What Golf Taught Me About Getting Better At Chess
===

[00:00:00] Hello, my lovely chess improvers. I am Grandmaster Noël Studer, and you are listening to Next Level Chess podcast. And today I wanna talk about my own improvement journey and something I'm pretty bad at. Actually, I did it for the first time and then six observations I made as to how this is basically the same as chess.

I'm talking about golfing. I tried out golfing for the first time because one of my best friends is a huge golf fan. He always told me, Hey, you gotta come start golfing with me. So I said, okay, let's do it one day. You will teach me some stuff, and it was super, super interesting because the basic rules of improvement seem to be exactly the same in golf as in chess.

So I have six [00:01:00] observations. Then I want to tell you my takeaways, and I also want to share an email or an anecdote from a student of mine that I got when I shared this golf story in an email newsletter. Which is very interesting because his golf coach had a very similar approach to teaching students as I try to do it in chess.

So it's really fascinating for me to see all of these similarities. Okay, enough yapping. Let's go into this. Similarity number one is understanding is easy, but the execution is really hard. As I said, it was the first time ever tried to golf, but in less than an hour, my friend taught me how to hold the golf club.

Which golf club is for what distance. So there are different clubs, so those that don't know golfing, there are like in a bag, usually I think up to 14 different clubs for different length, for different shots, for different [00:02:00] undergrounds. Very intriguing, but you can learn these things. And then I learned how a swing should in theory look like and feel like, and this is super interesting because it's a very quick learning moment.

You feel like, oh yeah, in an hour I know everything. But then the thing is, the execution is so damn hard because you gotta have the right grip, stable upper body, straight arms, solid footwork, then smooth swing. You don't have to force it. You don't have to try to do more with your shoulders, with your muscles, but it has to just be a swing.

And it sounds simple, kind of easy. Or when you see somebody do it, it looks very smooth. You're like, oh yeah, I can do that. But then the movement, trying to do it, boah, was so freaking hard. So yeah, understanding is easy, but then execution is really hard. Then point number two, this is something connected to mindset and expectations, is that it's so easy to [00:03:00] have blown up expectations very quickly.

This is because we humans get used to a new standard extremely quickly, and then something in us tells us, well, this is now forever, always going to work like this. So, I was trying some hits and at the beginning like the balls were basically just scratching the grass. They weren't really going up and an hour in, or maybe an hour 20 in, I hit a few nice shots in a row and one even went close to a hundred meters, like 110 yards.

And I was very happy with that. I was like, oh, I'm a beginner. My friend was even saying, oh my god. Yeah, that's so cool. And then when I did this like consecutively for four or five times, my brain was like, okay, this is easy. I figured it out. I can now this hit, I can always, whenever I can do that and I start expecting that, I would hit the ball just like that.

Just like when I hit it. [00:04:00] So it flew a hundred meters and that was the peak of my session. It just went downward from there because, well, it's not so easy to hit the ball all the times like this, and especially for a beginner, there was also a lot of random stuff happening probably in this one single hit where I really hit it perfectly. So repeating that was basically impossible, at least consistently.

Then point number three I realized, which is similar in chess improvement and golfing, is that the cool stuff isn't what matters if you want to improve your game. So my friend Laurent, who introduced me to golf explained me that it's not about hitting the ball as hard as possible at the beginning or driving the ball as far as possible.

So you are saying like, oh yeah, I can hit it 300 yards or whatever. But what actually matters if you want to lower your score in golf? Remember, lower score in golf is [00:05:00] better. Less hits to get into the hole is better. So if you want to do that, you want to be very consistent in the later stages.

So in the short range putting, so when you are like 10 meters from the from the hole away, or 15, seven meters, three meters, just to consistently be able to put these shots in. So this is super important, but if you observe others on the golf course, but also feeling myself, what I was attracted to, these are the total opposite things.

It's like, oh, how far can I hit the ball. Now when I talk to somebody about golf, the first question is also, Hey, how far can you hit it? So that's the cool kind of thing. Then I started dreaming of, oh my god, imagine I would hit it so perfectly that it would just go straight in hole in one. Oh my God. It would be so amazing. And so these kind of things are what is cool. But it's not really what decides if you are going to get better [00:06:00] at this sport or not.

Then number four, that is very similar in golf and chess is there is a big question if you just wanna have fun or you want actually train.

So playing a round of golf. So you just go on the nine or 18 holes, you go with friends, you have a fun time, you are trying to improve your score is the most fun thing. But what I suspected was true, I asked him, are you getting better if you're just, let's say every week, three times going to the same course?

You're just playing 18 holes. You're just trying your best and hoping your score gets better. And he said, no. If you only just play without deliberate practice with, without just going to the, I think it's called driver's range. That's when you, where you train and you just try to hit, maybe you try to improve your technique.

You try to be more stable in the upper body. Maybe you even have a coach watching you and saying, Hmm, this movement wasn't perfect. This movement wasn't perfect. [00:07:00] So you specifically and deliberately train something off your golf game, you're not getting better. So this is always the trade off between, do I just want to go on the course 18 holes with friends, or do I actually wanna get better?

And this is just super important to know that these are two different things and you can't just expect to get better if you just play for fun. Exactly the same in chess.

What I think is very important here, and I try to stress this a lot to my chess students as well. I don't say that if you want to improve your chess or your golf, you're only supposed to do the hard work. You're only supposed to go on the driver's range. You're never supposed to have fun. That's not my point.

My point is that you realize what is improving your game and what is more fun, and then you find a combination of the two that is fitting your goals and expectations. So if you want to improve a lot, you should go more to the driver's range in golf, you should have [00:08:00] a coach, probably.

And in chess you should do more of the tactics training. You should do deep, difficult positions that you're calculating, depending on your level, obviously. But you should do real deliberate practice and then you play less. And when you play, you really try to focus and then analyze your games.

You're not making a blitz marathon on Saturday night, which could be fun, but it's not really what is improving your game the most. What I see more often is that people do only the fun stuff, but they think they are doing something that improves their game. And this always creates frustration in people.

So keep your expectations in check. Realize there's a different thing of what I tend to want to do and what is really improving my game. And then figure out how much of each do you want in your training plan and then execute it.

Then point number five is actually something interesting because my friend has told me this for a long time. That in golf [00:09:00] concentration is super important. So similarity number five that I realized in my own body is that 90% concentration is already leading to a lot of mistakes. So we played for like three, three and a half hours. And towards the end I got physically and mentally tired. It's a new movement. It's difficult to do it for the first time.

So I was at my peak after one, one and a half hours. And then slowly I went down and I got tired. And so we tried to hit three full holes just to finish, to wrap it up the session. And it was interesting, but I wasn't fully concentrated anymore. I wasn't focusing on all the details that I learned how to hit, how to hold, how to hit, how to swing, how to have the upper body stable, all of these things.

And it was not horrible, but it was just 90% concentration and I hit some absolutely terrific shots like in the bad sense, it was just sometimes I didn't even [00:10:00] touch the ball or I touched the ball and they just went all the way out. So we had to get a new ball. It was really terrible. So the difference between 90% and a hundred percent is insane. And the same is in chess.

And then we have point number six, and this is more just an observation of, I would say tendencies in society is that what gets views doesn't necessarily help you improve, and this ties together. If you think back to number four, just having fun or actually training.

What gets views is usually the fun stuff. So I checked YouTube as well and I talked to some golfers and they confirmed that is that when you learn golfing from TikTok or from YouTube or whatever, if you just see the videos that are actually trending, they are like quick improvement suggestions that then mess up your whole process.

So if you are comparing two different titles of videos, which one do you think gets more views? One would be [00:11:00] titled How to Put Consistently, and the other one is Watch this and Hit the Ball 200 meters immediately. Well, the latter gets more views by far. I think it was a video that I checked with several hundred thousand or maybe even millions of views and this kind of promising quick improvement, this kind of, oh, do this and crush everybody in the chess sense.

That is drawing a lot of views because it's a cool promise. Oh, we love that. Oh, I would love to just immediately get better, but usually it's not fully the truth, so it doesn't mean that all content creators are bad people or whatever. I don't mean to say that at all, but just understand that if somebody's incentive is to get more clicks, it means that it might not be fully aligned with your incentive to improve your game. So more clicks doesn't necessarily mean that the training that they are offering in these videos are better.

So what are [00:12:00] my takeaways after having played golf? I really found it extremely fun and it was so fascinating to just realize in my own body some tendencies that my students have as well.

You get a good shot, you expectations race, you focus on the fancy stuff and all of these kind of things. So I thought as a takeaway or as what I would do is, what would I do in golf if I would now start trying to improve? Now, I'm not going to do that because I have quite strong allergies in summer, so standing four hours on a golf course is not really ideal for my health.

But if I would get this allergy in check. Here's what I would do, getting into a new hobby like golf. But again, it's really the same with everything. Basically, we wanna improve. So point number one would be setting reasonable goals. I would want to have a motivating goal. For example, in golf, you need to pass a test so you can go [00:13:00] on these 18 holes, you need to hit a certain score and be, know a few things, etiquette and so on.

So this would be a cool goal initially to say, Hey, I want to be able to play the same courses as my friend Laurent so I can spend more time with him. And it's "I can then spend more time with my friend", so this motivates me. So setting a cool goal would be step number one.

Then step number two, super important. I would get an expert to help out because I hate wasting my time focusing on things that don't matter. And as I know in chess, as I see it in the chess world, there is so much advice that sounds good in the beginning, but then messes up your game later on. I don't want to get into this rabbit hole.

I don't want to figure it out for myself. I want to get an expert that tells me, here's what you should do, here's the plan. Here's how you should hold your club, and then reminds me of the right process all the time. So that would be the second step.

And then the third step is [00:14:00] with this expert I trust, I would together with them create a plan. I like plans. I like knowing when am I going to train something and when I'm going to play. Good plan for me, for example, probably would be, well, I want to go train, let's say two to three times a week. I go on the driver's range and I start training, trying to have the right process, the right swing, and so on.

Maybe even making some videos, having the coach there sometimes, and then I would add a few playing session that would be fun and going on well, the holes that I'm allowed to in the beginning. And I would add that to my plan. So depending on how much time I have, I would say, okay, I go once this week or twice this week or whatever.

So it would be stable, what I want to do for my improvement, and then a little bit more flexible, how much time I have, what I want to do for fun. So this is basically what I would want to do.

And in chess, it's exactly the same. It's really the same. If you [00:15:00] want to improve at chess, keep it simple. Get some help, come up with a plan, execute, stay patient, and then you will improve.

It's very logical that you will have these expectations that rise very quickly. Be aware of it and then reduce them again. It's very normal that you can get frustrated if you train for two weeks, but you're not making any improvements. Be aware this is normal in an improvement process, and then keep going.

Have an expert that you know you can ask them, and then you can be assured that you are on the right road or you're doing something tremendously wrong, and then they can correct you. So it's really absolutely the same. And at the beginning of the podcast, I also promised you a story from a coach.

So somebody wrote me an email and said they had a coach that was reminding them of my chess training. So here is that Nobilis Bellator allowed me kindly to [00:16:00] share this message. So they sent me this quote from what a coach told them when they were inquiring about golf lessons. So I'm quoting here.

I'm not here to teach you how to play golf. You know the rules and you know the basics. For me to teach you the techniques you need to make a commitment, I will teach you how to improve. If you promise that for each hour you spend with me, you must spend eight hours at the driving range practicing your swing with all of the 14 clubs in your golf bag. If you're not prepared to do that, then just pay me the same price every week or month, depending on your schedule, and stay home and watch your favorite golfers do their magic on your TV screen. End of quote.

Now, obviously this is an extreme version, but I really like the kind of commitment that you have to put into as a student as well.

Because we can talk all about what others should do for you, how [00:17:00] chess teaching should be more appropriate for adult improvers. How chess teaching should be more appropriate for maybe beginner, lower rated players. Not everything, a club rate players title players and so on and so forth. But if you yourself, are not putting in the commitment and the work, no coach, however good they are, can make you improve at the game.

So I found this very interesting, inspiring story. I wanted to share that with you, and this is how I tried playing golf, and I realized it's actually really the same as chess. 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 at nextlevelchess.com/newsletter. It's totally free. It'll always remain free, and it goes out every single Friday with the best, latest [00:18:00] chest improvement tips that I have.

Most of the podcast episodes that I record are based on a previous newsletter. So getting the newsletter, you'll get the advice earlier and you'll get it directly into your inbox every single Friday. It's totally free, as I mentioned, and you can unsubscribe any time. So go to nextlevelchess.com/newsletter to sign up.

And one last thing, if you enjoyed this episode and if it helped you, then please take a few seconds and review this podcast. This helps a ton. It helps other people see, oh yeah, many, many people profit from the advice given in this podcast. Let's give this podcast a try, and if you can, if you know anyone in the chess world that would profit from this episode or any other episode.

Make sure to share it with your friends, with your people online. That's [00:19:00] super helpful. Podcast growth is really just working through mouth by mouth recommendations, so thank you. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for spreading the word about the Next Level Chess podcast. Now, that's all from me.

Thank you for listening and see you next time.