It took me 5 years to learn this one thing

Is it better to be right or not wrong?

Jun 04, 2025

Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses. Last time I talked about my 5-year experience as an adult improver. Today, I want to tell you the thing it took me 5 years to learn. Of all the strategies and tactics, of all the nuggets, I think this one thing is the simplest yet most unifying idea I’ve come across. I believe this is the most important thing for adults to keep in mind when playing or training chess. That one thing is this: In critical moments, it’s more important to not be wrong than it is to be right. Let’s get into it.

My One Thing

As you may already know, I practice as an emergency physician. I don’t always know what the patient has, but it’s my job to try to identify which of my patients has a medical emergency. You’d think it’d be easy, but it isn’t as easy as we’d like. I’ve learned humility the hard way, but it’s something all physicians go through. When you start out, you’re scared because you know you don’t know anything. By the end of your training, you think you know it all. By the end of your first shift as a fully fledged doctor, you’re back to being scared.

In fact, it takes nearly 5 years after completion of training to become a “mature” physician capable of making good decisions consistently. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it took me 5 years of chess improvement to learn the same thing that I did in medicine. That lesson is simple. When facing uncertainty, it is more important to not be wrong than it is to be right.

(Black to move: Is Re8 safe? (answers at the end))

Trying to Be Right

What has always confused me about chess (in comparison to the training I got as a physician) is the hyper-focus on being right or accurate. The entire chess improvement ecosystem sets us up for it. We solve tactics only from our perspective, where many of them ask you to find the winning move for your side. We learn openings by focusing on drilling variations where we track our accuracy. After every game, the computer gives us an accuracy score that we can obsess over. There are so many things urging us to try and be right in our decision-making over the board. Seeing our opponent’s threats or plans is completely left out!

Mistakes in chess games are often fatal. It’s been said that if you want to win against an amateur, simply play a move that gives them a choice. When faced with a decision, amateurs are just as likely to pick the wrong move as they are to pick the right one. When we make a mistake in chess, we hand our opponent a permanent advantage (unless they kindly give it back).

You might say this is obvious, and I would agree. But how much do we take it into account? Tactics trainers only train us to find the win. We try to learn openings by drilling moves repeatedly, trying to get it right. We watch content hoping we can “crush” our opponents, giving us interesting lines that are barely useful. We focus on our moves and try to play “correctly”. Put me down on record as saying playing to be “right” is a major reason adults don’t improve much.

(White to move and save the game.)

Critical Decisions

The science of decision-making is fascinating to study. For the newly initiated, I’d recommend the book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. She’s a PhD and a former professional poker player. She tells her story about learning to play poker. She was consistently losing money by playing “correctly” according to the theory. Her fortunes turned when she learned to ask a simple question: “What do they know that I don’t?” She kept her judgment open that she might be wrong and made herself consider what information her opponent might have that she didn’t. Only after making herself stop and look could she see what she had been blind to before. After that, she started winning consistently.

This tracks very closely with my own experience as a physician. It is the nature of medicine that doctors sometimes get fooled and make the incorrect diagnosis. Pattern recognition in medicine is only so good. If I try to be correct in my diagnosis, even now as an expert, I’ll only be “right” about 80-85% of the time. Count up the number of patients I see each day, and that’s a lot of mistakes. We all are trained to ask ourselves, “What if I’m wrong?” Only then can we find the information we didn’t initially see.

In his recent book Think Like a Super GM, Mickey Adams showed positions to players of various levels. What really is fascinating is that the top players didn’t really spend much time looking for moves. Instead, they spent a lot of time asking themselves, “Why doesn’t this move work?” They went searching for information they may have initially missed, trying to see if their opponent had a resource or a forcing move.

In chess, critical decisions are ones where the difference between the best move and the second-best move is very large. Getting critical decisions wrong is catastrophic. This is the important thing to remember: when facing critical decisions, what makes someone an expert or professional is consistently considering you might be wrong. In critical decisions, it’s far more important to not be wrong than it is to be right.

(Black to move: Is Nd4 safe?)

Be Less Wrong

In the book Zugzwang Method, author Daniel Munoz wrote a memorable quote: “For best play, the first thing you have to do is not play worse.” I love that line, but it’s not just him. Ben Finegold famously said that your ELO depends on your worst moves. In chess, our mistakes count for so much more than our successes.

I’ve tried for 5 years to play accurately, only to run up against my own limitations. When I try to play for the win, it doesn’t always go well. All my cognitive biases kick in and I only consider why a move is good. Every time I just try to play solid moves, it feels like chess is much easier. I can more often see my opponent’s threats. This is the nature of being an amateur. You just don’t know what you don’t know. I am good at tactics, but I am not yet good at endgames or positional analysis. I don’t always see the opportunities in front of me. I wonder if this describes you as well. If that’s true, then maybe we should train to be less wrong instead of training to be right. When facing decisions we need to first find the losing moves.

I hope you agree that in chess (and in many other things) it is better to not be wrong than it is to be right. In fact, it’s my opinion that this is the only strategy adult improvers need to have: Be less wrong. We don’t need to get the latest course, or that next book, or work on raising our ceiling. We need to make sure we manage the basic, simple things. Not dropping pieces consistently will get you to 1400 in my opinion. Don’t try to play winning moves. Rather just play the best move you can find that doesn’t lose. Keeping everything defended and waiting for your opponent to make a mistake is a very solid strategy for adults. Trust me, amateurs (like me) will eventually make a mistake.

So how do we train ourselves to do this? How do we work on being less wrong? Honestly, I wasn’t sure. Almost everything in chess teaches us to be more right. I went looking and didn’t find much. So I did something about it. I took lessons from Aiden Rayner, creator of Dontmoveuntilyousee.it and coach for adult improvers. Aiden didn’t coach me on chess; he coached me on decision-making. Over the next few posts, I’m going to share with you what I learned. Much of what he teaches helps players to be less wrong. I hope you get as much out of it as I did. See you then.

Chess in Small Doses