trying harder makes you play worse
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[00:00:00] And welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. As always, I am your host, Grandmaster Noël Studer, and I'm trying to make this more consistent again. It's been a while since I did my last podcast episode. Summer happened, illness happened. You might still hear it a little bit in my voice. But we are good.

So now, aiming to do this weekly again. And today, I wanna talk about that sometimes trying harder can make you play worse moves, and I experienced that a lot in my career, because early on, I wanted to prove myself, and I wanted to try as hard as possible. And I had to realize that [00:01:00] this doesn't always work.

And one of the main problems with trying too hard at the board, you might realize this yourself, is that you're getting into time trouble. If you are the type of person that tries to play ideally on every move or get the most out of your current potential on every single move, what basically inevitably happens is that you're running out of time. And so you play a game probably slightly above your level, which is nice, it feels good, but then you're getting into time trouble and you might mess up royally. And for some of us psychologically, this is hard to untangle because we have an excuse.

If you have more perfectionist tendencies, you can tell yourself, "Okay, when I tried really hard, I played well. But then I got into time trouble, and well, in time trouble everything can happen, so I [00:02:00] blundered, and that's fine, you know?"

And I do partly agree with that reasoning because, well, you can't really get too mad at yourself if you make mistakes in time trouble. But what we need to fix is not getting into time trouble anymore.

And there's a single way of playing that has helped me so much in my career, and I definitely think I would've benefited from knowing that way earlier, and I just called it rapid mode.

So originally I had to come up with this idea because of my traumatic brain injury. For those that don't know, I had this brain injury in 2017, I believe. It's a long time ago. And so I had headaches, I had concentration issues, and I would have kind of a maximum amount of concentration for my games.

And so I couldn't focus very, very well for five hours, so I needed to use my limited concentration [00:03:00] smartly.

And the main idea really is to spend not too much energy on moments that aren't as important, so that then I have enough energy in the crucial decisive moment to spend 15 minutes and to be actually properly focusing.

And the execution of it, as the name says, was basically trying to play most of the game as if it would be a rapid game. So I would focus on calculating short, key important lines, playing good enough moves, not perfect ones. And only to really stop and very deeply calculate when I said, "Okay, this is a really, really critical moment."

And something incredible happened. I started realizing that even if I felt pretty good, this way of playing helped me to just perform better in general, and we're talking about classical chess here. [00:04:00] So for the last one and a half years of my career, what I did is basically before every game remind myself, play rapid mode.

And what comes to mind here is, I think I've heard it from sprinting, that sprinters often don't try to go 100%, because if they go 100%, their muscles are so tense that they will maybe get cramps or just not sprint as fast as possible. So if they try to go at 80, 90%, that's where the magic happens. That's where the fastest times can happen.

And there's quite a few benefits outside of me feeling like I played better because you have much less pressure this way. Not every moment is "Oh, I need to get this totally right." And that can help a lot in performance, but also in terms of enjoyment.

And it also helps with analyzing the games because if you clearly know, okay, [00:05:00] this wasn't a crucial moment, then it means let's not ponder over this too much in game analysis. Okay, was that a decent move? Yes, it was. Okay, we're fine with that. So we can also in analysis really focus on what matters the most and brush over the rest of it.

And I just wanna end on why this is so much more important nowadays and for you guys listening than it was even for me.

Because you are further away from perfection, so that kind of attempt of doing it all right is even more futile for you.

Because online content has become so predominant, you've got so many things in your head of what you should do. So actually reducing them to an absolute minimum that you can handle during a game is more important than ever. And last but not least, you often also play shorter classical games.

In the US, there are these 60-minute plus 30 seconds or 45 [00:06:00] minutes plus 30 seconds game. Maybe online as well. There is the, uh, Lichess league with 45 minutes. You might play rapid. So for all of these time controls, the shorter the time controls become, this idea, and rapid mode was just a name for me. But just the idea to really only focus on the moments that matter becomes even more important.

And it's really astonishing to see how many, quote unquote, "time trouble addicts," can use this and not get as much in time trouble anymore. Because at the end of the day, it's not a skill problem to get into time trouble. It's not a skill problem when we have too much pressure on ourselves. It is a expectation problem. It is a problem that we're trying to play better than we currently can.

But there's one last thing I wanna finish on. This is very, very important because I see this advice misapplied sometimes. Some students, when I introduce them to this [00:07:00] play, playing good enough move, they confuse it with playing lazily, or they slowly drift into playing lazily. They look at a certain move and without calculating basically say, "Yeah, that looks good enough. Let's go." And that's going to cause a lot of problems.

So for me, the distinction is this. When you play lazy, you are just trusting your intuition without backing it up with calculation at all. So even in a complex position, you look at a move that you like visually, and you're just like, "Okay, I don't wanna calculate. Let's go." When you play good enough moves, you look at a position, you see a move you like, you calculate the two, three moves that you need to, and you see, okay, this move is fine.

And with that calculation, you decide, okay, this is a good enough, decent way of playing. [00:08:00] I could definitely find something else and look at different things, but this is fine. This keeps the position as it is, and I'll play this move. So it is a conscious decision of still doing the right process, but not doing it as deep and for as many moves as you could.

And once this kind of looking at a move, liking it, seeing two, three moves deep doesn't work anymore, that is the sign for you that you need to invest more time.

And for those that know my thought process of TIPS, right, so threats, ideas, plans, safety, even for good enough moves, we wanna do this. And the only thing that we might leave out is the P, the plans. So we still look for threats, we still look at our own tactical ideas, and then we come up with a move. We still [00:09:00] shortly calculate, okay, there's nothing. We make a safety check. We move.

So try it out and let me know how this goes. This has helped so many students. It has helped me a lot. I hope you will enjoy playing this way also much more and get better results.

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