you're sticking to something long enough, you can do the things that really matter. You can break through these plateaus and you can have bigger results than you think possible.

And one great [00:12:00] example is a student of The Simplified Chess Improvement System. That's a new name of my previous course, Next Level Training. So students shared their result for the last year, and it was a nice graph. The graph first for the first two months pointed downwards. So lost 50 points, but by the end of the year, they won 170 points total. So first down 50, and then 1, 2, 20 from then. And that's happening from time to time that when you try to improve, it's not going immediately. Everything straightforward, boom, immediate improvement. Sometimes you go through these slums, then you improve, then you learn, then you have your skills, and then it's going up.

So it's super important that if you want to improve a lot, you need to have the right mindset. You need to be able to say "no" to immediate quick hacks kind of things and to think long term, to train long term. And then you can have crazy [00:13:00] results. 

So I have mentioned it very shortly and I'm very excited about it. I have relaunched my course. It's now not called anymore Next Level Training, but it's called The Simplified Chess Improvement System, really trying to give a name that reflects what this course is teaching. It's teaching how to train smarter, not harder.

It's train teaching how to simplify your training plan and eliminate overwhelm, and how to consistently improve your skills, which will in the long run, convert into rating points. So what have I done? I have refilled all of the videos to provide a smoother learning experience and integrated everything and.

It's also now connected to a community. So directly from the course, there is a community where we talk about chess improvement. I try to help you if you have problems, so I'm super excited about this and the whole idea is really [00:14:00] chess improvement isn't as complex as many people make it to be. You just need to have a plan that works for you.

You need to do this stuff well, you need to learn tactics the right way. You need to execute on tactical puzzles the right way. Hint, write down your solutions. You need to analyze your games the right way. You need to study openings so you can actually remember the moves that you're studying. You need to study openings so you understand the plans and the ideas. So if your opponent deviates, you know what to play. 

So all of these things are super important. And they are taught inside this course. So if you want to train chess the right way and you feel like, Hmm, I'm struggling to do it on my own, then consider checking out The Simplified Chess Improvement System. You have the link in the podcast description. 

And guys, if you had access to Next Level Training, you got immediate free access to this upgraded version. So nothing for you to do, you can't even buy it, you already have it. [00:15:00] So everybody that got Next Level Training has access to The Simplified Chess Improvement System as of this podcast releasing.

So if you're still unsure what you want to do, if you want to understand how much potential you have, there are basically two things you can do. One thing is to study randomly, waste most of your time and to think about what your potential could be. I get a lot of emails saying, "Hey, could I win 300 points? Could I win 500 points? Could I do this?" 

The truth is, I can't tell you that the only way you know is if you're trying to train the right way, and then you'll see if you can achieve it. So if you wanna do that, I highly recommend start training with a proven, simplified system designed to consistently improve your skills.

If that sounds something like you want, The Simplified Chess Improvement System could be something for you, check it out. And otherwise, [00:16:00] just start with a super simple plan. Start doing stuff the right way. You can learn a lot from this podcast already. I have a lot of articles, there's a lot of free stuff even teaching you to do stuff the right way. 

You need to have a plan. You need to have good actions. You need to do the work and you need to think long term. And then you can improve more than most of the other people. 'Cause the truth is, nearly nobody in chess at the moment is ready to do what matters, to do it well and to do it consistently.

If you do these three things and, what implies consistently is over a long term, then you will outperform so many people because along the way somebody will lose motivation, drop out along the way. Somebody else will start playing mindless splits again, lose rating points along the way. Somebody will tilt a lot, lose a lot of rating points.

There are all of these problems that if you're saying, okay, I stick to the right routine and if I [00:17:00] get a tilting session, I learn out of it. I do it better next time. You can improve so much more than you think is possible, and that's what I would love to hear from you. That's what why I do what I'm doing.

I want to help people improve more, but it's super important that you know that you need to put in the work if you want to get the amazing results. See you next week. 

Hey guys, just two quick things before you take off. If you enjoyed this episode and want more structured chess improvement tips from myself, check out my newsletter@nextlevelchess.com/newsletter.

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Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for spreading the word about the Next Level Chess [00:19:00] podcast. Now, that's all from me. Thank you for listening and see you next time.