Episode 53 - Good vs Bad Mistakes
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome to an anniversary episode. I realized before recording this episode that it's been already a year since I started this podcast, so thank you so much for sticking with it or for getting newly into it. I'm super happy that I can do this and help people. If you wanna spread the word.

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Okay. Let's get into today's [00:01:00] episode where I want to talk about mistakes and separate them into good mistakes and bad mistakes, because if you've listened last week's episode, I was talking about taking too many risks, and many of us are doing that.

And then it leads to stupid mistakes or bad mistakes. But then many people also ask me, but wait a moment. You are talking about taking risks and making mistakes as something bad. But then also on the other hand, you say, allow yourself to make mistakes because you learn from them. So how does this work together?

So today I want to clarify this. Because in my opinion, as I mentioned already, there are two different types of mistakes. There are good mistakes, which I want to encourage you to do, and there are bad mistakes which you want to cut out. And the cool part is that they are linked together. When we cut down on bad mistakes, we automatically allow ourselves to make more good mistakes.

This will make [00:02:00] sense in a moment, so just stick to it. I'll talk about the definition of both mistakes and then what you can do in practice to do more good mistakes, to learn faster and to do less bad mistakes, to get less annoyed, get better performance. All of the good stuff. So what are good mistakes and what are bad mistakes?

Let's start with good mistakes. Good mistakes are chess mistakes. When you follow a proper process, make a move that suits your play level and learn something from it. So you're playing chess, you're thinking logically, and you are coming to a conclusion. You make a certain move. And after the game, it turns out that wasn't an ideal move.

And you look at it with a coach or with somebody that's stronger than you or with an engine and you learn something about chess. You, you gave your best, you came to a conclusion. That conclusion wasn't totally right and now you know a [00:03:00] little bit better. Next time you can make a stronger move. That's the kind of mistake we don't want to avoid. Well, we can't avoid, and it's really good if we have these mistakes because it's always good learning moments.

Now let's move to bad mistakes. What are bad mistakes? Bad mistakes are often blunders that seem like they don't make any sense. It's like you make a move and your opponent captures your queen and you're like, oh my God, how could I be so stupid? With this move, you didn't learn anything because you already knew that hanging your queen is not ideal.

Very often it's, as I said, a blunder or it's like as I talked last week, sacrificing material when you don't need to. And if you looked at it with a logical thought process, you would say, well, this sacrifice doesn't make any sense. It seems clear from the get go that it won't work, but I was emotional during the game. I wanted to go for the Hail Mary. I wanted to go for the beautiful brilliancy. And this persuaded me [00:04:00] into doing something that I would know that is not the right thing. So, very often when you make a bad mistake, you ask yourself afterwards, what the hell did I think when making this move?

And you don't learn anything. You really don't learn anything from these bad mistakes unless, well, like I should focus better or I shouldn't go for these high risk play. But in a chess sense, your understanding did not grow. And so this is a problem because you get stuck, you make mistakes, you lose games, but you're not getting better as a chess player.

So this is a big problem. And as I mentioned, they are correlated. When you make these bad mistakes, these huge mistakes, often you don't even allow yourself to understand chess better, because if you're blundering a full piece, or a rook or a queen, you don't get into these moments where you use all of your chess knowledge that you have right now.

You make a move and you learn something because by this point where you would [00:05:00] use the right thought process, you're already a queen down. Nothing matters anymore. So the goal really is to get more of the good mistakes. And to achieve that, also we need to get less of the bad mistakes. And this will also cut out frustration, cut out tilt for the most part, just that bad feeling that you get after blundering.

We really want to cut this out. That's why I talk about focus a lot. That's why I talk about playing really in a good state of mind when you play chess because it also helps you stop the bad mistakes and allow for more good mistakes.

So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about the main difference again, but I've touched this already.

So the key difference is that with good mistakes, you can look back and say, you did play according to your rating, and thus learn something new that will help you get stronger. The idea is not that you have to play perfectly, the idea is just you have to play what you think is best according to your [00:06:00] current level.

And then it's obvious that the engine that is so much stronger than any human will always point out moments where you could have played better. That's not something we can avoid. Then stop playing chess. If you don't want the engine scream at you and say, this was bad, this was bad, this was bad. We can't play chess anymore because computers are so much stronger than humans at this game.

So if you're imagining having a rating for every single move you play during the game. So there is a graph, right? It's like for every single move, and then you can draw a line of how well you played on every single move.

So if you have this graph between 1700 and 1900, you're rated 1800, this is a strong indicator for you making only good mistakes in this game because all the moves you played were roughly at your current skills and if something turns out to be not good, then you learn something new. You might have even missed a tactic, but you didn't just blunder piece, but you might have missed the tactics 3, 4, [00:07:00] 5 moves down the line, which is not obvious to your level at the moment. So that's also okay. It's okay making big mistakes if you played within your current skills.

If you now compare this with what a graph for bad mistakes could look like, you again have 1800 rating. We see kind of between 1700 and 1900.

Most of your moves are in there. They might even be closer to 1900. So most of your moves were of a higher level, but then you have one move which just drops the line down to, let's say, 1200, 1000, maybe even below. That's the kind of huge blunder, and then you get up, you play well again, if you played his this type of game.

You played at nearly max level for most of the game, and then you made one huge mistake which cost you the game. So very often in these games, you don't learn much. The only thing that you learn is, [00:08:00] well, don't play like a 1000 player. If you're 1800 rated, even for one single move, it might be enough to just lose the game.

So it's really not about the average. That's another discussion I had on this podcast already, why accuracy scores are not really helpful. Because it's not about the average move you do, it's really about can you cut out any absolute bad moves, because that's key in chess. One bad move can just cost you the game no matter how strong you play on all the other moves.

So let's get a little bit more concrete and actionable so you know what good mistakes are. You know what bad mistakes are. You know you want to cut out bad mistakes. Allow yourself to make good mistakes. How do you do that?

The answer is you wanna stick to the basics and focus on what matters most. I talk about this in my one third rule, that two thirds of your training should be [00:09:00] focusing on tactics. That's super important because most of the bad mistakes come from some tactical slip and then playing and analyzing with focus.

So if you realize, oh, I'm blundering a lot, that's a bad mistake. Then think about do I play when I'm focused? Am I really only focusing on the game. When I play my game of chess, am I playing somewhere at home where I'm undisturbed or am I playing on the commute, on my phone while listening something and a colleague is talking to me?

That's catastrophe for your focus. Okay? So think about your focus. Think about other things that might cause blunders. Are you playing when you are tired? Are you trying to make sophisticated moves when you should just play basic moves? Last week we talked about do you take too much risks?

Just think about what is the cause for your huge mistakes. Then change that. And in your training, really focus on [00:10:00] tactics, on easy tactics. Very often it's not the sophisticated tactics, it's the easy tactics, the one, two move tactics that really cost you the games and make these bad stupid mistakes.

Try cut them out. And then you will realize that when you just play at your level. And maybe you face even stronger opponents. You might lose games without making a move where you say, no, this move is just absolute catastrophe. When you have this moment where you actually think, oh, I played a good game, but I lost, that's the moment where you can say, oh yes, I can learn something from this game because it's not obvious to me what I did wrong.

That's actually something you should celebrate, not something you should be sad about because it's like, okay, I played good. I had just a stronger opponent or an opponent that played this game stronger than me, and now let's learn what I can do better next time so I get a little bit stronger. That's really our goal.

And I have a fun [00:11:00] story with a student of mine that recently wrote me that he's played all over the board games and he started realizing in one tournament he didn't have any blunders, like blunders weren't deciding the games anymore. Not for him, not for his opponent. And he was like, well, maybe our work on basics is not right.

Maybe we should focus on more sophisticated things. And I said, no, no, no. That's the totally wrong takeaway. You can be super happy that blunders are not deciding your games over the board anymore. That's a positive, but that's only because you focused on the basics. It's because both you and your opponent are doing the basic things right.

In chess and now basically you've both leveled up to more interesting games where the games are not decided by bad mistakes, but the games are actually decided by good mistakes, someone understands the position a little bit better than the other player, and then the player that lost can [00:12:00] learn from the opponent, learn from talking through the game with their coach, looking at it with an engine and get better through this.

So once you get to the moment where you and your opponents rarely make these type of bad mistakes anymore. It's not a sign that basics shouldn't be part of your training anymore. It's a sign that your work on the basics of chess have unlocked so much more of this beautiful game for you.

You need to stick to your basics while then learning from your mistakes, and this is how you then grow as a chess player. This is super, super important because even at the grandmaster level, if a grandmaster never does these small, easy tactics is getting super rusty, then there is a big danger that a grandmaster, and I know this all too well from my experience, is making these type of bad mistakes.

Losing games without learning much and making mistakes that even lower rated player, maybe 2200, [00:13:00] 2000 players wouldn't have done if they would've been totally focused. So, super important that we focus on the basics. We focus on focusing well, we do all of these things well because then we can cut out the bad mistakes, we can make more good mistakes, and that's how we grow as a chess player, step by step.

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