How To Make Better Decisions At The Board
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to another podcast episode, and today I want to talk about decision making and more specifically about some games that you play. And afterwards you are looking through your moves and you're thinking like, holy cow, why did I even make these moves? These make no sense at all. What happened to my brain that I thought during the game that these were good moves?

I didn't miss anything. It wasn't like I blundered, but just the move that I played doesn't make sense. And it's obvious that this other move should have been the move I should have played. And this is based in decision making and it's based on the emotional factors that go into decision making. So I have had many games, [00:01:00] sadly, in my career where my decision making was extremely faulty.

I really felt like I calculated this stuff. Things were going well. I saw the tactics. I saw the things. It just happened so that I, for example, wanted to avoid the draw so much that my decision making was absolutely horrible. And then I ended up playing one of the worst games of my life. And to understand why this happens, we need to understand how we make decisions both in life and in chess.

And the problem is that most of us, or I would say nearly all of us, want to believe and still believe that our decision making is fully logical. So we look at a problem, a position in chess, and then we just calculate and we logically make what we believe is the best move. Now, this sadly is not true, and I learned this by reading a fascinating book, thinking Fast and [00:02:00] Slow, by a Nobel Prize winner called Daniel Kahneman.

You might have heard of this book, if you haven't read it yet. It's a tough read. It's very long, it's very dense, but it's super, super interesting just of how the human mind works. And one of the main things that Kahneman presents in this book is two different systems of modes of thought that every human has, and he calls them system one and system two.

System one is fast, emotional and instinctive, and system two is logical, slow, more deliberate. Now, why is this important? In chess, again, we want to believe that all of our decisions are based on logic. So that would mean that system two is in control, right?

Maybe occasionally system one pops up. We have emotions, we are a little bit afraid to make a mistake. But then system two is like, Hey, I got you. Let's think through this logically and let's make a decision. Now, sadly, several [00:03:00] studies have proven this to not be the truth. Actually, it's the opposite way around.

And that brings us to why we have these strange games where we make these mistakes. So what actually happens, how I understand it, is basically, system one is in control and system two is often just there to come up with logical reasons to support what we want to believe or what we want to do. You might have had this in your own games that you see a move and it looks so attractive.

You only calculate ways for this move to work. Basically what happens is, your emotional brain has decided, system one has decided we are going to make this move. And now the task of system two is not to find things against this move or why it couldn't work. No. The only task system two gets is basically, hey, system two, find five lines that support this move, why this is the best, and [00:04:00] then we can go to play it.

And that's when big mistakes are happening. So basically how we can think about this is if we are not aware of it, most of our decision making is going to be emotion, then rationalization and then decision that feels logical. Very often this happens subconsciously. So we have the feeling that our decision is based on logic, where what actually happened is that first we had an emotion, an instinctive, intuitive kind of feeling, and then we just went to prove this feeling, and then we think that we made a logical move.

So how does this happen in chess to me? So I had this a lot, for example, when playing against lower rated opponents, I'm sure you had this too. Your natural tendency is that you want to win. Which means you want to avoid draw lines. So during the game you are not thinking about everything rationally, [00:05:00] but you are trying to answer an instinctive, intuitive questions, which is, how can I avoid a draw?

So basically, your calculation is based on the fact that you don't want the draw. So you exclude everything that is a draw. You're not asking yourself, and we get to that later on, what is the best move? What I believe has the best chances? No. So how can I avoid a draw? So I've played really one of my worst games in my career in this fashion.

I've been already a grandmaster. I played a closed tournament. And this tournament has been going pretty well. But I thought, okay, in this white game, I'm my slight favorite, like 50 points higher rated than my grandmaster opponent. I really want to win because this would allow me to play for the win of the tournament.

So that's not a logical decision. That's emotional. I want to win. And then my opponent surprised me. We got into a pretty equally position. I could have traded queens early on. It was a [00:06:00] similar structure, but I just started excluding all the moves that looked too equal, that looked too much like they might end in a draw.

And then what my brain did, what system two did, is coming up with lines that supported this emotional way of thinking. So I just kept convincing myself that rejecting what looked too equal was a smart decision. So during the game, there was like this kind of feeling that, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this makes sense, this makes sense.

But I only calculated lines that basically supported my emotional decision making, and this ended really badly. I posted in the article that I posted on this, I posted a checkmate, I was checkmated with a king on h3 as White in an endgae. So I got my bishop on h2. Everything was absolutely terrible.

Just absolutely horrendous game by me. And I sometimes played "guess the ELO" [00:07:00] with this game actually with my students and the guest's most frequent guess are like between 1800 and 2000 for White, which was me with 2580. So basically at the peak of my, over the board rating, and this might ring a bell for you guys at home as well.

This is something that sadly happens a lot and this is when we then go through this game and I did that. I went through the game and I was like, how did I even think that h4 in this moment was even a move I should try? Like what? What? Why? If I think, does this move make sense? No, it doesn't make any sense at all.

It was just praying that my opponent makes a stupid thing. So I was just looking basically at bad responses for my opponent. So what went on me in my brain is that I had the wrong question, right? I wanted to answer the question of how do I avoid a draw, which is an emotional based question. Then this gave me a wrong filter.

[00:08:00] I just discarded all the lines that looked drawish, no matter how I thought the position was. I came up with very weird justifications for even strange moves, and I came up with the wrong moves because I excluded everything that looked normal and drawish, and came up with these strange justifications for my bad moves.

And because this was emotion based. It doesn't make any sense anymore after the game where the emotion is gone and I just switch on my logical brain, my system two brain, and I'm like, yeah, that doesn't make sense at all. You might also have the same feeling when, for example, you play a game and a friend of yours is watching the game and they are asking 'em like, why would you play this move?

So this is the kind of the same thing. The person outside can look at it only with the system two brain, with the logical brain, and you are looking at it first with an emotional brain and then with logic on top of that. And I've seen, or I [00:09:00] heard a story from my grandmaster friend that made this mistake even more absurd.

So basically, this grandmaster friend is playing a serious rapid game and he is in check and he plays a lower rated opponent, so he wants to win. Now he's standing in check. So he looks at one move and he is like, no, if I move the king over to this side, there will be a perpetual check. I don't want a draw, so let me just move the king to the other side.

Makes sense, right? We want to avoid a draw. So the line that is a draw we just avoided. Well, turns out that moving the king to the other side was just checkmate in three, so he just lost and that was it. So, if we say, did he answer the question? Yes, he answered the question, how do I avoid a draw? So what's the wrong thing?

It's, we are asking the wrong questions, or emotional brain comes up with this preset weird questions. And if we just try to answer those, then we will get maybe to the right answer in quotation, [00:10:00] but it will still be a very bad move. So we should ask different questions. So for example, rather than asking how do I avoid a draw?

Also a dangerous one is actually what's the best move? Because the best move brings us sometimes to think like an engine, right? Oh this needs to be super, super deep. Let's think about a totally winning position. And you're two rooks up and you're asking yourself what's the best move?

You might go for a super kind of deep calculation and might miss something and actually risk your game. Where if you ask the right question, which move leads to the most favorable outcome for me, you can just find a simple piece trade, or you can also ask yourself a different version of this question would be.

What is a good enough move here? Okay, so good enough would mean, okay, let's just get the queens off the board. We are two rooks up. It's no problem at all. In the game I played where I ended up being checkmated because I wanted to avoid a draw. If I had asked what's a good [00:11:00] enough move, I would've just kept playing good enough moves and maybe at some point I got a chance.

You know, I'm, I higher rated, I'm white. I had a very tiny little advantage. Maybe my opponent's making a mistake. But if they're not, then I can't force it, right? We can't make sure that our opponent is making a mistake. If they play all the good moves, then the game is a draw. There is nothing we can do about that.

So asking the right question, having that question in your mind, I repeat both versions of it. You can ask yourself, which move leads to the most favorable outcome for me? Or you can ask yourself, what is a good enough move in this position? It brings you back to the logical part. It basically activates system two before you start having these kind of emotional reactions.

And whenever you feel this kind of tension coming up during a game, let's say you're asking yourself what's a good enough move? And then you're thinking, no, but I don't want to trade queens, then it's time to be [00:12:00] extremely careful, because this is your emotional brain screaming. Now, sometimes it can be good that we keep the game complex, right?

If we have a alternative that is equal in strength and has a better, more favorable outcome. What we believe that will be a position that we can win more than if we trade queens. But this needs to be based and grounded in logic. So we need to attack this kind of feeling and say, Hey is not trading the queen really the smartest decision in here.

If you can also ask other questions, like, if I would watch a friend play this game, would I recommend them to trade queens? Yes or no? So all of these questions are just trying to bring us out of the emotion and get into the logical brain before we have this preset question that we try to answer.

And we are not even realizing it during the game that we're answering the wrong question. So sometimes the best outcome is a draw, and then we should accept [00:13:00] it, but sometimes it's also steering into a complex position, right? Then it needs to be objectively at least semi correct. Right? We can't just say, well, this is not a draw and then we are much worse.

That doesn't really bring us more chances. That's actually something that my last coach, when I was still active, grandmaster Markus Ragger summed up perfectly. He told me often, in this position, you didn't play for a win. You are only trying to lose, and I had to come back to this once I was retired.

Now with some distance just saying like, oh yeah, this was actually a very good point because often I would fall into this emotional trap. I told myself I was a very ambitious player. I wasn't happy with the draw. But I just based my decision making purely on emotions. And that wasn't smart because then bad moves are coming.

And most of these games where I made these very dubious moves, I [00:14:00] ended up losing them or drawing them, but drawing from a, oh, please, please, please, I need to draw because I was much worse at some point. So, this is super, super important and because I think it's so important, I actually recorded videos on this for all of my Simplified Chess Improvement System students.

So if you're listening to this and you are subscribed to my Simplified Chess Improvement System, there is a video module in the course right now. It'll be in part three. You can go and check it out for you guys. It's totally free of charge. So what I do there is basically explain what I explained in this podcast, but just show it also with more games, more examples that you can just have a look at and say, oh yeah, that's, yeah, that's true.

That a grandmaster can play very bad moves if the questions are wrong. And I come up with different questions of these kind of trappy questions. It's like, what if I miss something?

It's one of these dangerous [00:15:00] questions as well. One question that we talked about enough here is how can I avoid a draw? Then we have many different questions that you might see in there, and it's like, oh yeah, when this comes up during the game, I need to bring myself back to logic.

I need to activate my system two. And not just to justify what I want emotionally, but to be in an objective way, what I can trust, and that I actually make logical decision making. So the goal is to avoid emotional traps, ask better questions, that's the key. So if you take away one thing, is your brain is answering questions during a chess game.

And the better this question is, the more objective, the more based in logic it is, the more based in logic your answer will be and the better your move will be. And then you need to build a practical decision making process that you can trust. So you just need to repeat this muscle.

You need to learn how to ask better questions during the game. And [00:16:00] then there are some examples in there as well that you can think, what would I do right now? And then I explain what would be the right decision making process. So if you are a Simplified Chess Improvement System student, go check it out.

It's in there, it's in the course. And if you're not yet, but you believe that decision making is something you wanna work on, then you can check out the Simplified Chess Improvement System. As the name says, it's a full system. It's not only about decision making, it's about everything. How to study chess how to study each part of chess.

And now I'm working on more practical modules, like the decision making, like time trouble that's coming up, like thought process. So, make sure to check it out. It's in the description of this podcast and I hope that you will make thanked to this podcast episode just a little bit more logical decisions and maybe you got aware for the first time what is actually happening in your [00:17:00] subconscious, and then I would be very curious to hear from you guys where you see this emotional decision making in your own life. Because it's not only in chess, it's everywhere. It's your life.

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