Why You Shouldn’t Copy Random Success Stories
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. This is where I, your host, Grandmaster Noël Studer, am giving you actionable and simple chess improvement advice. Today I have a podcast episode that is so important, especially for people listening to podcasts, which is basically you guys, because it's about following random success stories in chess improvement and how this can actually be bad for your chess.

And as a lot of the chess podcast landscape is really just some people that have success, that find success with different ways of training. I wanted to make this episode to warn you. Let's get into it.

So you can absolutely improve your chess by training the wrong way, and that's super important to understand why I think that following these chess improvement success stories can be bad for your chess. [00:01:00] So let's take an example. Let's say a million people are using the same random improvement method.

They jump on YouTube or they watch whatever pops up. Or you can also say, okay, they just memorize some opening courses. Okay, so 1 million people are doing that, and out of this 1 million, some people will improve. Like chess improvement is just like basically everything else. It's a percentage based improvement.

It's not like when you do the wrong thing, you never improve. When you do the right thing, you always improve, but it's always somewhere between this zero and a hundred percent. So let's say this random method is working for 10% of people, okay? You get a hundred thousand people that improve with that method.

And what happens next is that you will hear from these people because they think, oh yeah, I found something that actually works. So they go to Reddit, they maybe start their own blog, they start a YouTube channel, whatever. They [00:02:00] share what helped them to improve and think, well, if it helped me, must help others as well.

So you hear a hundred thousand people that have the same approach and it sounds like, well, this approach must absolutely work. But the problem is that you don't see the 900,000 people who tried and stayed stuck, and you don't see that the chance of success is only 10%, which is horribly bad, right? Somebody said, well, I have an improvement strategy for you that is 10% success rate.

You'd be like, go away with this. Stay away from me. So this is basically what we call survivorship bias.

And so this is how we get this illusion. Like multiply that several times with different random strategies and you get just so many random ways of improving your chess. For example, somebody improved by only doing puzzles. You get the illusion, oh. Puzzles [00:03:00] are the only thing that matters.

Someone else improved by binging YouTube videos. Just go on YouTube and just watch some videos and you improve. So maybe that's the valid method I should do. And then another player swears that playing blitz all day, and maybe sometimes they even play drunk and they say, oh, sometimes I played better when I played drunk, I was more inspired.

So it's like, oh yeah. Oh, playing blitz game drunk must be the method. And then you get the silly traps, the opening courses and so on, and you might start to realize why you hear so many random ways of improvement prized as this is the real way of improving your game.

And when you hear it often enough, you start feeling really like, oh my God, it has to work. Maybe it's me. Maybe I am the pro.

And so the problem really here is this success rate. And our human psychology is not made for this. When we hear 15 success stories of the same random improvement, then we think, well, it's not random anymore. We don't see [00:04:00] the amount of people that have tried this and failed, and we just see what worked.

And then we see maybe some patterns in YouTube videos or in podcasts, and we think, this must work. But that's the problem because this is just a little bit playing slots for chess improvement, honestly. It's just picking something that has worked for somebody. There's no real kind of repeatable process behind it, and you just try it and hope it works for you too.

So this is where structured training comes in and is so, so important because once you get to a point where you structure training and you find something repeatable, that has worked for many people and has a high success rate, that's what you wanna do. But before we get there and why coaches matter that much, why it's so important to follow a coach, in my opinion.

And it doesn't have to be one-on-one coaching, by the way, but just a reputable coach. I just wanna say what is actually the worst, the absolute worst thing you can do. It is even much worse than following [00:05:00] one random method is trying to combine many random methods at the same time. And this happens more often than I would like to see it, and you might recognize this with yourself because you hear of some of these success stories and then you're trying to take from every success stories just a little bit and build your own improvement system or kind of your plan will be configured by many different random success stories together.

So someone improved with tactics, someone studied classics, someone did blitz marathons, the other one did a little bit of bullet and so on, and you try to patch together everything.

And then you scramble together 15 different approaches. Maybe you do all of them a little bit at the same time, or you jump from one to another. Both are very common in the chess world. You try something for two weeks doesn't work. Let's try something else for two weeks, doesn't work. And that is really the [00:06:00] only improvement way that I can guarantee you that there is a success rate.

And it will be 0%. If you scramble together so many different things, you really manage to get very close to 0% of improvement. Because you take random methods that aren't even proven and you randomize them more by putting random methods together. So you start multiplying the 10% chances until at some point it really goes into 0.0001%, that you actually improve your gain.

So this is absolutely the worst.

So here is why coaches matter, and this is not just saying, oh my God, I have the best improvement system. Follow my stuff. I just say somebody reputable that has done it themselves and has taught others. This is something I learned from Tim Ferris and it's very useful. He said something along the lines, I'm not quoting here, this is [00:07:00] just roughly what I remember.

He says that you shouldn't copy someone who's successful, but you should copy someone who's successful and has taught many others being successful as well. Because then the more kind of success stories somebody has in teaching, the higher the likelihood, again, it doesn't mean that it must be the right thing.

It doesn't mean it's a hundred percent, but you get higher likelihood that it actually worked. So instead of taking, this person has tried this, and for them it worked is this coach has tried this with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of students and thousands of students have seen improvement.

So it's more likely that I'm hitting on something that is actually probabilistically more likely to help me improve.

And this is at the end of the day, really all I'm trying to do with my simplified chess improvement approach. Again, I don't claim I have the perfect method that works for everybody, that has zero [00:08:00] biases, that makes you magically improve and your brain will suddenly configure and you get more brain cells and you improve 700 points in two seconds or whatever you might find online these days.

Is just that I'm trying to bring together many different things that I've seen for myself. Then with my coaches that have taught already, many people that I find in psychology books, in other sports, right? So I try to gather methods that have seen big improvement rates and with my experience, with my knowledge, tested with myself, with my students, and then take what works for most and bring it into one system.

That's what the simplified chess improvement system is. And it's super important. I wanna point this out that I'm trying to be aware of my biases and trying to just tell myself, okay, what is just something that worked for me and what is something that works for many others? And if [00:09:00] you would observe how I train myself or what I did in my chess career, and then what I'm teaching right now, you would see that there's quite a big gap.

And I think that's actually important because if we just teach, oh, I'm a grandmaster, here's what I did, you should do the same. It's very, very likely that we fall into this trap of, well, this work for me must work for everybody else. It's a lazy way of giving content or of helping others.

It's like, this is what worked for me. Take it and you should improve. If you don't improve, it's your problem. It's very easy and lazy, but what we really should try is like, okay, is this based on principles? Is this based on human psychology? Is this based on science of learning? Is this based on many different things?

Has a coach tried it with many different kids and out of a room of 20 kids, let's say for youth coaching, that would be 15 have improved. That's a pretty good rate, right? So there will always be at a rate of people that it doesn't work [00:10:00] with. First of all, because you can't control what people are doing, so some people will just not apply it the right way.

And then also because people are different and some people learn in one way and some people learn in another way. So the best thing in my opinion, somebody can do is try to say, here are the people I'm trying to serve, and here is what I found. If you are one of these type of people of just improvers, this is what I found worked for most of them.

That's the best one can do. I know it doesn't sell as well. It sounds way better to make a YouTube video and title it: once you know this secret method, you will improve your chess forever. I just can't bring myself to do that because I don't believe it's true.

And then what I believe is very important as well is that, within an improvement philosophy, improvement system, whatever you want to call it, within my Simplified Chess Improvement System as a course, I have rigid [00:11:00] things and I have more open things. I think this is very important.

Again, it's more powerful also in a marketing term and trying to convince people to say, here's what everybody should do. It helps everyone. I have a hundred percent success rate. Again, don't fully believe that. What I believe is that some things need to be rigid. For example, how you do tactics.

I am very strict on how you should do tactics because I have found that for basically anyone I've worked with, doing tactics the right way, yes, it can be annoying. Yes, it's more intense. Yes, it's harder, but it makes you improve more. So I'm really insisting on, no, you should write down your solution. No, you should think through the end.

No, you shouldn't just make a move and hope it's right. No, you shouldn't take a book that is way too hard for you and so on. So there, there are kind of straight guidelines and if somebody's not following it, I'm saying, no, this is not, this shouldn't be your choice if you really want to improve, I truly believe this is the right way.

And then there are other things that are more [00:12:00] open. If you're a student in Simplified Chess Improvement System, you'll know that. If you aren't, I in the system recommending building a training plan. And then there are some things again that I say, Hey, this is how I think a training plan should look.

And then other things are open. For example, I'm saying, do you enjoy studying with books or do you enjoy studying with videos? I'm not saying, oh, everybody should watch this one video course. Because, some people actually enjoy studying with books. And then you should study with books.

For example, I have found that many people that fall into the category of academic learning. So if you have had a study you went to university where you had to read a lot and a lot of your learning was through reading, for example, law is a very good example. Then likely you adapted to, or you feel more comfortable to learning with books.

So for you, it might be nice to study with books. So again, here, we don't just take one approach. One person [00:13:00] has studied video courses and they are studying better with video courses, so everybody should follow their video course study method, but we try to understand what type of person are you and how do you learn.

All of that to say that my goal isn't to say follow my path that I did myself as a grandmaster, nor it is to say there is one single path for adult improvers that is perfect and everybody needs to tweak exactly that same path. But my goal is to say, okay, here are some things that I found that have extremely high likelihood to improve your chess.

So I would be rigid on this. The tactics solving example, it's one of them. For example, playing with focus. There might be occasional people that have occasionally games that are better when they are in a not so focused state. But let's be honest, like for 99% of the people, I assume that if you have better focus, you probably come up with better moves as well, right?

So we can say this is fixed, and then there are other things that should be more flexible, [00:14:00] and I hope this episode just helps you think about it when you hear success stories and both from someone that has achieved success and from someone that teaches a kind of system or the right way of studying chess, that you're asking yourself, okay, is this super rigid?

Is this just one way? Am I just following exactly the way? I see this also in private coaching that my private grandmaster coach has learned, and they tell me, you need to play these exact openings. You need to do this exactly like this, exactly like that. Then we're probably not adjusting enough to every human being a little bit different.

At the end of the day, chess improvement is really about finding a path that makes sense for you and has worked for many others that are very similar to you both in terms of maybe age, time they can invest, when they started playing, how strong they are and how they enjoy studying.

So to wrap this up, I [00:15:00] actually have two things for you. First of all, if you think that sounds nice, to get a system to get a training way that works for you, works for many other adult improvers, make sure to check out the Simplified Chess Improvement System. I'm really super proud of how it turned out.

The community is very active. I'm super happy about it. If you love my stuff, you definitely will like this course as well. And then the second thing is just think for yourself. What has helped you in other areas of life to learn more or improve more? What are some things that you found in many different areas of your life have helped you get better at something?

And then maybe ask yourself, how can I bring this into chess? Because very often there are clues of what approach works for us. When we look at other areas for life, for me, [00:16:00] for example, it's the simple way. I love to handle my finances in a simple way. I love to learn poker in a simple way. I did learn chess or when I had my brain injury, I simplified my chess improvement.

So everywhere where I learn something new, I'm like, okay, I'm the break it down, keep it super simple and actionable guy. So everywhere I go, I try to apply this. What is it for you? Try to find it out and you'll improve your chess probably more this way.

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