Make A Mistake - Do This Next
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I want to talk about making mistakes and especially more importantly, how you react when you make a mistake, because it's fascinating how principles that apply to chess improvement also apply to anything else. And today I have a story from my Sunday football game with friends and how I realized that one key skill that for me is normal right now is not normal for many others and actually causes a lot of problems, a lot of mistakes that are happening because of it.

And it's not how hard you shoot or how technically able you are, how much you [00:01:00] can dribble. Actually, I'm very bad at dribbling in football or how well you even pass the ball. But the real skill that applies to so much more than only football is how quickly do you act again after making a mistake.

Because what I realized is that some players from my teams, they had a lot of problems with making mistakes or just generally when our team would lose the ball, what they would do is just stop and put their hands to their head and say, oh my God, no. Oh shit. They would just stop all their actions and just moan about maybe somebody else losing ball, maybe they losing the ball, maybe somebody else hitting the post, they getting unlucky, whatever it was. It doesn't really matter, but something happened that might be a mistake, but also just goes against us and these players are just like stopping to work and then maybe 10, 15 seconds later, they start running back or whatever.

And [00:02:00] that's just super dangerous. Our opponent's team got a lot of counter attacks because of that, and it got so bad that at the one moment we were attacking and a guy had a chance. So I'll call him Peter. It's not his real name, but Peter has a chance. And Peter misses an easy shot and makes a mistake.

And he's like, oh, oh my God, no. Oh my God. And what he doesn't realize is that just after he moans so hard, we're actually winning back the ball. So he hit it somewhere. An opponent had the ball, we win it back. And turns out he's just standing in front of the goal because he was there before. And so we pass him the ball, but he isn't, even with his mind in the present moment, he's still moaning.

So he doesn't realize that he gets passed the ball. He just doesn't even hit the ball. And he misses what would've been just a free goal. Just super easy. [00:03:00] Everything is open. And he misses that because he was just with his hands up in his head, just moaning it. All in about how bad he actually is, and turns out that, well, the first mistake was bad, but the second was way worse, and it wasn't because of his football skills, but just because he can't get back quickly after a mistake.

And you might realize that the same thing is happening in chess. I see it so often. There is even a saying that we use in chess, which is a mistake, rarely comes alone. Because once we make a mistake, we focus on the past and so we don't have enough attention and maybe even not a positive mindset anymore on the present.

So we make more and more mistakes. This happens in chess, I see it for example, also in poker, it's very prevalent there that somebody has like a lot of chips, they lose one pot. Doesn't even have to be a mistake, but just normal part of the game, you [00:04:00] sometimes lose a hand. They will lose a hand, feel like it was unfair or whatever.

They get so angry, so tilted that they will just give their whole stack away. You know that once something bad happens to them, they will just not play objective anymore. Super emotional, give everything away. So the first problem was not even that bad. Maybe if it was a mistake, it cost them like 10% of their stack and then they give the rest away.

Happens in football with the example I shared and happens in chess a lot as well. You make a small mistake, maybe you lose a point, maybe you miss a slight idea from the opponent, or maybe you just realize you could have won on the spot and then you continue thinking about this. Oh, I'm so bad, it's so annoying.

Why does this happen? Whatever. You continue making mistakes, mistakes, mistakes, lose the game, and after the game, you might realize, well, after the first mistake, I was still completely winning. But I basically gave up the game right there, in that moment. 'cause I was moaning about it all [00:05:00] the freaking time.

And so what can you do against this? Well, the solution is rather simple. Focus on the present moment. Whenever something goes, not ideally against you. You don't want to spend any time and energy and resources on why this happened, why it always happens to you, how it's unfair, how stupid you are, whatever your story in your mind, but instead, you wanna focus all the energy you have on the present moment.

You can just ask yourself or tell yourself if you realize, if you catch yourself moaning about things and so on, to say, focus on the present. What is my next move? And this is the solution. It's going to be way harder to implement, especially if you have a big habit of doing that. It's going to be hard to break it, but you need to work on that because that might be the biggest leak in your game right now.

And one idea to also [00:06:00] make every mistake a little bit less painful or everything that goes against you less painful, is to just accept that these things will always happen. You will always make mistakes. There will always be situations that you feel are unfair, like in chess. It could even be that your opponent, I dunno, is completely lost and they offer a draw.

Some people are so upset by this that they will just throw away their game, or you play over the board chess and somebody is acting a little bit weirdly. Whatever it is, expect the things will happen that you don't love. That's just part of the game, part of life. You will also always make mistakes, so what you want to focus on is how you act after realizing that something has gone, not ideally well.

You just focus on the present, focus on the next move, and try doing your best. Once the game is over, you will have enough time and energy to work, to [00:07:00] think about the moments that haven't gone your way and to improve them, but that moment comes only once the game is stopped. That's super important.

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