Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses, a Substack for adult improvers. Over the last 2 posts, I looked back on the last 5 years since the pandemic and my entry into the world of chess improvement. Last time, I tried to argue that amateurs need to focus on being less wrong. Today, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about how to do that. Let’s get into it.
Mind The Gap
I don’t know if you can relate, but chess is at times very frustrating to me. I have this annoyingly wide gap between the kind of puzzles I can solve and the quality of the chess that I play. I have often wondered why this should be the case, even after 5 years of dedicated chess improvement. Just last month in a Rapid game, I uncorked the dismaying Ngd7??
White noticed what I had missed, that the c6 pawn was now undefended, allowing the knight to capture it with tempo, forking my Queen and bishop. Ouch. Analyzing the game was simple. Everything was fine until I made this blunder. But simply calling it a blunder is like saying lightning struck or a meteor hit. There’s no reason why it occurred at that time and in that location, just acknowledgment that it did. I have always been a curious person. I have this need to know why. Every chess player has had the experience of moving a piece to only then (and suddenly) realize it was a mistake. Why are we blind before we make the move when it seems so obvious after we make the move?
In pursuit of that answer, I ended up taking lessons from Aiden Rainer of dontmoveuntilyousee.it. From him, I learned the origin of our mistakes. There’s a specific way our brain handles information and makes decisions which can set us up for failure in chess. There are holes in our perception, ingrained biases, and of course, a limited amount of attention that we can dedicate at any one time. Our brains are amazing organs, but they have some real design flaws. On a regular basis, our minds will literally stop paying attention to some things. That can happen when we’re bored, when we’re mentally overwhelmed, or when we feel threatened. When that happens in chess, we’re vulnerable to blunders.
In order to play better chess, we must adapt to and overcome these limitations. Aiden has put together a number of interventions (or treatments if you will) which include: Labeling, using a mantra, addressing the holes in our judgment, and second-order effects. Today we’re going to talk about second-order effects, or as I like to call it: Two Things
Two Things
In his article called The Vacated Square, he shared an email he got from a member named Kamil:
When a piece makes a move then EXACTLY TWO things change in the actual position. That piece is on a square that it wasn’t before and that piece isn’t on the square that it was before. So if these are the two and only two things that changed, then it doesn’t quite make sense to focus only on one of them. It’s like deliberately ignoring 50% of inputs in order to make a decision.
It’s like you wanna cross the street so you stop at the curb and only look to the left if any cars are coming, but don’t look to the right.
Well said. To illustrate this point, let’s look at a position from a game of mine. It’s White to move after Black played the Rook from e8 to h8.
My brain immediately noticed that the bishop on h4 was being threatened. In fact, I had anticipated this move after playing Qe5 and had already committed in my mind to playing Bg5, keeping Black tied up. Noticing what the rook was no longer doing was not on my mind.
The Flaw in Our Thinking
Ask yourself what is easier to recall, your last win or your last loss? We’re wired to notice and respond to potential threats and things that might go wrong. News organizations and media know this, as we preferentially click on negative news stories more than positive ones. We dwell more on negative comments than positive ones. We have a strong bias towards finding threat, even if it’s just a threat to our pride.
In chess terms this means we’re more likely to notice what a move does (the threat) far more than we’ll notice what a move no longer does. Aiden calls this the first order and second order effects. As Kamil said, each move does two things and humans tend to only pay attention to only one of those. We pay attention primarily to what the move does. This has absolutely been the case for me, regardless of whether it’s my move or theirs. When I see a move that just looks amazing, I often only see why it works (the first-order effects) and not why it doesn’t (the second-order effects).
Let’s return to the above position, but with much fewer pieces.
Now we can immediately see what Rh8 does and undoes. It undefended the Queen and attacked the bishop. Why didn’t I see that in the game? Well, partly because there was a pawn in the way. Also I noticed the threat to the bishop first and ignored that the Queen was now undefended. Somehow, the second-order effects just disappeared from view (or at least they did for me). Here’s the game position exactly two moves later (Bg5 a5). White to move and win:
If you can see the Queen is undefended, then you can understand the e6 pawn is pinned to the Queen. As they say in Steps Method, a pinned piece is a bad defender. Since the pawn is pinned, the f5 square is only defended once by the g6 pawn. Pushing f5 becomes the winning move, opening up the Black King’s defense. After f5 gxf5 Bxf5, the g file is open and White is winning.
Yes, this move is hard to see initially, but it is a position I’d be able to solve if I saw it in a tactics book. My attention would be primed to look for tactical targets if I knew it was there. However, such a signal is forbidden in chess. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why I have the gap. Like many others, I too often miss half the information about the position. I’m crossing the road, only checking traffic in one direction.
Pointing Out the Obvious
As you can imagine, that’s not just chess where that happens. In fact, there is robust and surprisingly well-developed research into why mistakes happen in aviation, transportation, factory work, etc.— anything where humans need to maintain our attention over time for proper function and safety. Turns out, humans will inevitably lose focus, and their minds will wander. We’re not built to pay attention forever. Research shows that “When human error happens, the activation level of the brain is lower.” That means that the frontal lobe, the part of our brain associated with attention, suffers from lower blood flow and less activity. Our brains literally stop paying attention to details that seem initially unimportant, otherwise known as the second-order effects. Cue the Invisible Gorilla.
Aiden’s recommendation to combat this very human habit is to counter with another habit, a mantra you say after every move. Similar to a checklist, it’s meant to stimulate your attention to notice what has changed in the position. Some people recommended the “WTF” checklist to help as well. Either one you choose, it must be an ingrained and practiced habit. That’s because when we ask ourselves to remember to remember, we invariably forget.
My training in EM has shown this to me repeatedly. Whenever we are stressed for time or under pressure to perform, our brain will revert back to old habits. We only have so much cognitive capacity, and while under stress our 7 slots of working memory get used up quickly. I am trained to use familiar medications, practiced habits, and simple checklists when trying to save a life. Anything complicated will get tossed aside when I have little time or capacity to think. The same goes for chess. I’ll start out fully intending to use a checklist, only to realize I’d played the last 10+ moves without it.
So until I can fully develop these safety-first habits, I need something that will wake my frontal lobe up while critically not adding to my cognitive load. Fortunately there is something that does exactly that. I can point.
A Simple Process
In the above video, if you fast forward to the last minute, you’ll see two gentlemen in Japan crossing the street. As they do so, they point left and then they point right before crossing the street. I hope the analogy hits for you. If not, let me go further.
In Japan, train operators use a system called Point and Call where they point to anything they’re responsible for paying attention to. It’s an incredibly simple process. If the train operator can’t go until the light is green, then he’ll point to the light and call out “The light is green” before accelerating the train away from the platform. If the attendant’s job is to make sure all the doors are clear of people, then they point to each door and call out “Door is clear”.
What is astounding to me is that this simple habit reduced attention based errors by as much as 85%! That led to a 30% reduction in accidents for the entire Japanese railway system. All it cost them was the habit of pointing and calling. What appears to be going on during the Point and Call is that the body processes the movement and sound, directing attention to within 5 degrees of where the finger is pointing at. This increases blood flow causing the frontal lobe to “wake up” and pay attention to whatever the finger is pointing towards. Somehow, it does this without increasing cognitive load at all. How this works is by simply slowing down the brain just enough to be able to think through what it’s seeing.
“The few seconds it takes to point and call slows down the process just enough to allow us to pay attention to what’s important.”
A (not very) difficult choice
Think about the last time you were trying to calculate a tactic. Sometimes it helps to say to ourselves “If I go there, then they’ll go here…” or something like that. I’m going to bet when you did that there was a finger pointing in the air moving imaginary pieces. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught myself doing that.
Now think back to your last blunder. Did you move too fast (I did) or not think through the consequences of the move? If either one of those was the case, then maybe pointing would help.
What would this habit look like for chess players? Well, it’s not very different from the train operator. First, point to the square the piece was on and then point to the square it is now on. All I need to do is notice one thing that piece was doing on its old square, but is no longer. Then all I need to notice is one thing that piece is now doing on its new square. Once that is done, I can start to think about my move.
I’ve been trying to implement this with puzzles and with games. It feels odd at first, like it’s almost too simple to be effective. But when I don’t do it all my old habits come back and I have that gap again. When I do the practice, I notice a lot more things about the position. And noticing makes all the difference.
Pointing and calling is a discipline of noticing. According Emily P. Freeman, it “takes something that is typically subconscious and makes it conscious.” And noticing is the first job of the writer—or, indeed, anyone who hopes to make sense of the life she finds herself in. Also—and this is a key point—pointing and calling is not about diagnosing, only noticing.
In discernment and decision-making, as in writing, there is usually a temptation to skip too quickly to what things mean rather than simply observing what things are. What are the facts on the ground? If you don’t know the facts, you can’t very well know what they mean. Indeed, deciding too soon what things mean makes it impossible to observe what they are.
I love this quote because when I blunder it’s because I’ve given in to the temptation to move too quickly. What I (and I believe many amateurs) need is a habit that gets me to slow down long enough to notice everything that’s different in the position. For me, it’s not a very difficult decision to use this habit. I cannot promise it will work, but I believe it will. Otherwise I’m likely to keep looking only to the left when I cross the street, only noticing what the piece does.
Thank you for reading (an admittedly long piece). Let me know what you think! I hope you found it helpful. Until next time, good luck with your chess.
Simple and fantastic story, congratulations!!!
The right thinking process is your mantra. 1) Threat assessment: after Ne5 was done, we should have integrated the squares threatened by this knight.
2) Choice of candidate move.
3) Safety test: Is my move safe? Obviously not, since c6 is not protected. Is it annoying if this pawn is captured? Obviously yes, because of a dangerous fork. So my move is not good. My knight must therefore not be moved. So, I still need to improve my opening position: by considering other pieces, even if Ne5 is intrusive and will have to be dealt with later (or not!). This habit of following these steps is complicated when you are a little pushy or too sure of yourself.