Episode 108 - What I changed my mind on recently
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Grandmaster Noël Studer. And today, I wanna talk about something that I've recently changed my mind on. So these past three weeks, I've been focusing on showing the difference between knowledge and skills. I've been building this metaphor.

I've been building this analogy on the hike where if you go hiking, your body is the skills that you bring and all the tools that you can easily buy from somewhere are the knowledge.[00:01:00] 

And I hope that I drive the point home well that you gotta focus on your skills, and most of the time forget a little bit about the knowledge But today I wanna share where I took this a little bit too far, because very often if you get driven in some sort of extreme, well, it's not as balanced anymore.

So I wanna share that

But first, before we get to chess, I wanna share a fun story of my padel adventure that really illustrates this well. And yes, this matters for chess improvement

So just like in chess, many padel players focus too much on knowledge and equipment. They buy fancy rackets. They only play with the perfect [00:02:00] balls. They have the latest grips and sprays. They wanna do the exact shots the professional players are doing on TV. And I'm very aware of this issue, and I'm really trying hard to go the opposite direction.

I just bought a beginner racket to start. I then once upgraded it. I play with most balls, and I focus on my own skills. For me, there is kind of this clear rule for myself. If I make a mistake, especially an unforced error, it's me. It's not the material. It's not the knowledge. It's me. It's a skill issue

So I've been playing with the same racket, same setup for, I would say, six months now, and last week I played a match, and I had a slight same problem as I had previously. My backhand volleys weren't great, and my overheads weren't great. If you do play tennis or padel, you know what I'm [00:03:00] talking about. And the main problem, or one of the main problem with these shots were that I was somehow not stable enough.

Somehow I felt like the racket wasn't super stable in my my hand, but I was convinced that this is a me problem, right? I just need to figure this out better

but then something very funny happened. I played against someone who tested their own padel rackets, and he was very proud of creating those prototypes, and we agreed to change racket. He said, "Hey, do you wanna try it out?" I was like, "Yeah, sure. That sounds like fun." So he would take my racket, and I would take his.

And I felt, oh, this feels good in my hands, and he takes my racket in the hand and just looks at me and screams at me, "What are you doing? You, you can't play with such a racket." Uh, I was, like, a little bit confused, but it turns out that I basically didn't [00:04:00] have a grip on the racket. They come with, this pre-made grip, but it was very slippery, especially because I'm sweating a lot when I play padel.

So he was basically saying, "Well, if you have this, you can't fix the racket in your hand. It's going to slip, and then obviously you'll, you make errors And there is a very simple fix to that. And I was, like, laughing at myself so much because I even have these so-called overgrips at home.

They cost, like, two bucks or even less per piece, and I just was too lazy, or frankly, I just didn't want to use that excuse. I was always so focused on my own skills, and I was like, "Yeah, I don't need that, right? It doesn't make a difference on my level." Well, turns out it does make a lot of difference that you're able to hold your racket properly in padel.

So that was a not even five-minute and $2 fix that I completely ignored just because I was so obsessed that it's only the [00:05:00] skills that matter. So lesson learned

So naturally, I was thinking about my own chess teaching, and I saw this kind of same problem a little bit. Because what happened is that from when I came into chess teaching, right, I started in 2021,, I just saw that so many people were pushing knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, and mostly opening knowledge.

And this got me so triggered, and it's really not what matters the most. And so my stance always become- became more like, "Just don't do it. You know,, don't listen to them. Only focus on your skills." And I realized that it was too extreme, because there are occasions when you have a very clear leak in fundamental knowledge, and it can cost you a lot.

Just like me having a racket that slips out of my hand creates a lot of unforced errors. [00:06:00] And the problem here really is that amateurs have a hard time understanding what this fundamental knowledge is, right? For a reason, you are an amateur and not a professional or a coach And if you knew what the fundamental knowledge is, right?

, What the fix is, the fix can be quite quick with knowledge specifically, right? Skills take a lot of time to hone, to learn, to improve. But knowledge can be quicker, and that can be a problem because it's tempting. But it can also be nice because if you have a good coach, right? Who can just adjust this.

Like imagine six months ago, coach, I had some lessons, would've looked at me and said, "What are you doing with your racket?" Right? "It slips out of your hand. Let me check the grip." And they would've checked the grip. It would've been a five-minute fix, right? And in chess it is very similar But the problem, as I mentioned, is that as amateurs, as, you know, [00:07:00] learning players, you don't know what that knowledge is, and if you don't have a good one-on-one private coach, it's hard for somebody to completely, look at your situation and just figure out, okay, that's the knowledge that you're missing

And that's even for me, like I consider myself a very good learner and I have experience from chess coaching. But when I look at other things that I'm learning, even there it's difficult. Like even with the help of AI and all online coaches and videos and so on, it's hard for an amateur of a new skill to know exactly what are the basics.

Because, well, if we knew what they are, we probably wouldn't be amateurs anymore or we wouldn't be, you know, novices to that skill anymore

So this is what I had in mind, and that's what I want to change about my chess teaching a little bit. Because I wanna [00:08:00] be able to provide you guys not only with the, "Hey, this doesn't matter, focus on skills," but to be able to say, "Here is the minimum viable knowledge in different areas for different strength."

So you, without having an one-on-one coach, can go and compare your knowledge with what is the minimum viable knowledge and kind of understand for yourself, do I lack some fundamentals, or is what I'm lacking really the skills, right? The idea is that if you're, let's say, below 1,000 and there are very, very few things, right?

For example, knowing how to develop your pieces and not moving a piece twice in the opening is a general, , such a rule. And then just mostly not hanging pieces and very, very basic, like pin, fork, and so on. So once you know these things but you still make mistakes in those things during the game, then it's not a knowledge issue, then it's a skill issue[00:09:00] 

And by the way, for players below 1200, that does exist in the form of Beginner Chess Mastery. This is a course I did exactly with that in mind because most beginner courses are too big in my opinion. They share too much knowledge. So this is kind of the minimum knowledge that you want to have, and then you can focus on honing this knowledge into skills.

But I wanna do it for the full zero to 2000, , level, right, step by step. And I also wanna include openings because, well, you might know by now I'm a big critic of opening courses. But when they are done right, when we keep them super simple, when, , I can just tell you, "Hey, here is the absolute minimum that you want to know in terms of opening on this level," it can give you that reassurance of like, oh, okay, it's not the knowledge.

Or you know, you might have a huge leak and you're like, oh my God, yeah. I mean, that whole, somehow I've just missed that I should have developed my pieces and not a- [00:10:00] attack from the get-go, right? That can happen, that you have a leak, and then you can fix it this way

Because my bigger realization in a way was that the better and quicker I can help you solve your knowledge issue or, you know, really assure you that it's not a knowledge issue, the more you can actually spend on the things that truly matter, and you can, with a clear conscience and better focus, do the things that improve your skills.

So it's not like I'm suddenly changing to, bring out 50-hour opening courses and, you know, just,, join the dark side, so to speak. , But I wanna be able to provide what is the minimum of knowledge for different skill levels, different rating levels, different areas of chess, endgame, openings, strategy So [00:11:00] that then you can fix these leaks quicker and then focus on the skills

Now, that will take a while until I've built all of that, but until then, kind of the, the way you can think about it is if you feel like you're having a knowledge issue, can you get somewhere a very minimal amount of knowledge and see, okay, am I lacking in the absolute fundamentals, right? Or is it that I would know what I should do, for example, pin or, you know, not hang pieces and so on, but somehow there is a problem of bringing that into the game.

So if you know what you should do, but you're not bringing it into the game, it's very, very, very likely that this is a skill issue, not a knowledge issue[00:12:00] 

And that's kind of the framework that you can work with. Is there anything of the fundamentals that I lack? If the answer is no, okay, let's focus on skills. And in the meantime, I will work on what this minimal viable knowledge is for different rating ranges, slowly share it via content, and then also make products about it so that once and for all, I can not only say, "Don't do X, Y, Z," but I can say, "This is the minimum.

Go get it. Go learn it. Now focus on skills again." Really excited for that. If you have any ideas or questions, always feel free to reach out

And if you're in this below 1200 chess.com Rapid rating range, then make sure to check out Beginner Chess [00:13:00] Mastery if that's what you feel you lack, because this really focuses on the knowledge that you need to know, and then it also shows you how you can transform that knowledge into skills. See you in the next one.

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