We can't think anymore, here is why
===

[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. It's me again, grandmaster Studer. And today I wanna talk about something that I realized with myself recently is that my thinking is getting worse and worse. And I feel that this is not just a me problem, but it's a problem I see everywhere and it really is bad for our chess because when we can't properly think anymore, then we might feel when we're sitting at home, when you're using the engine, when you read a book, when you watch a video, that everything is logical. But once you sit down yourself and have to play a game of chess, your moves won't make a lot of sense and you will likely end up blundering something and lose the game.

And this is really due to the [00:01:00] new information overload that we have. There is AI now coming, but already so many different things. I feel like all the technology, or most technology, what it does is it basically tries to tell us, well, you don't have to think anymore. We do that for you. And that is very tempting.

But it's also very bad. I feel it in my own writing, feel it in my thinking in general in every day. I feel it when I play myself chess, and I see it a lot with students, and I'm gonna sound like a nostalgic old guy that says that everything was better before. But if we take a short time to look back, just when I started playing chess, that was roughly 20 years ago.

Like I didn't know, or I don't think there was any online server, or at least I didn't know of it when I started playing chess. There was no opening courses. There was, nobody knew what clickbait means. There was [00:02:00] nothing that basically implied that if you do a certain thing, you will win your chess games and everything will be simple. Or there was something that just solved all the problems for you.

When I started playing chess, what I did was going to a club. I had my own step method book, and I just tried to use my own brain to solve positions, that was my chess training basically. Sometimes the coach would have a lesson and prepare something for us, but more often than not, all of the kids in the chess club that I was at were just solving stuff and then playing against each other and maybe analyzing the games with our own brain.

So basically everything we did in chess was focused on how can you yourself solve a problem that is in front of you, and then somebody that was stronger than you, which was the coach, usually would correct your thinking and say, Hey, this is better or that is better. Now, if we compare that to today, and I don't mean just in chess, I mean it in chess [00:03:00] and in everyday life, we really rarely think for ourselves like think about your everyday life experience, like when are you having a problem?

You're by yourself. You're taking the time. You sit down, you think you come up with a solution and you trust this solution without taking any outside help. It's very rarely happening, but that's exactly what we have to do in a chess game. We don't have outside help. We just have a problem in front of us and we need to solve it.

And so because we train that so much less, it's very logical that you guys are struggling more to improve at chess than I was 20 years ago. And also, by the way, and I repeat the story a lot, but also my dad was 20 years ago and he was rated about 1400. He didn't really spend too much time on chess. He.

But I feel like he had it so much easier because he didn't have this overload, he didn't have this overwhelm, and he just [00:04:00] tried to use his brain, get a little bit better at using his brain for chess positions. And that's what brought him with very little effort to like 14, 1500 over the board rating, which after the FIDE rating increase, by the way, would now be 1600 or whatever.

So yeah, it's really a big difference. So if we look at how you spend your time with chess. I imagine that you're watching chess games. When you watch chess games, very likely you have a commentary, so your thinking is outsourced to some commentator or you are having the engine on, so your thinking is outsourced to the engine.

When you analyze your own games, what happens immediately when you play online? You get this immediate like overview of the game with question marks, exclamation marks, all of these notes, and that accuracy percentage, everything. Everything is done for you. You just have to click through and see, oh yeah, this was a mistake.

Oh yeah, this was a mistake. Oh yeah, this was a good move. You don't even have to think about it anymore yourself. What you did wrong, what led me to lose that game? No, [00:05:00] something else. The AI or whatever server you play on is just doing that for you. Also when you study openings, a lot of opening.

That's why I don't like the opening study. A lot of opening study is just, Hey, just trust me. Just play these moves and you'll be fine. In this position, just play this. You don't have to understand it. Just memorize it. So again, you're not learning to think about a position, you're just copying from somebody else.

If we are thinking about tactics, a lot of tactical talk has been about the woodpecker method recently. What is the wood woodpecker method is basically if you haven't heard about it yet, it's repeating the same positions a lot of times. And then basically making sure that your brain automatically sees those patterns when you play a game.

Again, I'm not a huge fan of it because the main gist of it is I'm doing it so many times that during the game it just comes at automatically to me. What [00:06:00] you really need to train is your ability to sit and think and find something. Obviously you need to know certain patterns for you to be able to find them in a game.

But again, if we just trust the woodpecker method too much, what you're doing is, you're mindlessly repeating the same puzzles. You basically remember which move it is. You don't fully understand why this move was good or whatever, but you just remember, oh yeah, that was the right solution, and you hope that this will lead to you playing a game without having to think much and seeing tactics.

So again, a dangerous thing. Now, when we go to everyday life. Again, navigation. We used Google Maps. If you have to book hotels, you just use reviews. You just look, oh, this is 8.9, whatever. This looks good, I'll book it. If you're unsure about anything, there is not long moments of uncertainty.

You just ask Google or you just ask AI. Even in everyday life, there's very rarely a situation where you need to sit down, think, and you need to [00:07:00] take a decision before you can consult someone else. I find this is extremely key. We need to learn again, to make decisions, to put our thinking out there, so to say, before we can get help, because if we do the thinking, but then at the end of the thinking, we are always used to, well, I can shortly run it through AI, so that means that I'm certain to not make a big mistake.

Then again, we can't do that. You can't think about a chess game about the move and then just say, okay, I'll check the engine before I make the move.

Not going to happen. So I think this is a big problem in society nowadays. We haven't learned or we unlearned, it's better to say it this way, how to think properly because technology is made to make everything easy, smooth. And also, if you go to YouTube, by the way, you find so many titles like, just copy this and make money.

Just do this in under one day, you'll make all of these [00:08:00] extreme cases are not incentivizing people to think on their own. So I feel like this is a superpower both in your private life, in your business life and in chess.

So also, when I started writing this article, or when I write articles in general, I get so much help. You have these tools like Grammarly that automatically improves your grammar. Then you can put it in an AI. The AI makes it more crisp and sound better and get better titles. There's so many ways to improve my writing without having to think about it myself. And the extreme would be I can just say, well, I realized this pattern that we have a hard time thinking, please AI write me an article about it.

That would be an article. And then I can just read it out loud. And I have a podcast, so everything is done so simple and I fall for that as well. But I feel like it's so important that [00:09:00] we take the time to think for ourselves. To put our work out there, to put our thinking out there and to be okay with making mistakes.

Because one of the side effects also of this whole AI tech can help you with everything is that it's normal that all the work should look polished. All the work should not have any mistakes anymore. Everything should be double, triple, quadruple checked. And yes, that has its place if you're writing a scientific paper better that you have some hard facts to support what you're about to write.

But for everyday life, I feel like we need way more of like, okay, my brain just came up with this. This sounds good. Let me trust it. And then, if it's a mistake, it's a mistake, whatever. It's not a tragedy. I.

So I'll try getting to a point. First of all, what are specific chess tools that, in my opinion, [00:10:00] you should avoid? And then the second thing is, what is the solution? How can we go against this kind of well solving everything for you, specifically obviously for chess? Because you're here to improve your chess. And how can you make thinking a habit again so that you play better games of chess, but also in all other parts of life you will definitely benefit from that.

So the first thing I still want to talk about is the Chessable Move Trainer. Now, most of you listening will know Chessable. It's the biggest online course selling platform. It is owned by chess.com now, and so it's really huge. Basically, everybody makes courses there. I feel like I'm the only content creator that hasn't done a course there with my wife, Alessia.

And I'm not a fan. I'm really, honestly not a fan. And the main thing is, I'm not saying that all the courses are bad, by the way. That's not the thing. But the main thing is that one of their biggest selling points is the Chessable move trainer, basically [00:11:00] using technology to give you positions to repeat, to help with Woodpecker Method to help with memorizing opening moves.

And I just think that this is a completely wrong incentive for 95% of chess players because repetition is okay and especially with openings, if you are going towards a title player level, if you are trying to move up to IM, grand master level. Then you really need to nail down your opening knowledge because somebody else might prepare and might just win a game against you if you haven't nailed down your opening knowledge.

But for the vast majority of players, I would really say 95% of you listening, at the very least using the Chessable move trainer will be an absolute waste of your time and will again give you that wrong feeling of, well, if I just repeat this enough times, I will then automatically during the game be able to remember that [00:12:00] and the game will be easy.

Now, let me tell you, once and for all, the chess game will never be easy. No matter how much patterns you recognize, how much opening moves you remember. Chess won't be easy. Chess is really all about sitting on your own, using your brain to come up to solve difficult problems that are on the chess board in front of you.

That's chess for you, and no matter what you're doing in your training, that process won't change. So when you spend too much time trying to memorize stuff, trying to repeat the same tactical patterns with the hope that then the game itself will get easier, you will get crushed in your games because that's not going to be your reality.

From time to time, you get a winning position out of the opening. Maybe you even checkmate somebody because you've remembered that sequence in the opening, congratulations. But in most of your games, you will have difficult problems in front of you. And [00:13:00] because you've used so much of these tools, especially the move trainer, you will just simply not know how to solve difficult pro problems.

And that's very, very bad. And that's what you see with many people using Chessable too much for the openings especially. They will know a lot of moves. They get to move 15, and you might relate to that if you're using Chessable as well, if you have opening courses. And then you get to move 15 and your opponent makes a move that is not in your course.

Now you know that theoretically this is a bad move. But you're panicking because you're like, well, I have no idea what I should do right now. Because the problem is you have memorized the opening. You have not understood the opening, so you have no clue what your plans are, what your opponent's plans are.

You just know on this move, I have to play this move. That's the only thing you know. And now you're on your own and now you have to solve problems. And it happens often. I see many games where somebody plays way too much theory for their level. The opponent makes a bad move. They blunder [00:14:00] something immediately, game is over.

Because you only learning how to repeat something from someone else. Once you're on your own, you have absolutely no clue. So, I've talked enough about the problem. What is the solution?

The solution is pretty simple. Use your brain more often. Whenever you are in contact with chess, try to remember that. The main thing you want to train is your ability to sit on your own, to look at a position, and to come up with a decent move. That's the ability that you will use the most when you are getting good at this. You sit in front of any position, somebody can give you any position, and you can kind of roughly make sense of the position.

And I'm not saying that you find the perfect move where you find the ideal tactic. I don't care about that. That's stuff for grandmasters. You just need to find a good enough move. On some levels, if you're below 1500 online, what you need to do is you need to be [00:15:00] able to look at a position, to not blunder anything, to take free pieces and to make a move that is not destroying your whole position. That's everything you need, but you need to train that skill over and over and over again.

So now a few examples. What you should do instead of what you're probably doing and what everybody on the internet, or at least the big companies try to make you do.

First, when you look at other games of chess. When I record this, there is the eSports World Cup, right? Where there's also chess. I think today will be the final. So when you hear this, it'll be already over. But when you watch top level chess, if you want to improve, look at the Games without eval bar, without commentary, without an engine, and actually think for yourself, what move would I play in this moment?

And then, once you have made the decision, that's super important, you make a decision for yourself, and then you check with an [00:16:00] engine, with the commentators, with what the players did, and then you correct your own thinking. Don't fall into the pattern of just looking games. When you hear somebody talk about it, it sounds super simple, when you look at the evil bar, well, it's logical that White is better because the eval bar is saying it.

And then you would get the same position on your own. You would have no freaking clue what to do. So that's very important. When you watch games from anyone basically, use your own head. Second thing to do is solve positions where you don't already know that there is a tactic. I call this in my five steps to tactical mastery that I teach inside my course, the Simplified Chess Improvement System. I call this step four tactics.

This is getting at any position where you don't know if there is a tactic or not. The main idea is that this represents the game the best. During a game, you don't know that there is a [00:17:00] tactic. So for example, if you're woodpecker all the time, you always know there is a tactic. I need to look for a tactic. There is a tactic. I need to look for a tactic. What you're not learning is being in a game and saying, well, I have no idea if there is a tactic, is there a tactic? I don't know. I have to find it out. So use positions that sometimes have tactics, sometimes is just a development move.

Sometimes the most obvious tactic is actually losing. So your only task is to find that this obvious tactic is actually losing and play another move. When you solve more of these positions, again, you get more used to sitting on your own solving stuff. Taking a decision, writing down your decision, and then comparing with a book solution, with a friend that sends you a test, with a coach, with whatever tool it is that you use. So don't only solve tactical positions, but solve positions that can be both a tactic but also just a normal move.

Then point number three that you should [00:18:00] do is to play chess without distractions. Focus is so key. When you need to think currently logically about a game, many of us also, this is also a pandemic in the world right now, is that we have a hard time focusing on one thing at a time.

I often listen to a podcast while working out, or even when I write, I listen to music. So my brain is also getting scattered and I need so many inputs to feel like it's enough. So what we want to do is to learn again, to sit on one thing, to just play chess, and that's enough. No music. No seven tabs open. Not switching in between stuff. Just you play a game of chess and that's all your brain does. So play without distraction and you will see that slowly, slowly, your ability to think logically currently during a game will get better.

And then last but not least, I [00:19:00] highly recommend, especially if you got until this point in the podcast and you feel like, oh, yes, this is me right now. I have a hard time thinking. Then start studying with books and don't use as many online tools now. Books have worked for so long. There are so many strong chess players that only had access to books. I agree that technology can improve the way you study if you're using technology the right way.

What happens very often is that technology uses you. Chess companies have an incentive to sell you more stuff. When you are online, you're always at the risk of studying something and getting a pop-up notification, getting a, oh, there is a new course. Oh, FOMO for this. Oh, this is a new opening I should learn.

You might also, if you're just on any technological device, you might get an email popup. You might get a call, a text. There are so many things that can distract you and again, [00:20:00] reduce your ability to think for your own and then get to a decision point.

When I was a professional chess player, I was using nearly only books to study. There is enough material in books for you to get better at chess. So if you struggle with focus, use a book, something like The step method, for example, is super simple. You just use a book to solve puzzles, to solve positions. There are mixed puzzles also where it's a little bit less clear which type of tactic it is.

It is just so useful to use these tools that have worked for so long because in the past decade or so, I think chess is becoming way more difficult to get better at. Only a small subset of people that know exactly how to use the technology, I would say maybe 5% are having a better time.

And obviously, if you're living somewhere where you didn't have access to a book, you didn't have access to anything. Now technology is great. It has its upsides for [00:21:00] sure. But if you're not using technology the right way, it can easily overwhelm you. You're getting confused, and you might find that your brain is not working properly anymore and we gotta do something against this.

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 chess 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 [00:22:00] 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 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.