Chess

Many people I know grew up playing chess and are proficient at the game. I started as an adult when I started work.

I have noticed myself getting very nervous before a chess game, in a way that has been uncharacteristic of me. It's interesting that this happens. Looking back at my life, the main other times this happens are

• When I was a child, playing a game (Wawayaya) online where there is a level with a big monster,
• The first few times I was doing mock trading online.

The 3 experiences all have me feeling exposed, where I need to perform at the moment but do not have enough time to prepare and be ready. I spent a lot of time preparing for my first chess game, getting lessons from a Grandmaster coach and studying my opponent's game deeply. That was helpful, of course. None of the prep was needed since my opponent blundered around move 5.

Why do I feel such a need to prepare? There is some concept like "internal narrative clarity" here. With mathematics it is easy to say "I will practice and perform at a certain level, and there is a deterministic function mapping from my preparation to if I do well". There is an opponent in a chess game that I am playing against. Unlike a team game, where I can put part of the cognitive load of the win/loss result on them, I need to bear it directly here. The result is that I feel terrible when I lose, since it is a sign that I did not prepare enough, and I don't feel great when I win since I can still see all the improvements I could have made.

The chess engine

Chess is a solved game in many ways. Stockfish is better than any human at playing the game and is cheap to run on my local computer. As a beginner, I find myself often looking to stockfish as gospel and trusting that I need to follow its ideas in every move that I play. However, it is impossible for me to imitate stockfish exactly as a human, and this often brings me into a trap where I pick up only the basic ideas of stockfish and leave massive holes in my game plan.

For most of chess history, people did not play chess like this. It is just another board game, no different from splendor or ticket to ride. In these games, much like in chess, it is possible to learn how to play it well without the engine. The lessons I learn from playing in those games tend to be "what are the types of plans that I should follow". While looking at an engine can tell me where my final right / wrong move is, it does not distill what I see on the board into a plan.

The opening preparation

The opening of a chess game is very studyable. There are only so many good moves people can make, and a little bit of memorization goes along way. These attributes of the opening phase make me want to over-fixate on preparing it well, and it is indeed not hard.

My current method of prep is to use a mix of chessable practice exercise and raw opening explorer. From a starting position, there are only so many types of moves that are considered main line. Memorizing 30 or so lines is enough to cover white and black repertoire to move 5, and people at my level rarely follow the opening tree beyond this point. The only case I know of are specific Sicilian lines where there is an early exchange, which feel not particularly difficult to think through as well.

For my level (around 1000 elo), I am already great at openings. I consistently come out of early opening phase (move 8 or so) with an advantage compared to my opponent, around +1 eval for white and 0 for black. That is an opening success by all accounts. However, with the little amounts of middle and endgames I play, this advantage goes away pretty quickly. Part of what I need to remember here is that chess at my level is very rarely won or lost from the opening, and there is nothing more I can learn that will make myself immediately better from the opening phase.

What should I focus on in chess?

A collection of tips that I would like to leave for myself.

• Playing more games help. There are certain ideas about "what sort of plans are valid in a chess game" that I can only learn from playing.
• Playing humans is better than playing bots, and I should set myself some goal like "play one game of chess a day against a human and don't worry about the rating". Perhaps even setting a goal of "I must lose this many rating points by this date" will be good.
• It helps to have a plan in the endgame and leave myself with enough time.
• For each post-opening phase where I have a positional advantage, there is some sort of plan that works.
• Do more tactical puzzles with any book that I have. They are all pretty good.