Why Hoping to Get Lucky is Ruining Your Chess
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm grandmaster Noël Studer. And as always, let's talk about chess improvement. Let's talk about how you can simplify your chess. And actually today, I want to talk about a danger. A danger I realized in my own life. But that carries over to chess and basically anything you do. And if I had to summarize it, is as long as we hope that we could get lucky, it's way harder to put in the real work to really improve. Or keeping up a full stream of things that are easy and somehow will happen without us putting in the hard work. Well, our making the hard work look so [00:01:00] terribly annoying that we're never going to do it. Let's talk about it.

So if you follow the show and my newsletter for a while, you know that I love playing poker. I got into it when I stopped playing chess competitively myself. And I find it's a fun game. It's combining human psychology game theory and there is a component of luck and we'll talk about that in this episode.

And I went to tournaments. I studied it quite seriously. I traveled to several places in the world, also Las Vegas. I played one event in the World Series of Poker. For those knowing, it's not the main event. I recently discovered that all the adrenaline and hope for a big tournament score actually had a negative impact, both on my work quality and the quality of my daily life. So two things I really care about.

And so I wanted to talk about this because I realized, as with so many other [00:02:00] things, this actually happens as well in chess. And even if chess doesn't really have this kind of luck component, I still see this every single day in my work as a coach. When I go online, I see people falling for the same thing.

So this is super, super important and it applies to everybody because this kind of notion of it could be quick and easy is in marketing a lot. No matter what we're trying to do, we are in contact with that.

So let's get back to talk about poker, see how it affected my life, and then bring it into chess. So poker is a game of skill. There are clear strategies that are better than others. Players who study and who know what they're doing have a higher possibility of winning than those who just gamble. But here is the big "but". It takes an incredible amount of hands played to accumulate for the luck factor.

And this is especially true in tournament poker, as the winner [00:03:00] gets a huge piece of the pie and you really only make serious money if you reach the top 1% of any given tournament. In a single tournament, the luck factor is extremely high, so you have to play a lot of tournaments, and I mean a lot of them, to lower down the luck factor.

And that's what professional players are doing. Especially when they play online. They play thousands of tournaments to make sure they can turn their theoretical edge into a nearly guaranteed payday at some point. This is very important, nearly guaranteed at some point.

So the longer, the more you play, obviously the bigger edge you have. The more you play, the more realistic it gets that you actually even out the luck, so to speak, and then just stick with, well, you are better so you win more.

But even the best players can go several months, sometimes more than a year, playing very good poker and still lose money. This is super important to keep in mind. With [00:04:00] proper tilt management and bankroll management. If you're into poker, you know what this means. Basically, just giving yourself enough time, financially speaking, that you can play this many tournaments in poker and you're not affected by 10, 20, 30, 50 tournaments not going your way. The best players will be winners eventually.

But here's the catch. For someone like me, far from the best in the world, obviously I was never a professional player, never intended to be one. But a winning player compared to the people that I usually play with. The reality turns poker more into a game of luck than a skill-based game, even if I'm sure of my edge. So I'm sure that with the players I usually play with, I am one of the so-called quote unquote winning players.

But the problem is by playing so few because, well, I just did it for fun. I don't have this huge amount of tournaments that I can play, so I can't compensate for the luck factor.

And what [00:05:00] I mostly did is sometimes I played at home. But mostly I traveled somewhere and I had a good time, spent time with friends or with my wife. And then I played also some poker tournaments. And if I played a lot, just counting all the tournaments that I also played here in Switzerland, maybe I get to a hundred tournaments a year.

And that's really nothing compared to really serious professional players. And so slowly, this message arrived to me, oh and actually relying more on, on luck in that case rather than skills. And a few aha moments happened to me.

And one of those moments was when I played two huge online tournaments. Two of the biggest of the year. Long tournaments usually take several days. And after the first day I was chip leading or close to chip leading. Can't fully recall. One tournament that had a 600,000 US dollars first prize, and it was close to the leaders in the second tournament with a [00:06:00] 300,000 US dollars first prize. So combined, that's close to a million dollars.

And in my brain what happened is just, oh, with just some luck and let's be honest, it's not just some luck, it's an insane amount of luck that I would still need because these tournaments had thousands and then the second time, tens of thousands of players, I could theoretically be a millionaire within a few days.

And this thought pushed me in the wrong direction. And that's when things came together. Because I've read about psychology, I've read about how our brain works and our brains are not made to calculate these extremely unlikely scenarios. Our brains are also not logical based.

It's first emotions and then, our logic is searching for the stuff that we want to believe. And that's why lottery still works. It's incredibly unlikely to get the huge win, but the brain just sees it as an option. And it can't understand how incredibly insanely small this option actually [00:07:00] is.

And just seeing that there is an option gets us excited. And once I saw these opportunities, here's what happens to the brain. My brain goes, well, why work hard on a daily basis if I could just get lucky and become a millionaire in three days? Now there's a lot of things wrong with that because it's also not only about money, but sometimes our brain simplifies stuff.

And so this is an incredibly bad way of thinking. And even though I was already aware of the risk, I realized that the more poker I played, the less ready I was to the daily dry and the hard work in my business.

But this is really what I care about. It's not only about the finances, it's also what I really like to do. I really like to help people. Frankly, I'm not helping anyone if I'm sitting at a poker table. So this teaching, this is really what I like, but obviously it's hard. I can have a positive impact, but it is done through daily difficult things that I'm doing. And I don't always see the immediate impact as well.

And that's when [00:08:00] I saw that, oh, wait a moment. This is not only happening in poker. This is happening everywhere. That's what I meant with the marketing messages. If you really look anywhere on the internet, but just anywhere where there's marketing, you get bombarded. We get bombarded by these messages that try to convince us that if you just give those people money or your time, which, eventually, it's also money, there will be quick and easy successes made and chess improvement in finance, in business, in health, wherever.

And the thing is that these are not just some marketers making one advertisement, but these are industries that are usually trillion dollar markets. With huge companies hiring the best psychologists. Like, let's talk about social media, let's talk about all of these things. They hire the best of the very best, pay them a lot of money to understand human weaknesses, to understand how our brains work, and to understand how they have to formulate things so that we get a little bit [00:09:00] trapped in this message.

And when I realized that, okay, this is not doing me good, it's harder for me to get myself to do the things that I actually want to do and I don't really even enjoy poker that much anymore if I think all the time about the result. I want to think about the process, about sitting there and making a decision, but not the outcome.

I ended up with a very drastic solution. I haven't played the hand of poker since early November last year, and I don't plan to play one in the coming months, maybe years. Let's see.

And the thing that I realized for myself is that the more I get a taste that success could be easy, fun and quick. And by the way, I know success is not only finances. But sometimes, even for myself that I'm very aware of this, my brain can go into that of like, okay, just number go up is better, right?

So when I get that idea that success could be easy, fun, and quick, the real way gets less attractive. And when it gets less attractive, it gets harder to get me to do it, [00:10:00] and I do it less. And so what happens is: I'm doing the stuff that I want to do, and that will eventually lead to where I want to go in my life, less for doing something that has a very, very, very small chance to give outsize returns. And it's also pretty quick and easy. It's not what I want to do.

And so let's tie that back to your chess. What I see in chess is this hope to find a resource, to find a opening, to find a video, to find a secret that somehow makes chess improvement simple, easy, and fun. Everything kind of ties together. If you just figure out which openings you should play, then every game will be fun. You'll not get boring positions anymore. Every position will be good. Everything will be amazing.

And the problem is that in chess specifically, those that already do promise you that, because it's not true, it's not going to happen. Like, [00:11:00] there's not even a small chance, or well, there could be a small chance, but a ridiculously small chance. There are always outliers. That's basically what I mean. Even the worst methods sometimes can work, but the thing is, does it work often enough for you to warrant doing, spending time, energy, and money on it? No.

And so as long as you have this hope that there could be something out there that if you just have that, chess improvement can be easy, can be quick, can be extreme. It can be always fun. Every position is great. You love every opening you play, whatever it is. When you have that hope, you will go the wrong direction.

And what will happen is that doing what actually improves your chess, the repeated tactical work, the analyzing your games, especially the ones that you lose, especially the ones that seemed boring or where you made the huge mistakes.

Diving deep into that mistake, like what happened there actually. Figuring out your sleep. Maybe you're sleeping badly, it could be as simple as that. Doing all of these things that [00:12:00] actually will push your chess forward, but that are difficult, that take time. We will get so much less likely, and that means you just keep searching.

You keep searching. Maybe I'm getting to this one opening course, maybe I'm getting to this one video. Maybe I'm getting to this one thing. So you keep that dream alive, but your actions are going completely the wrong direction. And so just to keep that dream alive, you're doing the wrong things.

And that's what I felt was the problem with my poker. Keeping that dream alive, that I might win a huge tournament, it could be a huge payday. Just made me do less things that I actually enjoyed, less of the things that I want to do.

And so that's why it's so important. That's why I have this message so often in my work. Like, guys, it won't be easy. It will be hard. You will do things that you don't love. Sometimes you don't feel like training, but you gotta do it. If you want to improve your game, you gotta do it. Even if you don't feel like it. Even if you look outside, it [00:13:00] feels like, oh, it's sunny.

If you actually want improvement, you need to also train when you think, oh, it would be nice to watch some videos right now. So there are trade offs. And accepting that they are there will help you put in the right work.

And so that's why I took that extreme decision. Because I preferred completely giving up that hope of quick, easy, fun. Everything. Oh, no trade offs, it could be so easy. To instead get myself to do the daily tasks, the things that are actually working. The things that actually improve my life. And actually by doing so, by improving my own business, I also help more people. So this is the route I want to go. That's why I stopped playing poker. And for you, please don't trust anyone who tells you it's easy, it's fun, it's great. It's quick. Just watch this one more video. I'll have the solution for you.

Solution is just: do the work.[00:14:00] 

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