Ep 52 Risk Taking
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[00:00:00] Hey, my dear Chess Improvers. This is Grandmaster Noël Studer, and I'm back with another episode for the Next Level Chess podcast. And today I want to talk about risk and more specifically about what we celebrate, what we see in the media. All of these big risk takers. All of these super successful and famous people that took 27 shots and the 28th really stuck and that's why they made millions, billions, quadrillions and got famous and we all celebrate them.

And how this same approach just doesn't work at all in chess. So I had this idea actually when I played a game of settlers, of Catan. Dunno if you know that [00:01:00] board game. It's basically a board game of four players, and especially when you play it online. But even when you played with friends, what really matters is winning.

So your four players and you're playing for the win. I used what I will then explain later on in this podcast my chess kind of philosophy. And then I realized, holy cow, I don't have to use the same chess philosophy here because it's four players. And if you're just playing, let's say good enough, simple, safe strategy, you'll very, very often end up second or third.

You're not going to have the last place basically ever. But what matters is winning. If you're getting second all the time, you're basically the first loser in that game. That made me think of, oh, here in this game, we can use that kind of business strategy of taking risk. We can go for the absolute home run, and if it works even 30% of the time in that game, you would win more than the average because 25% would be the average split in a four player game.[00:02:00] 

Now in business what we learn, this is even way more extreme. If you think about venture capital, for example, or also called an angel investing. As I understand, these are the same things, correct me if I'm wrong. So when people do that, they invest into a lot of companies. So let's say they have a hundred companies they invest in and they count on 95 of these companies or maybe 90 companies going broke, not making any money, but the five to 10 companies that actually end up making money, maybe they thousand x or 10,000 x their money, and that's how they still make money, even though 90% of the businesses they invest in fail and this really gets pushed onto our society at the moment.

I feel like this kind of risk taking that's especially also, and I have a majority of American audience. It is really an American thing. In Europe, we have that a little bit less, but as I follow a lot of [00:03:00] American writers and YouTubers and so on, I have that ingrained in myself as well a little bit.

This whole American dream going big, dreaming big, failing, but then trying it over and over again. And so I see this getting into how people play chess as well, so you can see that many players just try to go for the ideal moves all the time in their games. And this is a huge problem because in chess we have a big difference to, let's say, business, especially the upside in chess is capped.

So let's say you have 50 games and you are at a moment where you can play one speculative move and it might work out, and if it works out, it's really this beautiful, amazing, incredible move that many people will look at and say, oh my God, you're such a genius.

Or you can play the safe move where very likely you are going to have a stable game. Maybe you're slightly [00:04:00] better but it might end in a draw. And with the crazy move, basically you're not sure if it works. And if it works, it's great, but the chances that it works is not actually that big. Now, from an emotional standpoint, many of us go for this crazy move.

And if you play this game 50 times or similar situations 50 times, depending on your level, right? So the stronger you are, the more you can calculate in these moments. So actually the more sure you can be that a genius looking move could actually be genius, but the lower rated you are, the higher the possibility that this move is going to mess up your game and you're going to lose the game.

So out of 50 times you might fail 49 times. You might may fail 45 times and then produce one to five brilliancy. Now the problem is opposite to business, where these five brilliancy will pay off way more [00:05:00] than 45 mistakes. In chess, you get five points for that.

That's it. If you win five games, you get five points and you probably lose 45 times because let's be honest, most of the time we try to go for a genius move, we end up blundering something rather ridiculously. And we quickly try to forget about these moments. The problem is you've got five out of 50 points.

Now, if you just go for the more safe move where as I said, maybe you're slightly better, you might end up scoring maybe 35 draws. You might win 10 times and even lose five times. That could be a nice split if you're slightly better. That could be how your games are going.

Now with this split of 35 draws, 10 wins and five losses you get 27.5 points, right? So compare 27.5 points to five points. It's a huge difference. So that is actually the main difference, that in chess you don't have that insane upside that you have in [00:06:00] business and that you have in games that involve more players.

Now there is an exception in chess as well, is tournaments where there is only one result that really matters. So let's say for rating, it's always the stable approach that generally scores better. In tournaments, this can be a little bit different. So let's say I'm playing a Swiss Championship. And I usually went into it with the mindset I wanna win, or I don't really care about all the other places.

Now in this moment, I create a situation where taking some risks from time to time can make sense. Now in Round one doesn't really make sense because if I end up losing the first two games, I just completely destroy all of my chances to win the tournament. But let's say you're in a tournament. You are one point behind the leader and the only thing that counts is a win.

You don't care about your rating and you don't care about drawing. So you need to win. Let's set the [00:07:00] stakes high. World championship match, last game. It doesn't make sense to make a draw at all. It doesn't really matter. These five rating points. Who would care? It's about the World Championship title.

So there are exceptions where like in this moment, you want to take more risks because you don't care if you lose or you draw. It's basically the same. It's just disappointment and you don't get what you wanted. So you need to take risks to win. But even in these moments, it's actually important to think about is my taking risks, actually paying off.

Because sometimes you can go for this Hail Mary kind of crazy line and you might not have a bigger expectation of winning the game than if you just kept playing on with solid moves and just waited if you got any chances at all. Getting back to our 50 game idea, right? [00:08:00] If you make a brilliancy and you win five times, but you're guaranteed not to win 45 times, that's only a 10% winning chance.

So what you need to ask yourself is, if I take a super risky approach right now, am I actually, even if I had to win by force, right? Would I be of a higher chance to actually do that? Or can I just play a logical move and down the line I might get easier chances to win the game and I still raise my percentage.

So this is very important when we think about playing chess because the emotional part of playing a brilliancy will often derail us to do something that if we just look rationally at our results, does not pay off at all. And I love a story that my wife Alessia made with her student, which is so cool.

So Alessia had this student [00:09:00] that generally tends to go for very risky sacrifices. Just whenever a sacrifice was available, basically that student would go for that sacrifice. A student was rated 1465, so 1,465 rating on chess.com. So Alessia tried and tried to stop this student from doing these risky sacrifices.

At some point she said, okay, let's just do it like this for one week. You are only allowed to sacrifice if you see a clear continuation that wins back the material or checkmates. Just very clear stuff. Otherwise, instead of sacrificing, you just play a logical move. And then what if we finish this week and the results don't change?

You can go back to your usual playing style. What do you think happened? Well, it's a cool story because the change is incredible in this week. Well, a little bit more than that week because this student kept going, worked so well in 10 days. The student won a hundred [00:10:00] points. That's incredible on that level because it was stagnating quite a while and just with that one thing will change.

It's winning a hundred points and in the next 15 days then kept winning 40 points, reached a new all time high of 1,605 rating points, so that's 140 points. One, just with one single change. Just instead of going for the speculative potential double exclamation mark stuff you just go for a simple move and do that.

And just keep the game simple. Trust yourself, but only go for the risky things if you're actually sure. And then it's not that risky anymore. Let's be honest about that. If you calculate something until the end and you have the ability to see it, and to really move by move see, okay, I sacrifice a piece, but forcefully I get it back and I will be happy with that trade off.

Then you can do it. [00:11:00] So if this sounds like you, if you are trained, taking too many risks and an indication might be you really love, you are super proud of your brilliant moves because that can derail you into it. You are losing a lot of games. So it's either losing or winning. And the lower rate that you are, the more you should try to just stick to basic chess rules and not going for these brilliances.

Then try the same idea that Alessia did with her student. Just say, for the next week, when I play chess, I just go for the simple moves. I just for go for the good enough moves and I'll see what happens. And very likely, if you have that problem, you'll see that your results will get better, and then you can always decide, well, do I value my brilliancy potential brilliancy way more than a hundred rating points.

If that's all okay, go for it. Do what you want and go for the risky style and [00:12:00] accept that you will be lower rated. Or just try the simple style and see that the results are getting better and maybe you never want to go back. Just like the student from Alessia, I think he learned his lesson. He's like, okay, yeah, I'll go for simple chess.

When I can calculate a move until the end, I can go for what looks like a brilliancy. If I can't, if it's just speculative, I'm not going to do it. 'cause in chess we have an upside that is capped at one point per game. You can't win more than one point per game. You can't make up for 95 losses with one brilliant game, just not how chess works.

And just to go back to these stories that, so society teaches us to finish off this podcast. The next time you hear such a hero story from someone getting super rich or super successful, taking a lot of risks, and it paid off, I want you to remember three things, okay?

Number one is most of these stories are at least [00:13:00] slightly fabricated, if not completely false.

Number two, you never hear about the millions of people who tried taking the same risk but failed. You only hear from the people that actually made it. So there is a huge bias in that direction.

And then number three, and that's the most important for your chess. But even if you make that huge risk and it pays off in a single game, your reward is capped at one point.

Might have gotten there also by just playing logical moves. Okay? So don't get tempted by it and keep it simple, especially in chess. See you next week.

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