Episode 101 - You Don't Need To Calculate Everything
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. As always, I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, your host. And let's talk about how to calculate less but play better moves. Because that's one of the things that I see with so many students, readers, and viewers, is that you have that feeling of having to calculate everything. But that's not how chess works, and even grandmasters can't calculate everything.

So I recently had a lesson with a one-on-one student that brought this even stronger to light for me. We had a position where I asked [00:01:00] him, why can Black not play knight to F6? And after roughly 10 seconds, he basically saw everything that he needed to see because there was a tactic for White winning a pawn. But because one way Black would actually lose a full exchange, and the other way it's, quote-unquote, "only losing a pawn," he got confused and thought for two, three, four more minutes.

Was like, "Hmm, no, I don't know why it doesn't work." What happened there is he saw a line for Black to continue, but kind of lost track of what he was trying to do, because this is the idea is it's a real game. You are looking at a move and you see that it loses a pawn. Now, if you have moves that don't lose a pawn, you can just exclude that. You don't need to calculate on.

And this is a simple example, but I see so often, be it in real chess training or below my videos if I ask people, "Hey, what [00:02:00] did you calculate?" In my Simplified Chess Improvement System community, with students, like everywhere where I get in contact with adult improvers, I see that same mistake in different facets. And I believe it also comes from watching people like Hikaru that seem to see everything on the board.

But even for us grandmasters, we can't see every single thing. So basically, what you want to do is remind yourself that you're playing a practical game, human against human. And what you need to do is to, as quickly as possible, be able to say, "Hey, is this move decent for what I'm trying to achieve?"

So in a equal-ish looking position, whenever you see that a move that you're considering for yourself is losing material, if it's not for some super strong attack or a continuous kind of a thing that you need to calculate, you can [00:03:00] discard that line and look at only the lines that don't lose material.

And for your opponent, this is the same thing. If you're seeing a move and you're calculating a move that your opponent will play that would lose material for them or that would be going into a very nice position for you, you don't need to go down that line anymore. You're kind of like, "Okay, I'm super happy with that line. Let me think about the things my opponent could do that are actually making me unhappy." That's what you have to calculate.

But a lot of people spend time on lines to try to see everything, to completely understand every position, to evaluate correctly. No, you can cut it short if you can evaluate it already.

But attention here. If you misapply this and cut short when you have to continue to calculate... Let's say you sacrifice a piece and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I like this position." There is no "I like this position" when you sacrifice a piece. Usually it's does it work? Yes or no? You need to [00:04:00] differentiate between positions you can cut short.

So let's say as if in this example, you make a move, you lose a pawn. You don't need to understand how bad it is. Is it completely lost? Is it lost? Is it very bad? At this point, there is no way this is good, so you can cut it. But when you sacrifice a piece, the span of things, it could be completely winning to completely lost. So there you can't cut short. You need to decide, calculate, and see what it actually is.

A few ways to think about this would be, let's say you find an absolute minimum for you that is already good. Stop calculating. You find an absolute minimum for the opponent that is already bad for you. Well, don't play that move. Consider another move. And I wrote down three questions that you can ask yourself during your game to get you in this frame of thinking.

Question number one is: does my opponent have an easy way I dislike? this is aimed to quickly discard an [00:05:00] option. Question number two is: do I have a minimum that is better than the initial position, or alternatives? So here are these two things that I already mentioned.

When you see that minimum, you don't consider that specific line from your opponent. You wanna see other lines where you don't achieve that minimum, so you need to calculate deeper. And then practically speaking, it also matters if you're completely lost, right? So here's the question. Am I lost in all other scenarios?

Or the other question could be, another version of that question could be, do I have a choice? That is aimed to take risks in hopeless positions. So instead of looking at a very bad position, just say, "I don't like this move. I don't like this move. I don't like this move." Yeah, you're in a bad position.

Probably you don't like any position. You can ask yourself, am I lost in all other scenarios? And if you are, you can take a little bit more of a gamble. Or you can say, "Well, I sacrifice a piece. I'm not sure about the outcome, but I am completely lost in [00:06:00] all other scenarios, so even not being sure is already better than everything else.

So the question is really what is a practically good position based on where I am right now and what I'm seeing, and not just do I see everything and evaluate every position perfectly? That's way too overwhelming. And I hope by having listened to this podcast and trying to implement, you will both feel that chess can become a little bit less intense because you can calculate less, but you should focus on the calculations that absolutely need to be calculated.

And that you can also play quicker, especially if you get into time trouble. It might be because you always want to calculate everything, know everything, understand everything. So cut yourself short when it doesn't have practical value anymore. We're not in a math lab. We're not in a science paper.

You don't need to write out everything perfectly. This is very practical. So when a [00:07:00] move is not a problem anymore from the opponent, stop calculating it.

And if you want to see those principles in actions with four positions, I highly recommend checking out the YouTube video I did about this.

It's titled Stop Trying To Calculate Everything, and it will be linked in the podcast description. So you can go through these four positions and really clearly understand what I mean by when can you cut short, when can you evaluate based on just what you understand right now. Hope you enjoyed it.

See you next week.

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