Real things require real difficulty. Fake stuff never does. This doesn’t mean fake work is effortless. Instead, pretend activity always has just enough difficulty to allow you to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing something that matters. But, conveniently, it avoids any of the truly difficult things the real situation would create. It requires effort, but always in a way that feels doable and safe. Real things have risk. They have the possibility of failure. They have frustration. They force you to confront the possibility that maybe you just aren’t good enough. Fake activity is great for making yourself feel better, but lousy for actual results. (From https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thing/)
I just spent a month studying my ass off. I will get to the hard-hitting lesson I learned since finishing this project, but first...
Deliberate Chess Study in July
- Solving tactics in apps like chess.com and lichess
- Working through the sample positions and calculating the exercises in Yusupov book 2
- Working through Ray Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises
- Serious online games (rapid or classical) + time spent analyzing
- Opening repertoire memorization
- OTB games
- Browsing chess content on reddit, twitter, or discord
- Reading introductions to chess books
- Listening to chess podcasts
- Preparing positions on a board
- Writing about chess or creating/updating chess improvement spreadsheets
The Numbers
- 75.1 hours total (4505 minutes)
- 145 minutes per day average (161 min/day if counting only the days I studied)
- 269 minutes (4h29min) studied on the longest day
- 28 days of at least some study
- 3 days of zero studying
- 16 days of studying over 3 hours
- 3 days of studying over 4 hours
- 18.1 hours was my highest five-day stretch
That's a lot of chess training for someone that works ~40 hours a week. It also helped me see how much of my "chess time" is wasted: how often I'm scrolling through /r/chess or twitter, how often I'm passively listening to GMs commentating a super tournament, how often I'm writing in my blog or editing a chess improvement spreadsheet. This past month has made me realize more clearly what little these activities accomplish if you are wanting to get better. I'm lucky to have several hours a day at work that I can choose how to spend. Fifteen minutes spent here and there on something besides calculating, solving, and memorizing opening moves was fifteen minutes not spent on my goal. Many times I'd find myself pausing my stopwatch (yes, I clocked every second of July) when I got sidetracked and noticed I wasn't actively solving chess exercises. I'd immediately feel like I needed to get back to the studying. Which is the goal right? Well...
I just spent two and a half hours a day for a month on hard chess work. Again, that's not even including the hour or two most days that I'm passively consuming chess content. And I've burnt myself out. I've known this for a while but I'll state it here. I've done more than enough improvement from studying. I need to seek improvement from playing. There has been a contradiction in my chess life for a while now and it has become more evident than ever over this past month:
I love chess and I never play it.
I am over-studied and under-practiced.
I'm the engineering grad student that can't assemble an IKEA couch. I'm the 10-year med student that can't take someone's temperature. I'm that guy who has read "How to Fly a Plane" books for ten years and then gets behind a yoke and can't get the propeller going. I could point out all the controls in the cockpit, explain the gauges, and describe what went wrong during a crash-landing but I'm not getting off the ground. Likewise, if given a difficult pawn weakness chapter in the Yusupov book and four hours to solve all twelve problems, I might understand most of them and even get a passing mark on the problem set. Yet in a full-game situation, I just don't have the same abilities. I have the book-smarts but not the street-smarts. I can fully concentrate for thirty minutes on a blindfold chess puzzle but then I turn around and blunder a mate-in-one TWICE in one game.
Okay, I'm being hard on myself but that's the point. Ben Finegold recently put out a video that practically deserves its own blog-post but here's my favorite quote from it:
"If you're 1300 at chess and 1300 at blundering and then you get to 2000 in chess and 1300 at blundering....you're still 1300. The blunders are more important."
Stated in the most matter-of-fact Finegoldian way, You can know everything about chess but if you blunder, all that knowledge is meaningless. I'm not "2000 in chess knowledge" but I might be, say, 1800 in chess knowledge. However, when it comes to practical chess skill, I'm considerably lower than you'd think if you looked at my time spent studying and training.
I've worked on the theory long enough. I need to get more experience. And that's my next project! No studying, just playing. I need to find my rating plateaus. It's the opposite problem of so many chess players I read about online. I'm not addicted to blitz. I can easily stop from playing several games in a row. I don't get tilted. I spend hours upon hours doing the stuff most casual players find boring. Ya know, like solving chess problems for two and a half hours every day for a month ;). Yes, some might say that studying too much is a good problem to have but it's taken up too much of my time.
Time to play!
