Breaking Through The Wall

What it Take to Become A Chess Master, Part 2

Sep 22, 2024

Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses. Today we finish the exploration of What it Takes to Become a Chess Master. As GM Soltis told us, most players hit a wall.

“The vast majority of players who take chess seriously will hit a wall: Your rating may have been steadily rising when it suddenly stops. Some players hit the wall at about 1500 strength, others at 1700, others higher. (…)
Mastering chess takes more. It requires a new set of skills and traits.

In the first post, I asserted that visualization is the first fundamental skill for chess. Once we know how the pieces move the next key is to be able to “see” the moves on the board before they happen. As we conceptualize the board more and more, the moves become “easier” to see farther out. Work on tactical and checkmate patterns starts to pay off. Openings become familiar and we even learn some strategy or endgame technique. Eventually we reach a level of competency where progress becomes harder. One of the reasons is that our opponents become more skilled. They too know the tactical patterns. They too can calculate. Suddenly you need new skills to beat these better opponents. Essentially the game has changed, now it’s a game within a game. Unless we grow, we will remain stuck at this level or even regress. However adults often resist growth, or find it difficult since it means changing. Today’s post is about breaking through that resistance, or “the wall” as GM Soltis called it.

(A quick note. In researching this post, I encountered many great writers who have written on the subject. Today’s post is going to be a little different as I will feature many quotes from them as I find their explanations helpful. I hope you agree.)

Let’s get into it.

The Wall

The first question I have is why do we have a wall at all? Why should our progress stop? While everyone’s brain learns a little differently, there are 3 distinct phases of learning for all people. I’ll let Joshua Foer (author of the book Moonwalking with Einstein) explain it:

In the 1960s, psychologists identified three stages that we pass through in the acquisition of new skills. We start in the “cognitive phase,” during which we’re intellectualizing the task, discovering new strategies to perform better, and making lots of mistakes. We’re consciously focusing on what we’re doing. Then we enter the “associative stage,” when we’re making fewer errors, and gradually getting better. Finally, we arrive at the “autonomous stage,” when we turn on autopilot and move the skill to the back of our proverbial mental filing cabinet and stop paying it conscious attention.

Just recall back to when you learned how to drive. At first everything seemed important, like trying to remember where the turn signal was, or keeping track of how fast you’re going. As you got more used to it, then you could relax a little. Eventually you’re so comfortable driving that you get bored and maybe look at your phone. It’s natural for all of us since thinking is metabolically expensive. Our brains try hard to reduce the cognitive load of any task over time and turn it into a habit.

In respect to becoming an expert, this adaptation will lead to a state the Foer calls the “OK Plateau”. He defines it as:

“the point at which you decide you’re okay with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.”

This autonomous phase is where our brain wants to get. This, however, is Soltis’s wall and the #1 reason most of us never make Master. We stop growing. A good example is typing. All of us deal with computers and type daily, but we likely type at the same speed as we did years ago. Despite repeatedly practicing typing, we’ve stopped growing the skill. In the introduction to The Amateur’s Mind, IM Silman asserted that most amateurs simply play the same game over and over again. He meant we’ve all hit our OK plateau.

The OK plateau provides us with comfort and predictability but – as with anything that feels easy – there is a darker side. Reaching the OK plateau too early can truncate the necessary and desirable difficulties required to excel….
Dr. Victor Brazil, ICENet

So if most of us get stuck in chess at this “OK Plateau”, how do we break through? How do we get back to growth?

Getting Un-Stuck

If the autonomous phase (the mind-turned-off automatic repetition of skills) is the problem then we need to find ways to get back into the cognitive phase. In the cognitive phase we are intentional about what we do, we experiment and try new things. Here’s Foer again telling us how experts do it:

They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.”

Getting out of autonomous repetition and back into cognitive phase starts with focusing on technique. I’ll get to how to do that next, but it is critical here to mention why this idea is so transformative. In the past it was assumed everyone had a natural limit, and upper bound to how good they could be. Many believed that IQ and intelligence levels were fixed and unchangeable. However, Ericsson’s work and that of others showed that there is a way to expand your capabilities at really anything. You just need to fail first.

#1) Deliberately Failing

Let us go back to Joshua Foer to better understand why failure is crucial:

Something experts in all fields tend to do when they’re practicing is to operate outside of their comfort zone and study themselves failing. The best figure skaters in the world spend more of their practice time practicing jumps that they don’t land than lesser figure skaters do. The same is true of musicians. When most musicians sit down to practice, they play the parts of pieces that they’re good at. Of course they do: it’s fun to succeed. But expert musicians tend to focus on the parts that are hard, the parts they haven’t yet mastered. The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.

Another way of saying it: you will only improve by trying and failing, and then trying again. There’s another word for this of course. It’s deliberate practice.

“By deliberately practicing, you’re not merely practicing repetitively — instead, you’re deliberately failing more.” (Elle Kaplan on Medium.com)

Failure is very hard on the ego. Many people will naturally shy away from this strategy. Humans greatly prefer a predicable world because it feels safer. People will avoid risk if allowed. In chess we become attached to our ELO and are reluctant to risk losing rating points. However to progress past “just ok” we need to challenge ourselves and fail. Here’s Ericsson:

Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. … Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

Growth lies just outside our comfort zone. We grow when we play against higher rated players. We grow when we play positions that we’re not used to. We grow when we try to solve very difficult puzzles. We grow when we play those young kids OTB and lose. However, failure isn’t the endpoint but rather just the first step.

#2) Study Your Failures

Learning from mistakes is crucial. When you push yourself to the point of failure, then you have bought yourself the chance to learn why you failed. In his excellent book Pump Up Your Rating, Axel Smith suggested that players analyze their games and make a mistakes list. Noel Studer also recommends learning from your mistakes. So do the guys from the Chess Dojo. So does Ben Johnson and frankly anyone else who cares about improvement. Study your games to see what kind of mistakes you’re making and why. Here’s the mistakes list for my games in August, 2024.

Once you know your top 1-2 areas of need, a focused study plan is really easy to write. In my experience, that is the absolute beauty of a failure based approach. You don’t need to wonder if you should be working on endgames, openings, strategy, or whatever the latest course is. You know exactly why you’re losing games. You are free to ignore (for now) everything else in chess trying to get your attention. You can calmly begin to work on your biggest need.

This is not a small benefit to simply be ignored or disregarded. There is so much competition for our attention these days, and it will only increase. The most valuable thing you have is your time, and what has your attention is where you will spend your time. If you really want to get better at chess, make sure you are focused on only what will bring the greatest improvement to you and shelve everything else. Focused work on your mistakes over time will lead to gains.

#3) Seek Feedback

The last step is using feedback. Humans have a tendency to tell themselves stories about how they are better or worse at a thing than they are. We need accurate feedback to show us how we’re doing. We need to know if we’re making progress or if we’re really working on the right thing. Here’s James Clear on the two ways we can get accurate feedback:

“The first effective feedback system is measurement. The things we measure are the things we improve.” (…)
“The second effective feedback system is coaching. One consistent finding across disciplines is that coaches are often essential for sustaining deliberate practice.”

The first one is easy: Set a specific and measurable goal. For example, my goal right now is USCF 1800 within 3 years. For that to be true I need to get better at calculation based on my mistakes list. So from there I can make a plan to get better at tactics and calculation using hard problems. How will I know? Game accuracy, ELO, tactics rating, Win/Loss… there are tons of options to choose. The key is to decide what you’re working on and measure your progress.

The second one is simple, but can be more expensive: get a coach. Luckily in chess there are a lot of coaches, but even a higher rated player will suffice. You just need someone better than you to look over your games. See if they agree with your analysis and mistakes list. If your experience is like mine, they will probably try to focus you on something fundamental that you’re probably missing often. That’s the signs of the autonomous phase of chess, mindless play where you miss opportunities for better moves. A coach will help focus you on what you need to work on.

One more thing

So there you have it. We can get un-stuck from our OK plateau by deliberately failing, studying those failures, and seeking feedback. This represents a virtuous cycle of fail-learn-try again. However, improvement is neither easy nor immediate. Deliberate practice takes time. That brings us to the last and perhaps most important point. You have to know your “why”. Why should you sacrifice your time for chess? Why does that matter to you? There will always be alternatives that may even seem more fun in the moment. Why do you want to improve?

Learning isn’t just studying something endlessly, but rather it’s forming a relationship with it. The way our brains work may be slightly different from person to person, but one thing is true for all of us according to research. People will not learn anything unless they think it’s meaningful, interesting, or important.

In a seminal NYT article, Dr. Immordino-Yang discusses ideal biological conditions for learning, and the predicament that “it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.” In other words, emotional investment is critical for learning, which is why students are motivated to engage with material that will be tested; their fear of failure drives them to study.

In the cited article, the fear of failure is recognized as a common motivator for teachers and students, but it has a price. If you need the answers to pass the test, then that is often all you care about. Once the test is over, the reason for engaging with the material ends for many students. The chess example would be letting the engine analyze your game instead of doing it yourself first. All you get is the answers, but not the understanding.

The alternative would be to engage your curiosity. There’s a lot going on here in the brain, but if we engage curiosity we’re not looking for answer’s but instead we’re looking to understand. Again from the Learning and the Brain article:

A curious state is one in which you explore and notice, and follow what you’ve noticed… and try to play it out… and question yourself about whether or not you fully understand and appreciate it… Then, come back around where you were before and re-examine what you thought you already knew, potentially with a new understanding of something else that might be related or a new connection.

We need to be clear why we want to excel at chess, why it matters to us. It helps if that reason is a positive, curiosity based one. When that’s true, we don’t need to be perfect. We don’t need to win every game or get every puzzle right. We’re just trying to learn something from every position.

Chess in Small Doses