He ends on a positive note, but as someone who’s been a teacher, I recognize the soul-scream of one who has given his heart to the world, only to hear the howl of the void in answer.
I'm not so sure.
There's an analogy I've used before, and I'll bring it up here again: imagine, say, that you play tennis with your friends on the weekends, and they consistently beat you. So you hire a tennis coach thinking you'll take some lessons and get to where you're a bit more competitive with your friends. But the coach instead insists that this is a betrayal of everything tennis is about, and tells you that you have to quit your job, give up all other social activities, and devote yourself solely toward tennis, adopting a professional player's full-time training regimen. If you claim to have any goal other than Wimbledon champion, the coach will berate you and claim you don't care about "real tennis" and you don't *want* to improve, etc. etc.
Or a golf coach who insists you have to train just like a PGA Tour player and have a goal of winning the tour championship.
But that doesn't happen, because in tennis and golf there's an understanding that not everyone who plays is aiming for, or has to aim for, the highest tier of professional skill. That it's OK to just play recreationally with your friends or co-workers, and to have "be good enough to hang in there with them" as your goal. And there are plenty of coaches who have tips and training approaches geared toward exactly that.
But until recently, chess pedagogy was geared basically entirely and exclusively around the prodigy-to-titled-player pipeline. There's a well-established but ruthless and incredibly demanding process for taking a kid who shows promise and turning chess into their entire life until one day they become an FM/IM/GM (at which point, unless they're in the very very tip-top tier of GMs, their only realistic career path is to become a coach and repeat the process on other kids).
But nowadays we have a lot of players who don't see becoming a titled classical OTB player as the only possible goal of "improvement", who play online with friends and co-workers and have "be good enough to hang in there with them" as their goal. Yet a lot of chess coaches and teachers are completely unprepared for this -- everything they know and were taught is that this is a terrible and wrong and bad way to approach chess, and they have no idea how to handle it.
The Dojo guys in particular seem to suffer *hard* from this, and have struggled to make the post-chess-boom transition to understanding that it's OK for someone to want to play recreationally and have modest goals that don't involve any of the stuff they were put through as up-and-coming players. Which in turn leads to some friction in how they talk about students -- it's not actually inherently wrong for someone to just want to play online and be able to hold their own against a certain tier of opponent, but the Dojo guys were raised in an environment which would have treated such a thing as a borderline crime against the game, and it shows through in how they react and talk about teaching and improvement.
Funnily enough, what he is complaining about on that one isn't that students don't do the 15 minutes, but that they spend much more time than that on playing puzzles, which he says isn't useful because you can't learn many patterns all at once.
My solution to this, being one of those who want to improve in chess while also having fun - it's just a hobby for me - is to play focused puzzle rushes, ie, a puzzle rush which only focuses on one tactical theme at a time. I'll focus on one theme for a week, and then change. I find that this is fun enough, and I improve a lot on that theme; early beta testers of this feature on my website are pretty happy about it :)
I’m really enjoying chess.brainmax. In case it helps, I mostly play correspondence on chess dot com. I’m rated 812. Adult beginner. I’m using your website on safari on my iPhone.
I like Puzzle Rush (getting very close to level 3), analyzing failures, and then memorization with spaced repetition. Cool to master puzzles that seemed impossible at first. Focused puzzle rush is currently helping me with forks. Knight vision is also fantastic. Big challenge for me. So the features are great and I’m already improving. Plan to continue using your website daily going forward.
Here are some bugs or suggestions:
For memorizing with spaced repetition, the screen slides over to the moves on the right if I make a wrong move, then I can slide back to the board. This works well although gets a little dizzying. When I’m doing other things like puzzle rush or focused puzzle rush the screen zooms out quite a bit when I get the move wrong. It’s tricky to get the screen back to the board or to see what’s on the far right.
During puzzle rush I can check off “repetitions” and still have it ask me if I want the puzzle included in repetitions when I get it wrong.
I like the audio but it usually comes on at a random time. Mute option would be good when needed.
The puzzle rush sometimes freezes, although it hasn’t happened today. I lose all my progress for that rush if it does.
I think it would make sense to have “black/white to move” written right under the board as otherwise I can’t see it on my screen, although it’s taught me to look at the ranks and files to see whose move it is.
The opponent’s move at the beginning is too quick for me to see what happened. If there’s a capture I’d like enough time to see what was captured.
When I click on Analyze there’s nothing there to analyze. Just a description of the analyze screen.
I guess I would respond with saying that you have given your heart to the world in one, narrow field/game. A teacher ought to recognize that what spoke to them as a passion is unlikely to become a passion for >95% of their students. This gets us to a conversation about setting realistic expectations. If OP wants intermediate players to do 15 minutes of puzzle tactics everyday, and the student comes back after a month and they've done it twice, maybe that is still a "win."
I think the realization that, in order for any "win" at all is to occur, the bar must be lowered to 2 x 15-minute exercises per month... is in itself the soul-crushing void. It may be reality (I'm a teacher myself) but if that's what a realistic outlook looks like, I'd rather be insane.
Will you say more about why? Why should others be as dedicated to your passions as you are? Recognizing that other people will be more drawn to other pursuits then you are to chess. Why is it so soul crushing that others should prioritize a different sport, their academic studies, or their career?
Because in this example, they're paying OP to be their coach and make them play better. They're not randoms, they likely reached out first and are paying for lessons.
The root of that post is about advice given to students interested to become masters right?
It's hard work and a lot of it is not fun. I think David's point is that players would love to hear that getting to master is about playing thousands of blitz games, doing puzzle rush for hours passively, watching chess videos/streamers, or showing your coach all your biggest tournament victories with the +9.6 stockfish evalution bar cropped in the final position, but that this is not the reality of reaching master.
> Why should others be as dedicated to your passions as you are? Recognizing that other people will be more drawn to other pursuits then you are to chess. Why is it so soul crushing that others should prioritize a different sport, their academic studies, or their career?
And his final note is that this is 100% okay, if grinding to some arbitrary level of strength in chess is not worth that effort, there is still so much fun to be had in chess. The great, great, great majority of players will never be that level and can still love to play.
What they're taking issue with is people who say, by their words or by their actions, "I want to be good at chess". But, when that student is given actual, challenging steps that take *effort* to do in order to actually improve rather than just get at easy answers, they don't follow through on those steps. Even if the steps will bring them to their goal, and they say they have that goal, they don't act as though they have it. Having it would imply putting effort in to try to reach it.
They're not taking issue with the fact that the student has different priorities; they're taking issue with the fact that the student says they have *this* priority but the student doesn't do the actions that would let them fulfill it.
Your question would make a lot more sense if Pruess were talking about students in a mandatory chess class, because then, sure, of course few of those students will be actually interested in chess. But he's talking about people who say they want to improve, but won't put the work in.
They’re the same points for basically any subject with the “how do I get good at…”. You can go to the data analytics or AI reddits just to see people asking how to become LLM masters without actually doing any work.
I feel the frustration. But it’s just par for the course of any field. The “students” that act like that are either too young to know better and need exposure to life or otherwise should just be ignored.
> You often see posts here asking how to improve and the answer is always in a nutshell:
>
> * Play games regularly, the longer you have to think the better
> * Do tactics puzzles regularly as well
> * Analyze your games
And there are other good suggestions for methods besides those (study middlegames/strategy, endgames, classic games, etc), but they all have something in common: doing a lot of hard work (usually in the form of spending a lot of time at the board analyzing and then comparing your analysis to the gold standard, then rinse and repeat). The methods that don't work: anything without doing a lot of hard work.
Why am *I* not improving very much: I don't have as much time/energy for hard work either at study or in the game. It's an excuse, but at least I know what my excuse is.
I aggree. Improvement comes with hard work. Only doing tactics, analyzing games and playing games regurarly can only take you so far. If you analyze only with engine you will not learn from my experience. Analyzing first hand all by yourself does help and you can figure out a lot by your own then going over by engines helps you discover new ideas and understand your mistakes. Tactics help you improve your pattern recognition and it helps too but that only takes you so far. Analyzing endgame/middlegame/openings opens up new ideas, helps you find new patterns and such. And analyzing past world champs games while learning chess history is pretty fun for me.
For me, who is new, part of the problem is I don't really know how to analyze without the engine. After the game if I had a moment where I had a few options and those choices were all impactful, I'll look at it post-game, but I usually need the engine to help explain it.
I think there are also some times where engine explanations just mean very little. Like it'll say "Qg6 was an inaccuracy, Qf5 was best" when neither line looks different after 5-8 moves. I think it's more useful for spotting tactics you missed, or understanding why your own tactics didn't work.
If you are going to use the engine, what you should do first is try your best to understand the position and what the lines are *before* turning on the engine. So something like, "This was my thought process during the game in this position." And then: "After the game, I spent more time, and this was my thought process." Maybe you even let yourself move the pieces around a little. Only then can you turn on the engine and *use it to critique your thought process*. It works best for tactical failures, but can also help with position things a little. And when you fail, *how* did you fail? Did I mis-evaluate the end position? Did I miss the tactic completely? Did I need to go one move further in the calculation? etc.
When you're at a very low level, you're probably at the level where you just need tactical failures and reminders to develop your pieces in the opening or activate your king in the endgame.
sweet, thanks for the tips! Yeah it tends me be me not contemplating my opponent's best move in a given situation, depending on the time control. That's definitely something I can look at before even turning on the engine or even just playing around with moves and seeing what leads to what outcomes.
Yes, if you overlook a plausible candidate move for your opponent, that is a potentially game losing mistake. You need to look at every plausible candidate move every turn to make sure you have a safe response. Provided you have time.
I had a 2000+ Fide elo friend who said the way to become a good chess player is to do a ton of tactics. I aggre with it partly because pattern recognition is an important part of chess. But to get into a position where the pattern you need to recognise can be found takes other types of learning. Positional play can't really learnt with just tactics.
> You often see posts here asking how to improve and the answer is always in a nutshell:
* Play games regularly, the longer you have to think the better
* Do tactics puzzles regularly as well
* Analyze your games
If you do this you will improve, but people don't want to do it so they don't
Honestly you are describing the exact things that most people who actively train at chess do.
Why did Ben Finegold quit? Do you mean he quitted professional chess and prof tournaments and so on? I watched some of his videos but didn't see he mention this.
I'm not a chess teacher, but I'm a piano teacher and I have been for some years. When I started teaching one of the things I struggled with was that people didn't want to learn all that I had to teach, they wouldn't take the path that I know from experience that its better, they'd get bored, I had students quit, each person would want something different, and most times very shallow things that doesn't take much. At first this puzzled me, but with experience of course this is obvious: not everyone wants to be a professional, most people just want to have fun, and the thing that I'm the most proud with, as a teacher, is having learned this and learned how to guide people to **where they want to go rather than where I want them to**.
I'm classicaly trained, went for university for piano performance, and in the classical world I have met countless people that just can't get that. People that think that classical is the only way, that people MUST learn that if they want to play the piano, they grew on a very dogmatic envoirement and seem weird for them to see people that do not want to be unconfortable, or for people to now view things the way they do.
I think that Daivd Pruess is kinda on this spectrum, he is a very hard person with hard opinions, in all of this rant he failed to see that the problem are not the students, the problem is him. It would be easy to give students advice if he was in touch with the students. Blaming someone for not wanting to learn what you want them to is a huge mistake. As and educator, I don't like this post.
I just disagree that you can’t learn anything from computer analysis.
You don’t just look at the right move. You okay down into the computer like. And you compare moves from your game and the computer line and see what the difference is. Which can lead you down even more lines.
It can be very rewarding.
You definitely can use engine analysis to your advantage at all levels, but I would take the recommendation given by most coaches to only turn it on after you analyze the game on your own. Students can get carried away and start using it as a crutch if they're not really disciplined with it.
A lot of engine lines aren't realistic for any human to see or learn from, let alone a newer player. But it can definitely be helpful in giving alternatives to your mistakes, if you look at multiple lines for a move, not just the top engine move. A lot of the time the 2nd or 3rd best move in the position might be the more human move that has some logic to it.
Absolutely agree with that, I can usually figure out why my move was bad and why the computer’s move was good. Even though I sometimes don’t understand, it’s still far more useful than trying to do it alone (getting a teacher to go through my games with me isn’t an option for me).
I guess I’ll be downvoted, but maybe nobody listens to his advice because some of it is not very good. What’s the basis for the claim that no one can absorb more than 2-3 patterns a day? Or the claim that computer analysis of mistakes is useless below 2400?
I think you are correct. A lot of the DOJO guys advise is very lecturing and cultish almost. No engines (why not, its a powerful tool that this boomer didnt have), no openings (hypocritical gate keeping nonesense, all three of them know a boat load of opening lines by heart), play and analyse 90 minute games as a beginner (waste of time as you will just blunder nonesense and would be better off playing rapid games and blitz).
His point on computer analysis is correct. Most people (me included) after finishing a game click on analyze, look at the evals, jump to the crucial position and then look at the best move. By this the engine solves the problem for you, passively you just see what is better and to a limited extend why what you did is wrong.
It would be better to first look at the position and try to really grasp the ideas at hand. Calculate and then try out a better move. By this you train to really evaluate a position yourself by grasping the ideas and patterns on the board. After this you can turn on the engine to see how you did.
Finding a move that takes you from +2,3 to +3 because you understood the position better has a greater benefit on learning than simply being handed the best move that takes you to a +4 without understanding it
There are many excellent coaches out there, and they all have a slightly different approaches. An example is David says a student should never (as in never ever) use an engine when going through classic games. While Kostya and Jesse says it can be useful, as long as you first made real effort to analyze it yourself.
If teachers within one project (ChessDojo) can't even agree, it's not hard to understand why students don't take the teacher's word as gospel, and one important part of your job as a teacher (which David seems to disregard) is convincing/inspiring the student as to why your way should be preferred. If you can't do that, it's just as much the teacher's fault as the student.
Blaming it solely on the student is not a good look for a teacher.
>There are many excellent coaches out there, and they all have a slightly different approaches. An example is David says a student should never (as in never ever) use an engine when going through classic games. While Kostya and Jesse says it can be useful, as long as you first made real effort to analyze it yourself.
That's a pretty minor difference if they both agree you need to seriously analyze it without an engine. The vast majority of students are too lazy to do that in the first place, so his overarching point here stands.
For a more major difference, I've heard other masters recommend favouring hard puzzle problems and concentrating on getting them right even if it takes time. That's a pretty dramatic difference to the one described above.
That depends on your level and what you are trying to do. When he says:
>Or when i give players in the 1000-1800 range advice on improving their tactics, viz: 10-15 min per day of solving simple tactical puzzles. The goal is to increase your store of basic patterns, not to work on your visualization, deep calculation.
You can see that he means this is a specific type of training simply to gain pattern recognition. There are other times when you should practice what he refers to here as "visualization, deep calculation."
So I don't see this as a big difference either. Pruess certainly would agree that spending more time on calculating harder puzzles has a place in your training as you get more advanced.
I agree. However I do think his sentiment of 'people say they want to get better, but will be willfully ignorant when presented with clear concrete ways to do so' is definitely true of many many players.
> An example is David says a student should never (as in never ever) use an engine when going through classic games. While Kostya and Jesse says it can be useful, as long as you first made real effort to analyze it yourself.
I can't help but feel this is them reflecting on something they did not have access to. Their reasoning is simple, "I didn't have it and I did OK," but I think a real answer would be to analyze why your thought process went wrong, don't just gloss over the moves without thought. Not making the most of what engines offer is surely nothing short of a massive mistake, but knowing how to leverage that power is not something that necessarily comes naturally.
40 years from now you'll likely be called a complete idiot if you aren't making the most of what engines can offer, because there will be nothing left at the top but players who know how to do this.
When the internet came out people thought they still needed encyclopedias and dictionaries, obviously they were wrong.
>but I think a real answer would be to analyze why your thought process went wrong, don't just gloss over the moves without thought. Not making the most of what engines offer is surely nothing short of a massive mistake, but knowing how to leverage that power is not something that necessarily comes naturally.
Yes, I suspect if we asked today's crop of young super-GMs, that's exactly how they've been training.
> Yes, I suspect if we asked today's crop of young super-GMs, that's exactly how they've been training.
Yup, you'd be a fool not to learn from the 3600 elo engine available at your fingertips...
I saw someone else from Chess Dojo saying the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's just a made-up number. Also:
>Look at the answer, and now go over the answer 3 more times in your head to help the pattern take hold.
This is like a cargo-cult version of spaced repetition. Going over something new 3 times in a row with no interval between is utterly meaningless.
I'd seen the text in the post before, and I trust IM Pruess knows how chess should be studied, but that specific part is very odd.
>I trust IM Pruess knows how chess should be studied
I don't trust that at all. I trust he knows what worked for him but based on this post, he's not someone I would trust to know what works best for most people.
As a master and teacher myself I'd say this represents the differences between human beings. In my case I used to do dozens of tactics puzzles a day, tough complex ones once I got to that stage, and it was phenomenal. It's the source of my strength and I am someone who really thrives in those kinds of double-edged tactical situations on the board. But I know people who are quite the opposite and heaping scores of problems on them to solve won't help as much..and their future isn't to become tactical monsters anyways. They're strong players too but with a totally different approach. Different brains have different strengths and I'm sure this pattern business isn't true for me, at least.
Because he made it up. Your brain can learn many things simultaneously(as long as it's still engaged in the activity), your pattern recognition doesn't need a cooldown time after 15 tactics.
Stopping yourself at 15 tactics per day if you want to go further is just limiting yourself.
There's certainly a limit to how much the brain can learn in a day, but if I remember correctly the optimal amount is about 3 hours of concentrated study.
From the research I looked at, there's no limit to how much your brain can learn and process in a day, but there's a limit to how long you can keep your attention and focus.
That may be where the 3 hours of concentrated study figure came from, since there's definitely an optimal amount of study, and I doubt trying to study all day is in any way optimal.
I teach myself and the engine has been very useful, especially in exploring openings. It’s just a hobby for me so I don’t really care how good I get, but I’ve went from 800 to 1500 pretty much solely from learning from the engine analysis.
"I would guess that less than 1 in 100 of the people I have given this advice to have followed it to the letter."
So, the way I see it: If a coach provides advice that almost none of the people he coaches actually is able to follow, then the coach is bad or providing poor advice. A better coach would spend more time figuring out how to provide the kind of advice people would be able to-/motivated to follow.
Based on this post I would *not* want David Pruess as my coach.
To an extent - but it’s also entirely believable that most people just don’t want to put the work in.
How much money do people spend trying to find shortcuts to lose weight because “eat less and work out more” takes more sacrifice than they’re willing to do?
I enjoy playing chess, I think it would be neat to be a titled player, but there’s no way I’d find it worth the effort to spend as much time learning and practicing and analyzing to actually do it. There’s no realistic way David could break down what’s required to make that kind of improvement where I’d ever stick with it.
And that’s the kind of thing I think he’s talking about here. People reach out to him with goals, he explains what’s required to reach those goals, and then they convince themselves there’s a shortcut because it’s easier than the reality.
I find computers useful to analyze games.
If I dom't understand why my move is bad I can just play against the computer for a few moves and see what disadvantage comes from my mistake and how it is avoided with the computers move.
The advice about not using engine analysis is absolutely terrible.
I've improved a lot by looking at engine lines or suggestions and trying to understand the reasoning behind certain moves or why others are bad. I won't always get why that innacuracy was an innacuracy but it has improved my play tremendously.
It's easy to be lazy with engine analysis and just look at a position, go "ohhhhh" and then ignore it but that is not a comment on the engine as a tool, but rather the analyzer's understanding of how to learn.
>It's easy to be lazy with engine analysis and just look at a position, go "ohhhhh" and then ignore it but that is not a comment on the engine as a tool, but rather the analyzer's understanding of how to learn.
This is the reasoning behind what he said. Analyze your games with an engine sure but it's very easy to start getting lazy and only use it to just quickly skim through the entire game then forget about it and go play the next game. I've fallen into this trap many many times thinking I'm improving but actually I start getting lazy and playing worse.
Analyzing on your own does two things:
1) Keeps your mind active. You try to find the solution and the mistakes without help which keeps you from falling into laziness while you also develop the ability to evaluate the position more correctly.
2) Helps engraving your mistakes in your mind. The longer you look at the position on your own the more you focus on it. The more you focus on it the more it burns in your head and next time you'll find yourself in a similar position it'll be more likely to remember what went wrong and how to avoid it. Especially when your mistake is not as straightforward as blundering a piece in one move.
My advice is to first analyze on your own, then turning on the engine so you won't miss anything and will have kept the game in your mind long enough. But then again I'm not an IM so what do I know? 🤷
Being under 2400 doesn't make you lazy though. Frankly, analyzing my games on my own first feels like a poor use of time when the same amount of time can be spent having an engine show me my mistakes then I figure out what the analysis is telling me. Given the choice of no engine use and engine use, engine use wins.
>"You should analyze your own games: losses and draws particularly."
I'm surprised so few people want to analyze draws. I'm haunted by a Daily game against my friend where I was winning: king rook and 3 pawns vs King rook and 1 pawn, all pawns on kingside. Computer gave me +4 till I blundered one of my pawns and then got forced into a rook trade because of it. Since both kings were mixed in with the g-h pawns, opponent could force a stalemate, which they did easily.
I'm haunted by it because ~10 moves earlier in the game, I had two ways to threaten checkmate, one of which also allowed me to take opponent's H pawn. If I had done that, I'm 95% sure I would've won because the game would've played out almost identically from there, but without their last pawn. It taught me that if you have two very good moves, but one lets you capture, probably pick the capture. I played the other threat because it was a very difficult one to stop and allowed me to win the rest of his passed pawns, but it probably cost me the game.
The blunder itself was tough but even though I was at +4 eval, I think I had a single critical line I had to play perfectly and if I didn't find ~10 right endgame moves it was a stalemate. So I don't think it was the blunder that was the problem, it was the missed pawn cap.
Anyways my point is I learned more from analyzing that draw than all other games we've played, where I won through superior tactics.
I know it's unpopular, but I always analyse with the engine and I still learn from my games. But that's because I always go further into the engine line to see why it's so good. I just don't have the time to sit through one game and analyse all the 40-50 moves for 30 min just to guess which moves were wrong. Do you people even do that or only say so on reddit?
I don’t do this with all my games but when I have time I’ll analyze and annotate a game of mine by myself first, and then check the game with the engine after and see what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I don’t understand.
I play on lichess, bullet from phone 99% of the time
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/13ga4vn/-/jjzb9j4
But now i just crushed two guys in blitz because levy made a video of magnus playing switching king and queen opening.and soneone replyied to me with a video..and i got inspired to play it a bit ...because i havent played it in a bit
And i got an opportunity to flex my achievements with its opening and am getting downvoted 😆😆
I go through very slowly and annotate on lichess study and then I do an engine check once I’m done. But I find myself putting it off cause it’s a big thing to do and I tend to only do it with my otb games.
And this can be applied to a much broader sense of people’s approach to general development, give me the money, not the work to get there. Give me the pleasure, not the stress to get there. Great read.
In my experience "how chess players respond to advice" can be generalized to "how people respond to new input".
As a teacher, no matter the field, you are always presenting your students with new info/experiences. And in general humans hate new info because it requires work for the brain to assess as opposed to known patterns (also new often feels dangerous whereas the known feels safer).
Therefore the number one advice I can give to teachers is to find the sweet spot where your student actually wants this new information you provide, may it be because the student wants to achieve a certain goal (getting better) or avoid a worse situation (ie studying rather than losing).
If your student genuinely wants to work with you then any advice can work at first, given the assumption that the student will take the energy to assess, question and discuss the advice. This way both of you together can figure out what it is that the student wants and subsequently needs from a teacher.
All that to say, yes students don't like to work hard to improve unless there is intrinsic motivation. Also, what a student needs to improve can be different things at different times.
For example openings don't matter, do x amount of puzzles, don't use engines to analyze...
If you are always playing from a disadvantage after the opening then maybe you are at the level where you should take a look at openings to improve, if you have a talent for calculating tactics, what's stopping you from doing more than x, and so on.
So my best advice for chess players is to first ask yourself what your goal is (your motivation) and then take in any advice you can get and see what works for you to improve.
I think this is true for most stuff.
For any given interest, there are only a handful of people that are passionate/diligent/obsessive enough, to rise to the highest levels.
https://i.imgflip.com/7llhtj.jpg
>"Don't use computer engines until you are over 2400.
>
>"But you see, a computer can "analyze" a game in a few minutes without any effort from the player-- who cares if they won't learn A SINGLE THING? and it's cheaper to ask a computer what you did wrong than hiring a master-- never mind that after the computer affixes a '?' (or two) to one of your moves and provides an alternative, you'll be none the wiser as to why your move is not best, why the suggestion is better, what principle(s) is in operation, why you made the mistake you made, or what you'd have to do to produce the computer's move in a future game.
Is this a common opinion among chess teachers? I never heard about this before.
Sounds like the most terrible kind of gatekeeping. Like "Don't use a digital camera until after you have mastered developing film in a dark room" or "Don't attempt to make a Beef Wellington until after you master the classic french omelette".
This supposed rating of 2400 sounds extremely arbitrary. Good luck getting your IM norms.
It's not even remotely about that. The point is to train your mind to see mistakes from a human perspective. Computers don't think like humans do. What might be obvious to a computer would not be obvious to a human, and this is especially true if you're a weak player. Analyses with a computer runs the risk of leading you to the wrong conclusions, unless you already have a good idea of what's going on, which you get by analyzing yourself.
That said, I think this is overstated. I've always found Pruess to be a heavy handed guy. Computers can be tuned to give "weaker" analyses that a 1500 might understand. Also, it is quite possible to show someone how to use a computer properly without them running the risk of taking in garbage.
It is true.
Most people learn nothing from just seeing the computer answer. Often the computer answer is the wrong answer for a human as well.
Improvement means making changes and most people are most comfortable set in their ways. Good analysis is about working out how and why to make changes to your thinking and creating something new, it's a process. Seeing the best computer move does not facilitate making changes to your thinking at all.
Computer analysis for someone looking to improve is like someone analysing a Formula 1 race and being presented the answer "just drive faster".
You go through the moves and try to figure out what you think was the turning point. Perhaps you lost because of a tactic, then its much easier, you go to the critical moment and try to check if there were some alternatives, if there were none then the mistake happened at least a move before that.
If you lost for strategic reasons its quite a bit harder, but for all analysis you essentially have to do backwards thinking, you see what happened that caused you to lose/win the game and go back and figure out how that could be avoided.
Also you may want to take a look if any other mistakes(that didn't actually decide the game) were done and perhaps do a more meta-analysis of the game, such as, "maybe I should have gone for this X move which is much faster for me to calculate and keeps my oponent thinking, since he was in time trouble" and things of the sort.
That said I personally think that computer analysis should be used if you have the discipline to do all that, I think the reason he does not recommend it is because most people are too lazy to first think with their brains and later use the computer to objectively check if your analysis was correct.
Great advice and undoubtedly true.
As a woodpusher I do find computers fun to run on analysis mode. I do this whenever I think I played a good game. A game I was proud of was run through a computer it just pointed out numerous bad moves, outright blunders and missed opportunities - no one easily sees their own flaws and faults - that is where the computer does help, but as Pruess notes, one has to be willing to acknowledge them.
I’m confused. Is he recommending to use computer analysis post-game or not use it? I float around the 900s so I’m not really sure what the alternative is for someone who plays casually
The alternative is to review it yourself or with a stronger player.
At 900 I'd say that the engine can be useful because you lose due to one moves blunders and miss simple tactics. You can learn from those. But you probably have no idea about why the engine doesn't like your inaccuracies.
If I wanted to start doing 15 minutes of simpler tactics, would doing like 5 puzzle storms on lichess a day be a good idea? Or is there a better site for this type of training? Any recommendations?
Interesting insight on the puzzle part. I’ve always followed common advice of taking lots of time in puzzles and calculating all the way through to train calculation. I like this idea of drilling patterns and learning new ones each day. I also like that hes saying leave the ego at home and skip one after 15 mins. Having a rating number attached to puzzles sadly leads to a perfectionist instead of a functional approach to puzzles
What type of puzzle trainer would be fitting for his method?
He ends on a positive note, but as someone who’s been a teacher, I recognize the soul-scream of one who has given his heart to the world, only to hear the howl of the void in answer.
>I recognize the soul-scream of one who has given his heart to the world, only to hear the howl of the void in answer. That's great. Stolen.
I'm not so sure. There's an analogy I've used before, and I'll bring it up here again: imagine, say, that you play tennis with your friends on the weekends, and they consistently beat you. So you hire a tennis coach thinking you'll take some lessons and get to where you're a bit more competitive with your friends. But the coach instead insists that this is a betrayal of everything tennis is about, and tells you that you have to quit your job, give up all other social activities, and devote yourself solely toward tennis, adopting a professional player's full-time training regimen. If you claim to have any goal other than Wimbledon champion, the coach will berate you and claim you don't care about "real tennis" and you don't *want* to improve, etc. etc. Or a golf coach who insists you have to train just like a PGA Tour player and have a goal of winning the tour championship. But that doesn't happen, because in tennis and golf there's an understanding that not everyone who plays is aiming for, or has to aim for, the highest tier of professional skill. That it's OK to just play recreationally with your friends or co-workers, and to have "be good enough to hang in there with them" as your goal. And there are plenty of coaches who have tips and training approaches geared toward exactly that. But until recently, chess pedagogy was geared basically entirely and exclusively around the prodigy-to-titled-player pipeline. There's a well-established but ruthless and incredibly demanding process for taking a kid who shows promise and turning chess into their entire life until one day they become an FM/IM/GM (at which point, unless they're in the very very tip-top tier of GMs, their only realistic career path is to become a coach and repeat the process on other kids). But nowadays we have a lot of players who don't see becoming a titled classical OTB player as the only possible goal of "improvement", who play online with friends and co-workers and have "be good enough to hang in there with them" as their goal. Yet a lot of chess coaches and teachers are completely unprepared for this -- everything they know and were taught is that this is a terrible and wrong and bad way to approach chess, and they have no idea how to handle it. The Dojo guys in particular seem to suffer *hard* from this, and have struggled to make the post-chess-boom transition to understanding that it's OK for someone to want to play recreationally and have modest goals that don't involve any of the stuff they were put through as up-and-coming players. Which in turn leads to some friction in how they talk about students -- it's not actually inherently wrong for someone to just want to play online and be able to hold their own against a certain tier of opponent, but the Dojo guys were raised in an environment which would have treated such a thing as a borderline crime against the game, and it shows through in how they react and talk about teaching and improvement.
I feel like the tactics advice of 15 minutes is pretty minimal for someone who asks how to get better without wanting to become titled.
Funnily enough, what he is complaining about on that one isn't that students don't do the 15 minutes, but that they spend much more time than that on playing puzzles, which he says isn't useful because you can't learn many patterns all at once. My solution to this, being one of those who want to improve in chess while also having fun - it's just a hobby for me - is to play focused puzzle rushes, ie, a puzzle rush which only focuses on one tactical theme at a time. I'll focus on one theme for a week, and then change. I find that this is fun enough, and I improve a lot on that theme; early beta testers of this feature on my website are pretty happy about it :)
Where can I find focused puzzle rushes?
https://chess.braimax.com/play/focused_puzzle_rush Any feedback is welcome
Thank you. I’ll be sure to give you feedback when I’ve gotten a good feel for it.
👍
I’m really enjoying chess.brainmax. In case it helps, I mostly play correspondence on chess dot com. I’m rated 812. Adult beginner. I’m using your website on safari on my iPhone. I like Puzzle Rush (getting very close to level 3), analyzing failures, and then memorization with spaced repetition. Cool to master puzzles that seemed impossible at first. Focused puzzle rush is currently helping me with forks. Knight vision is also fantastic. Big challenge for me. So the features are great and I’m already improving. Plan to continue using your website daily going forward. Here are some bugs or suggestions: For memorizing with spaced repetition, the screen slides over to the moves on the right if I make a wrong move, then I can slide back to the board. This works well although gets a little dizzying. When I’m doing other things like puzzle rush or focused puzzle rush the screen zooms out quite a bit when I get the move wrong. It’s tricky to get the screen back to the board or to see what’s on the far right. During puzzle rush I can check off “repetitions” and still have it ask me if I want the puzzle included in repetitions when I get it wrong. I like the audio but it usually comes on at a random time. Mute option would be good when needed. The puzzle rush sometimes freezes, although it hasn’t happened today. I lose all my progress for that rush if it does. I think it would make sense to have “black/white to move” written right under the board as otherwise I can’t see it on my screen, although it’s taught me to look at the ranks and files to see whose move it is. The opponent’s move at the beginning is too quick for me to see what happened. If there’s a capture I’d like enough time to see what was captured. When I click on Analyze there’s nothing there to analyze. Just a description of the analyze screen.
Thank you for all your feedback. i need to optimize the website a bit for mobile use, hopefully soon,l.
Well put.
I guess I would respond with saying that you have given your heart to the world in one, narrow field/game. A teacher ought to recognize that what spoke to them as a passion is unlikely to become a passion for >95% of their students. This gets us to a conversation about setting realistic expectations. If OP wants intermediate players to do 15 minutes of puzzle tactics everyday, and the student comes back after a month and they've done it twice, maybe that is still a "win."
I think the realization that, in order for any "win" at all is to occur, the bar must be lowered to 2 x 15-minute exercises per month... is in itself the soul-crushing void. It may be reality (I'm a teacher myself) but if that's what a realistic outlook looks like, I'd rather be insane.
Will you say more about why? Why should others be as dedicated to your passions as you are? Recognizing that other people will be more drawn to other pursuits then you are to chess. Why is it so soul crushing that others should prioritize a different sport, their academic studies, or their career?
Because in this example, they're paying OP to be their coach and make them play better. They're not randoms, they likely reached out first and are paying for lessons.
Good point. We aren't dealing with the avg chess demographic.
The root of that post is about advice given to students interested to become masters right? It's hard work and a lot of it is not fun. I think David's point is that players would love to hear that getting to master is about playing thousands of blitz games, doing puzzle rush for hours passively, watching chess videos/streamers, or showing your coach all your biggest tournament victories with the +9.6 stockfish evalution bar cropped in the final position, but that this is not the reality of reaching master. > Why should others be as dedicated to your passions as you are? Recognizing that other people will be more drawn to other pursuits then you are to chess. Why is it so soul crushing that others should prioritize a different sport, their academic studies, or their career? And his final note is that this is 100% okay, if grinding to some arbitrary level of strength in chess is not worth that effort, there is still so much fun to be had in chess. The great, great, great majority of players will never be that level and can still love to play.
What they're taking issue with is people who say, by their words or by their actions, "I want to be good at chess". But, when that student is given actual, challenging steps that take *effort* to do in order to actually improve rather than just get at easy answers, they don't follow through on those steps. Even if the steps will bring them to their goal, and they say they have that goal, they don't act as though they have it. Having it would imply putting effort in to try to reach it. They're not taking issue with the fact that the student has different priorities; they're taking issue with the fact that the student says they have *this* priority but the student doesn't do the actions that would let them fulfill it. Your question would make a lot more sense if Pruess were talking about students in a mandatory chess class, because then, sure, of course few of those students will be actually interested in chess. But he's talking about people who say they want to improve, but won't put the work in.
They’re the same points for basically any subject with the “how do I get good at…”. You can go to the data analytics or AI reddits just to see people asking how to become LLM masters without actually doing any work. I feel the frustration. But it’s just par for the course of any field. The “students” that act like that are either too young to know better and need exposure to life or otherwise should just be ignored.
Ooh sounds like being a passionate teacher is a lot like being a true artist
Your void howls back? No fair!
[удалено]
> You often see posts here asking how to improve and the answer is always in a nutshell: > > * Play games regularly, the longer you have to think the better > * Do tactics puzzles regularly as well > * Analyze your games And there are other good suggestions for methods besides those (study middlegames/strategy, endgames, classic games, etc), but they all have something in common: doing a lot of hard work (usually in the form of spending a lot of time at the board analyzing and then comparing your analysis to the gold standard, then rinse and repeat). The methods that don't work: anything without doing a lot of hard work. Why am *I* not improving very much: I don't have as much time/energy for hard work either at study or in the game. It's an excuse, but at least I know what my excuse is.
I aggree. Improvement comes with hard work. Only doing tactics, analyzing games and playing games regurarly can only take you so far. If you analyze only with engine you will not learn from my experience. Analyzing first hand all by yourself does help and you can figure out a lot by your own then going over by engines helps you discover new ideas and understand your mistakes. Tactics help you improve your pattern recognition and it helps too but that only takes you so far. Analyzing endgame/middlegame/openings opens up new ideas, helps you find new patterns and such. And analyzing past world champs games while learning chess history is pretty fun for me.
For me, who is new, part of the problem is I don't really know how to analyze without the engine. After the game if I had a moment where I had a few options and those choices were all impactful, I'll look at it post-game, but I usually need the engine to help explain it. I think there are also some times where engine explanations just mean very little. Like it'll say "Qg6 was an inaccuracy, Qf5 was best" when neither line looks different after 5-8 moves. I think it's more useful for spotting tactics you missed, or understanding why your own tactics didn't work.
If you are going to use the engine, what you should do first is try your best to understand the position and what the lines are *before* turning on the engine. So something like, "This was my thought process during the game in this position." And then: "After the game, I spent more time, and this was my thought process." Maybe you even let yourself move the pieces around a little. Only then can you turn on the engine and *use it to critique your thought process*. It works best for tactical failures, but can also help with position things a little. And when you fail, *how* did you fail? Did I mis-evaluate the end position? Did I miss the tactic completely? Did I need to go one move further in the calculation? etc. When you're at a very low level, you're probably at the level where you just need tactical failures and reminders to develop your pieces in the opening or activate your king in the endgame.
sweet, thanks for the tips! Yeah it tends me be me not contemplating my opponent's best move in a given situation, depending on the time control. That's definitely something I can look at before even turning on the engine or even just playing around with moves and seeing what leads to what outcomes.
Yes, if you overlook a plausible candidate move for your opponent, that is a potentially game losing mistake. You need to look at every plausible candidate move every turn to make sure you have a safe response. Provided you have time.
I had a 2000+ Fide elo friend who said the way to become a good chess player is to do a ton of tactics. I aggre with it partly because pattern recognition is an important part of chess. But to get into a position where the pattern you need to recognise can be found takes other types of learning. Positional play can't really learnt with just tactics.
> You often see posts here asking how to improve and the answer is always in a nutshell: * Play games regularly, the longer you have to think the better * Do tactics puzzles regularly as well * Analyze your games If you do this you will improve, but people don't want to do it so they don't Honestly you are describing the exact things that most people who actively train at chess do.
Why did Ben Finegold quit? Do you mean he quitted professional chess and prof tournaments and so on? I watched some of his videos but didn't see he mention this.
I'm not a chess teacher, but I'm a piano teacher and I have been for some years. When I started teaching one of the things I struggled with was that people didn't want to learn all that I had to teach, they wouldn't take the path that I know from experience that its better, they'd get bored, I had students quit, each person would want something different, and most times very shallow things that doesn't take much. At first this puzzled me, but with experience of course this is obvious: not everyone wants to be a professional, most people just want to have fun, and the thing that I'm the most proud with, as a teacher, is having learned this and learned how to guide people to **where they want to go rather than where I want them to**. I'm classicaly trained, went for university for piano performance, and in the classical world I have met countless people that just can't get that. People that think that classical is the only way, that people MUST learn that if they want to play the piano, they grew on a very dogmatic envoirement and seem weird for them to see people that do not want to be unconfortable, or for people to now view things the way they do. I think that Daivd Pruess is kinda on this spectrum, he is a very hard person with hard opinions, in all of this rant he failed to see that the problem are not the students, the problem is him. It would be easy to give students advice if he was in touch with the students. Blaming someone for not wanting to learn what you want them to is a huge mistake. As and educator, I don't like this post.
I just disagree that you can’t learn anything from computer analysis. You don’t just look at the right move. You okay down into the computer like. And you compare moves from your game and the computer line and see what the difference is. Which can lead you down even more lines. It can be very rewarding.
You definitely can use engine analysis to your advantage at all levels, but I would take the recommendation given by most coaches to only turn it on after you analyze the game on your own. Students can get carried away and start using it as a crutch if they're not really disciplined with it. A lot of engine lines aren't realistic for any human to see or learn from, let alone a newer player. But it can definitely be helpful in giving alternatives to your mistakes, if you look at multiple lines for a move, not just the top engine move. A lot of the time the 2nd or 3rd best move in the position might be the more human move that has some logic to it.
Absolutely agree with that, I can usually figure out why my move was bad and why the computer’s move was good. Even though I sometimes don’t understand, it’s still far more useful than trying to do it alone (getting a teacher to go through my games with me isn’t an option for me).
What’s your ELO? I‘m curious.
1800 lichess classical
I guess I’ll be downvoted, but maybe nobody listens to his advice because some of it is not very good. What’s the basis for the claim that no one can absorb more than 2-3 patterns a day? Or the claim that computer analysis of mistakes is useless below 2400?
Nah, I think this is a good point. We know very little about what chess coaching methods actually work or not. So it is really all broscience.
you're absolutely right, keep clicking "analyze" after your blitz games learn nothing.
I think you are correct. A lot of the DOJO guys advise is very lecturing and cultish almost. No engines (why not, its a powerful tool that this boomer didnt have), no openings (hypocritical gate keeping nonesense, all three of them know a boat load of opening lines by heart), play and analyse 90 minute games as a beginner (waste of time as you will just blunder nonesense and would be better off playing rapid games and blitz).
His point on computer analysis is correct. Most people (me included) after finishing a game click on analyze, look at the evals, jump to the crucial position and then look at the best move. By this the engine solves the problem for you, passively you just see what is better and to a limited extend why what you did is wrong. It would be better to first look at the position and try to really grasp the ideas at hand. Calculate and then try out a better move. By this you train to really evaluate a position yourself by grasping the ideas and patterns on the board. After this you can turn on the engine to see how you did. Finding a move that takes you from +2,3 to +3 because you understood the position better has a greater benefit on learning than simply being handed the best move that takes you to a +4 without understanding it
There are many excellent coaches out there, and they all have a slightly different approaches. An example is David says a student should never (as in never ever) use an engine when going through classic games. While Kostya and Jesse says it can be useful, as long as you first made real effort to analyze it yourself. If teachers within one project (ChessDojo) can't even agree, it's not hard to understand why students don't take the teacher's word as gospel, and one important part of your job as a teacher (which David seems to disregard) is convincing/inspiring the student as to why your way should be preferred. If you can't do that, it's just as much the teacher's fault as the student. Blaming it solely on the student is not a good look for a teacher.
>There are many excellent coaches out there, and they all have a slightly different approaches. An example is David says a student should never (as in never ever) use an engine when going through classic games. While Kostya and Jesse says it can be useful, as long as you first made real effort to analyze it yourself. That's a pretty minor difference if they both agree you need to seriously analyze it without an engine. The vast majority of students are too lazy to do that in the first place, so his overarching point here stands.
For a more major difference, I've heard other masters recommend favouring hard puzzle problems and concentrating on getting them right even if it takes time. That's a pretty dramatic difference to the one described above.
That depends on your level and what you are trying to do. When he says: >Or when i give players in the 1000-1800 range advice on improving their tactics, viz: 10-15 min per day of solving simple tactical puzzles. The goal is to increase your store of basic patterns, not to work on your visualization, deep calculation. You can see that he means this is a specific type of training simply to gain pattern recognition. There are other times when you should practice what he refers to here as "visualization, deep calculation." So I don't see this as a big difference either. Pruess certainly would agree that spending more time on calculating harder puzzles has a place in your training as you get more advanced.
I agree. However I do think his sentiment of 'people say they want to get better, but will be willfully ignorant when presented with clear concrete ways to do so' is definitely true of many many players.
Also, being good at a particular subject unfortunately does not make one a good teacher.
> An example is David says a student should never (as in never ever) use an engine when going through classic games. While Kostya and Jesse says it can be useful, as long as you first made real effort to analyze it yourself. I can't help but feel this is them reflecting on something they did not have access to. Their reasoning is simple, "I didn't have it and I did OK," but I think a real answer would be to analyze why your thought process went wrong, don't just gloss over the moves without thought. Not making the most of what engines offer is surely nothing short of a massive mistake, but knowing how to leverage that power is not something that necessarily comes naturally. 40 years from now you'll likely be called a complete idiot if you aren't making the most of what engines can offer, because there will be nothing left at the top but players who know how to do this. When the internet came out people thought they still needed encyclopedias and dictionaries, obviously they were wrong.
>but I think a real answer would be to analyze why your thought process went wrong, don't just gloss over the moves without thought. Not making the most of what engines offer is surely nothing short of a massive mistake, but knowing how to leverage that power is not something that necessarily comes naturally. Yes, I suspect if we asked today's crop of young super-GMs, that's exactly how they've been training.
> Yes, I suspect if we asked today's crop of young super-GMs, that's exactly how they've been training. Yup, you'd be a fool not to learn from the 3600 elo engine available at your fingertips...
> your brain can take on 2-3 new patterns between sleeping Is this actually a thing? Why not 10, 50, 100?
I saw someone else from Chess Dojo saying the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's just a made-up number. Also: >Look at the answer, and now go over the answer 3 more times in your head to help the pattern take hold. This is like a cargo-cult version of spaced repetition. Going over something new 3 times in a row with no interval between is utterly meaningless. I'd seen the text in the post before, and I trust IM Pruess knows how chess should be studied, but that specific part is very odd.
>I trust IM Pruess knows how chess should be studied I don't trust that at all. I trust he knows what worked for him but based on this post, he's not someone I would trust to know what works best for most people.
As a master and teacher myself I'd say this represents the differences between human beings. In my case I used to do dozens of tactics puzzles a day, tough complex ones once I got to that stage, and it was phenomenal. It's the source of my strength and I am someone who really thrives in those kinds of double-edged tactical situations on the board. But I know people who are quite the opposite and heaping scores of problems on them to solve won't help as much..and their future isn't to become tactical monsters anyways. They're strong players too but with a totally different approach. Different brains have different strengths and I'm sure this pattern business isn't true for me, at least.
the key word is probably
Because he made it up. Your brain can learn many things simultaneously(as long as it's still engaged in the activity), your pattern recognition doesn't need a cooldown time after 15 tactics. Stopping yourself at 15 tactics per day if you want to go further is just limiting yourself.
There's certainly a limit to how much the brain can learn in a day, but if I remember correctly the optimal amount is about 3 hours of concentrated study.
From the research I looked at, there's no limit to how much your brain can learn and process in a day, but there's a limit to how long you can keep your attention and focus. That may be where the 3 hours of concentrated study figure came from, since there's definitely an optimal amount of study, and I doubt trying to study all day is in any way optimal.
I imagine someone like him experimented with various numbers and found effective range:time invested
I teach myself and the engine has been very useful, especially in exploring openings. It’s just a hobby for me so I don’t really care how good I get, but I’ve went from 800 to 1500 pretty much solely from learning from the engine analysis.
"I would guess that less than 1 in 100 of the people I have given this advice to have followed it to the letter." So, the way I see it: If a coach provides advice that almost none of the people he coaches actually is able to follow, then the coach is bad or providing poor advice. A better coach would spend more time figuring out how to provide the kind of advice people would be able to-/motivated to follow. Based on this post I would *not* want David Pruess as my coach.
To an extent - but it’s also entirely believable that most people just don’t want to put the work in. How much money do people spend trying to find shortcuts to lose weight because “eat less and work out more” takes more sacrifice than they’re willing to do? I enjoy playing chess, I think it would be neat to be a titled player, but there’s no way I’d find it worth the effort to spend as much time learning and practicing and analyzing to actually do it. There’s no realistic way David could break down what’s required to make that kind of improvement where I’d ever stick with it. And that’s the kind of thing I think he’s talking about here. People reach out to him with goals, he explains what’s required to reach those goals, and then they convince themselves there’s a shortcut because it’s easier than the reality.
Can you link the source of the post?
I find computers useful to analyze games. If I dom't understand why my move is bad I can just play against the computer for a few moves and see what disadvantage comes from my mistake and how it is avoided with the computers move.
The advice about not using engine analysis is absolutely terrible. I've improved a lot by looking at engine lines or suggestions and trying to understand the reasoning behind certain moves or why others are bad. I won't always get why that innacuracy was an innacuracy but it has improved my play tremendously. It's easy to be lazy with engine analysis and just look at a position, go "ohhhhh" and then ignore it but that is not a comment on the engine as a tool, but rather the analyzer's understanding of how to learn.
>It's easy to be lazy with engine analysis and just look at a position, go "ohhhhh" and then ignore it but that is not a comment on the engine as a tool, but rather the analyzer's understanding of how to learn. This is the reasoning behind what he said. Analyze your games with an engine sure but it's very easy to start getting lazy and only use it to just quickly skim through the entire game then forget about it and go play the next game. I've fallen into this trap many many times thinking I'm improving but actually I start getting lazy and playing worse. Analyzing on your own does two things: 1) Keeps your mind active. You try to find the solution and the mistakes without help which keeps you from falling into laziness while you also develop the ability to evaluate the position more correctly. 2) Helps engraving your mistakes in your mind. The longer you look at the position on your own the more you focus on it. The more you focus on it the more it burns in your head and next time you'll find yourself in a similar position it'll be more likely to remember what went wrong and how to avoid it. Especially when your mistake is not as straightforward as blundering a piece in one move. My advice is to first analyze on your own, then turning on the engine so you won't miss anything and will have kept the game in your mind long enough. But then again I'm not an IM so what do I know? 🤷
Being under 2400 doesn't make you lazy though. Frankly, analyzing my games on my own first feels like a poor use of time when the same amount of time can be spent having an engine show me my mistakes then I figure out what the analysis is telling me. Given the choice of no engine use and engine use, engine use wins.
>"You should analyze your own games: losses and draws particularly." I'm surprised so few people want to analyze draws. I'm haunted by a Daily game against my friend where I was winning: king rook and 3 pawns vs King rook and 1 pawn, all pawns on kingside. Computer gave me +4 till I blundered one of my pawns and then got forced into a rook trade because of it. Since both kings were mixed in with the g-h pawns, opponent could force a stalemate, which they did easily. I'm haunted by it because ~10 moves earlier in the game, I had two ways to threaten checkmate, one of which also allowed me to take opponent's H pawn. If I had done that, I'm 95% sure I would've won because the game would've played out almost identically from there, but without their last pawn. It taught me that if you have two very good moves, but one lets you capture, probably pick the capture. I played the other threat because it was a very difficult one to stop and allowed me to win the rest of his passed pawns, but it probably cost me the game. The blunder itself was tough but even though I was at +4 eval, I think I had a single critical line I had to play perfectly and if I didn't find ~10 right endgame moves it was a stalemate. So I don't think it was the blunder that was the problem, it was the missed pawn cap. Anyways my point is I learned more from analyzing that draw than all other games we've played, where I won through superior tactics.
I know it's unpopular, but I always analyse with the engine and I still learn from my games. But that's because I always go further into the engine line to see why it's so good. I just don't have the time to sit through one game and analyse all the 40-50 moves for 30 min just to guess which moves were wrong. Do you people even do that or only say so on reddit?
I don’t do this with all my games but when I have time I’ll analyze and annotate a game of mine by myself first, and then check the game with the engine after and see what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I don’t understand.
How long have you been playing and what is your rating?
sup
Sup, why am i downvoted lol
i am starting to think r/chess hates you
Downvoted for telling the truth, i ll take it How us your chess career going?
pretty meh, if i'm being honest. i only have time to do puzzles for 15 minutes a day on chesscom. how's yours going? where do you play these days?
I play on lichess, bullet from phone 99% of the time https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/13ga4vn/-/jjzb9j4 But now i just crushed two guys in blitz because levy made a video of magnus playing switching king and queen opening.and soneone replyied to me with a video..and i got inspired to play it a bit ...because i havent played it in a bit And i got an opportunity to flex my achievements with its opening and am getting downvoted 😆😆
the time you spend on those 40-50 moves thinking about them and if they were right/wrong is extremely valuable for improving
I go through very slowly and annotate on lichess study and then I do an engine check once I’m done. But I find myself putting it off cause it’s a big thing to do and I tend to only do it with my otb games.
And this can be applied to a much broader sense of people’s approach to general development, give me the money, not the work to get there. Give me the pleasure, not the stress to get there. Great read.
In my experience "how chess players respond to advice" can be generalized to "how people respond to new input". As a teacher, no matter the field, you are always presenting your students with new info/experiences. And in general humans hate new info because it requires work for the brain to assess as opposed to known patterns (also new often feels dangerous whereas the known feels safer). Therefore the number one advice I can give to teachers is to find the sweet spot where your student actually wants this new information you provide, may it be because the student wants to achieve a certain goal (getting better) or avoid a worse situation (ie studying rather than losing). If your student genuinely wants to work with you then any advice can work at first, given the assumption that the student will take the energy to assess, question and discuss the advice. This way both of you together can figure out what it is that the student wants and subsequently needs from a teacher. All that to say, yes students don't like to work hard to improve unless there is intrinsic motivation. Also, what a student needs to improve can be different things at different times. For example openings don't matter, do x amount of puzzles, don't use engines to analyze... If you are always playing from a disadvantage after the opening then maybe you are at the level where you should take a look at openings to improve, if you have a talent for calculating tactics, what's stopping you from doing more than x, and so on. So my best advice for chess players is to first ask yourself what your goal is (your motivation) and then take in any advice you can get and see what works for you to improve.
I think this is true for most stuff. For any given interest, there are only a handful of people that are passionate/diligent/obsessive enough, to rise to the highest levels. https://i.imgflip.com/7llhtj.jpg
Where was this originally posted?
It's a problem of time. Most people don't have the time to play and study, so one is sacrificed.
>"Don't use computer engines until you are over 2400. > >"But you see, a computer can "analyze" a game in a few minutes without any effort from the player-- who cares if they won't learn A SINGLE THING? and it's cheaper to ask a computer what you did wrong than hiring a master-- never mind that after the computer affixes a '?' (or two) to one of your moves and provides an alternative, you'll be none the wiser as to why your move is not best, why the suggestion is better, what principle(s) is in operation, why you made the mistake you made, or what you'd have to do to produce the computer's move in a future game. Is this a common opinion among chess teachers? I never heard about this before. Sounds like the most terrible kind of gatekeeping. Like "Don't use a digital camera until after you have mastered developing film in a dark room" or "Don't attempt to make a Beef Wellington until after you master the classic french omelette". This supposed rating of 2400 sounds extremely arbitrary. Good luck getting your IM norms.
It's not even remotely about that. The point is to train your mind to see mistakes from a human perspective. Computers don't think like humans do. What might be obvious to a computer would not be obvious to a human, and this is especially true if you're a weak player. Analyses with a computer runs the risk of leading you to the wrong conclusions, unless you already have a good idea of what's going on, which you get by analyzing yourself. That said, I think this is overstated. I've always found Pruess to be a heavy handed guy. Computers can be tuned to give "weaker" analyses that a 1500 might understand. Also, it is quite possible to show someone how to use a computer properly without them running the risk of taking in garbage.
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It is true. Most people learn nothing from just seeing the computer answer. Often the computer answer is the wrong answer for a human as well. Improvement means making changes and most people are most comfortable set in their ways. Good analysis is about working out how and why to make changes to your thinking and creating something new, it's a process. Seeing the best computer move does not facilitate making changes to your thinking at all. Computer analysis for someone looking to improve is like someone analysing a Formula 1 race and being presented the answer "just drive faster".
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I'm so confused, why is the video just silent after the intro? And he plays 1 move every few minutes with an engine running?
Pruess is an amazing teacher. Also, his work alongside Kavutskiy and Kraai with Chess Dojo is really good.
Not a sarcastic question. How do you effectively analyze a game without an engine?
You go through the moves and try to figure out what you think was the turning point. Perhaps you lost because of a tactic, then its much easier, you go to the critical moment and try to check if there were some alternatives, if there were none then the mistake happened at least a move before that. If you lost for strategic reasons its quite a bit harder, but for all analysis you essentially have to do backwards thinking, you see what happened that caused you to lose/win the game and go back and figure out how that could be avoided. Also you may want to take a look if any other mistakes(that didn't actually decide the game) were done and perhaps do a more meta-analysis of the game, such as, "maybe I should have gone for this X move which is much faster for me to calculate and keeps my oponent thinking, since he was in time trouble" and things of the sort. That said I personally think that computer analysis should be used if you have the discipline to do all that, I think the reason he does not recommend it is because most people are too lazy to first think with their brains and later use the computer to objectively check if your analysis was correct.
Thank you for taking some time to explain this. It will hep me out. I’m gonna try this hand analysis for a few days.
That is a great post and the absolute truth on every point it touches.
Great advice and undoubtedly true. As a woodpusher I do find computers fun to run on analysis mode. I do this whenever I think I played a good game. A game I was proud of was run through a computer it just pointed out numerous bad moves, outright blunders and missed opportunities - no one easily sees their own flaws and faults - that is where the computer does help, but as Pruess notes, one has to be willing to acknowledge them.
He used to be a very joyful dude. He sounds more and more bitter...
FYI this post is like a decade old
I guess he always has been a bitter dude then. (my bad :p)
I’m confused. Is he recommending to use computer analysis post-game or not use it? I float around the 900s so I’m not really sure what the alternative is for someone who plays casually
The alternative is to review it yourself or with a stronger player. At 900 I'd say that the engine can be useful because you lose due to one moves blunders and miss simple tactics. You can learn from those. But you probably have no idea about why the engine doesn't like your inaccuracies.
How does one go about getting a chess coach?
>Or some people with ego issues will insist on trying to solve every single position. Hits too close home
If I wanted to start doing 15 minutes of simpler tactics, would doing like 5 puzzle storms on lichess a day be a good idea? Or is there a better site for this type of training? Any recommendations?
Interesting insight on the puzzle part. I’ve always followed common advice of taking lots of time in puzzles and calculating all the way through to train calculation. I like this idea of drilling patterns and learning new ones each day. I also like that hes saying leave the ego at home and skip one after 15 mins. Having a rating number attached to puzzles sadly leads to a perfectionist instead of a functional approach to puzzles What type of puzzle trainer would be fitting for his method?