What it Takes to Become a Chess Master

It started out as a book review and quickly become so much more...

Sep 02, 2024

Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses. This week I’m writing what I had originally intended to simply be a book review. GM Andrew Soltis wrote a book call What it Takes to Become a Chess Master in 2012. He apparently was a prolific writer, he had a chess column for both the NY Post and Chess Life, and an accomplished chess player. I’ve read a few of his books and feel he’s underrated as a chess writer even though I’d agree there are better individual books on some of the subjects he writes on. Still, he takes on topics that other writers have not and this is one such book. I read it with obvious self interest, but once I started down the rabbit hole… it went very deep. I found myself ranging from Perpetual Chess to Moonwalking with Einstein to Outliers and finally to my own education as a doctor. Let’s get into it.

(WARNING: This is a long piece, that I will break up into two posts. For the impatient reader’s sake I put a TLDR summary at the very bottom.)

First, the book

This entire post first began as a book review. I read GM Soltis’ book for some clues as what would be required for an improver to achieve the NM title. He wastes no time whatsoever, getting right to it in the first sentences of the Introduction.

“Only a tiny fraction of people who play chess become masters. In fact, only two percent of the people who take chess seriously make master. Why?
Or to put it personally: You take chess seriously. You read and reread books and magazines. (…) But it doesn’t seem to help you get further, to master. Why? (…)
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 this book I’ve identified nine of the attributes that are most important to making master. Some of these may be familiar to you. Others will be new.”

Those 9 things are:

What Matters Most
Habits
Little Tactics
More
Sense
Winnability
Easier
Comp
Knowing

Each of these represent an idea that Soltis expands upon in a chapter. The ideas are straight forward. For example “What matters most” is that a Chess Master knows what they want out of a position. In other words, they know where they want to steer the game towards. In “Habits” he writes that a master “always looks for targets” noting that “Targets = Initiative”.

His writing style is like reading a chess column with prose at the beginning and multiple games to highlight his point following. Each chapter has a similar structure, with puzzles at the end to reinforce the lesson from the chapter. Overall I found the examples useful if a little beyond me (obviously).

However, by about 3-4 chapters in I began to have a question. GM Soltis was doing a great job of describing the profile of what Master players do and why these things are important. However, he wasn’t describing how they do it. For Soltis, the how was outside of the scope of his 208 page book (to be fair he mentions studying Master games). I was left somewhat disappointed but also intrigued. It’s an interesting question to ask how an adult becomes an expert in anything. That question became an itch in my mind because of my own education as a physician.

Educated Gestalt

I graduated in 2005 from residency and have been practicing medicine ever since. During my time as a resident I met an attending physician who I swore was part Jedi. “Tony Nap” or Dr. Anthony Napolitano from Connecticut was so fast, so intuitive, and so skilled that I remember being in awe of him. He just knew what the right thing was to do in every situation, no matter how crazy. He in my mind is the example I use of what an expert physician looks like.

Now after 20 years I am proud to say I am that guy most days. Every time I walk into a room, within 15 seconds - 2 minutes I know what the issue is, what the treatment is, and (more importantly) whom I am dealing with. It’s not perfect, but over my residency and subsequent years of practice I’ve seen enough patients and their disease patterns to know what to do in almost every situation. I don’t think it so much as feel it. This reminds me of the 60 minutes interview with Magnus Carlsen where he said that essentially he "just knows” what the right thing to do is and often doesn’t have to think.

At my hospital now we have residents, or doctors in training. We’re trying to foster that same expertise with Emergency Medicine in them by having them follow a well defined path. One part is didactics to learn the “theory” of Emergency Medicine. The other part is the “play”, seeing and treating patients with a “coach” or more experienced physician helping them learn from each interaction.

The fundamental skill they’re learning is how to assess a patient. Everything in medicine is based off the assessment. No matter how much book knowledge you have in your head, without a good assessment you’re just guessing what condition the patient might have. I always have to smile a bit when I tell the residents to go slow at first when they assess a patient so they can go fast later.

What I believe we’re doing is we’re trying to educate both their brain and their gut. We’re trying to give them an expertise or educated gestalt. This is a state where both their “gut” feeling (or intuition) and their brain are able to help make complex decisions in the face of uncertainty. Intuition gets educated by repeated assessments of patients. The combination of intense study and practice over 3-4 years results in expertise in Emergency Medicine.

Now there’s no program like a residency for chess (yet), so how can someone achieve expertise in chess on their own? Or as GM Soltis might say, more personally how can you become an expert?

10,000 Hours

Medicine, chess, poker, and many other disciplines require people to make complex, time-based decisions with incomplete information. Achieving expertise has been the subject of intense research. Some years ago, author Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers which became famous for the assertion that 10,000 hours of practice was needed to become an expert in anything. That’s a lot of time, but it was based on research by a man named Anders Ericsson whose study of violin players showed that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice led to expertise. Gladwell took this research and ran with it in Outliers, leading to the popular belief that practice time alone was all that was required to master anything. To be clear subsequent research has shown this is not the case, but the idea has stuck in popular culture leading to memes like this one.

There was even a man, Dan McLaughlin, who put his entire life on hold to try and become an expert golfer. His stated plan was to simply spend the 10,000 hours practicing golf to get there. He made it through 4018 hours and unofficially ended his pursuit in April 2015, getting to a 2 handicap at his peak. Interviewed later he made this prescient observation:

“There is a direct correlation between how much time you put in and the results you see in your golf game. But it’s not just the hours; you have to have focused hours. You have to work on something specific with a goal each time you show up. The same is true in business or any other venture.”

So if it’s not just training time that leads to expertise, what is it?

DiSSSing Chess

Let’s turn to another writer to understand our answer. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes that the first step towards expertise is to focus on fundamentals.

“No matter how advanced they become, experts never lose sight of the fundamentals. In many ways, they are advanced for that very reason: they understand the fundamentals better than anyone else.”

No matter the discipline or area of study, there’s a set of fundamental skills or information needed to become competent. To become an expert, these fundamentals must be the subject of intense focus and practice. You might imagine that for chess it’s tactics or checkmating patterns. While I agree these are important, everyone is studying tactics and most are not achieving expertise. As GM Soltis noted, most players don’t get there no matter how hard they work on tactics or how many books they read. So it may be heresy, but I wonder if tactics really are the fundamental thing we need to focus on to achieve expertise? If not tactics, then what is it?

This is the sort of question that Tim Ferris has asked repeatedly. He published a book called The 4 hour Chef in which he used a process to achieve expertise in multiple areas (he has been able to learn over five languages, Chinese kickboxing, cooking, tango, and swimming). That process is called DiSSS

The steps are:

Deconstruction - breaking down the goal into small blocks
Selection - choosing the 20% of blocks that will give you 80% of the results
Sequencing - creating a logical sequence to learn or develop the skill
Stakes - making the goal meaningful

(For more on this process I encourage you to hear it from Tim Ferris himself. )

The idea is simple. Take the most important or fundamental skill or knowledge, break it down into a manageable sequence, and hold yourself accountable by setting meaningful stakes. While this approach seems simple, it’s been my experience in chess that few of us do this (or at least I didn’t). We mostly just launch ourselves at chess with zeal until we get tired. It’s not our fault, we don’t know what we don’t know. Still, it might help more of us reach expertise or mastery if we did.

So what would be the small blocks to work on? What is the fundamental unit(s) or fundamental skill for chess? Enter Perpetual Chess.

Don’t Move Until You See It

Recently for Episode 392, Ben Johnson interviews Aiden Rayner who has created a company call dontmoveuntilyousee.it (I have no stakes in the company). It’s the by-product of Aiden essentially using the DiSSS process (almost unintentionally) to find the one fundamental thing that could help him progress with chess. He stumbled across blindfold chess when he saw a video of Fabiano Caruana saying that visualization is the most important thing in chess.

“Visualization is probably the most important thing in chess, because mistakes and blunders, if we strip them down to their bare essence, this is where they come from.”
Fabiano Caruana

Let’s stop and consider that for a second. Visualization is the essential skill, the one skill that enables a player to apply their knowledge of chess. It’s also the skill that, when it fails, leads to blunders and mistakes. Since most games are won or lost by mistakes, then is it fair to say that most games are won or lost by visualization?

What’s going on here? We’ve all made blunders where we forgot about a knight or a bishop, or didn’t see that our piece could just be captured. According to Aiden it’s normal for our brains to get overwhelmed with details while calculating. We have typically 7 +/- 2 channels for working memory at any time. Anything that demands our attention or occupies our mind will use those channels. When working memory is used up, our brain defaults to System 1 thinking and makes glaring, predictable errors. In other words, we blunder.

With chess, our minds will naturally reach the limit of our working memory. But research has shown that if we can train our minds to better conceptualize (chunk information into pieces) what’s happening on a chess board, we’re going to make fewer mistakes. This is his company’s assertion and reason for existing (again, no financial relationship). There are many other resources for visualization training but the point is made. If our brain’s ability to process information is the hold up, then training to better handle that information is the answer.

So is visualization just something we’re just supposed to achieve on our own, by accident? In my experience the approach of most trainers is to drill tactics, hoping that working on one thing (tactics) will lead to improvement in the other (visualization). Is that really how it works, like Karate Kid painting the fence? In my experience, no.

Looking Back

This is my Chess.com Rapid rating. I started my coaching in 2021 which led to 150-200 point gain in just over a year (same for Lichess Classical rating). However, the circled part where I went from 1250 to 1500 on my own. I began by working with Steps Method 1 and 2 books. What really did it for me was Steps 2 Thinking Ahead. It was a game changer for me. This is a book dedicated entirely to “blindfold exercises” or specifically visualization. More than anything I’ve ever worked on, after finishing that workbook suddenly I could “see” deeper. I could see the moves before they were played. That skill along with the tactical work was worth 250 points for me.

What happened after that is I stopped the Thinking Ahead books (there’s one for Step 3), and went back to tactics alone. I was following the conventional wisdom that tactics, tactics, tactics are the way to get better. Since then however, I’ve struggled and regressed. My rating dropped nearly 200 points on Lichess. I was becoming frustrated and wondered if this was just the fate of 50+ year old chess players. And then this happened…

Taking my own medicine

Aiden Rayner’s interview was in July 23rd of this year. By the beginning of August I had begun some basic visualization training. I’ve done a little nearly every day since then. My coach suggested (and I bought) Cognitive Chess which also trains visualization. That’s not the only change I’ve made to be honest, but it is the biggest one. I’ve been working to slow down and find more active moves in each game which has often led to better positions. Still I cannot help but notice that when I returned to intentional visualization training I got better. That’s 100 points in one month. This is the highest rating I’ve had all year. I also earned my highest rated win on Lichess ever.

I have come to believe that visualization (or conceptualization as Aiden referred to it) is the fundamental skill for chess. Like assessment in medicine, everything depends on that first skill. No matter how many books or courses you take, unless you work on this skill, you will not be able to apply them in a game. You need to have the ability to “see” how things might change on the board without ever actually moving a piece. Having the clear concept of a chess board and the placement of pieces in your head allows that tactical and strategic work to bear fruit. There’s so much more required to achieve mastery, but without visualization no significant progress will ever be made. Many GM’s don’t emphasize this work in their lessons because it was something that they naturally developed. The people who made it past this first challenge are the ones who could visualize from early on. Everyone else has to work at it.

More to come

Take this as one man’s story. Visualization training for me as an adult improver has enabled greater success. I believe that it will very likely work for you too, especially if you came to chess later in life. It’s just my opinion, but I truly believe that visualization is the fundamental skill in chess that enables us to apply what we know.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your patience for a long post. I will finish with a second post about what else I found about achieving mastery later in September. There’s a lot more to discuss. I’d love to hear your thoughts. To be continued…

TLDR

What started out as a book review became a personal journey to better understand why so few people actually achieve master in chess. GM Soltis said that most chess players hit a wall and stop progressing. Essentially what got us here will not get us there. We need new skills.

This led me to wonder about why so many people fail despite so many hours being spent. My own education as a doctor told me that often there is one key skill that enables success, that most experts are simply practicing advanced fundamentals. I wondered what would that be for chess.

Listening to the interview with Aiden Rayner on Perpetual Chess reminded me how much visualization training had done for my own chess. Step 2 Thinking Ahead worked on visualization and was worth 150-250 rating points for me. I put the training to work again this month and gained 100 ELO points. Because of my experience, I believe now that visualization training is the fundamental skill in chess. However, that skill is often neglected or left to chance which may be why so few players ever make it to expert or master level.