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David's Chess Journey - Installment 60

Training and Lesson Reflections

Training Reflections

Here was this week's plan:

Goal of the WeekStick to the plan. Nothing more, nothing less. Reward: 1 hour extra chess study on Saturday's in the next training plan.
15/1/2025Play 1 game. Try playing as simple as possible. Can I give a nice check? capture something? Make a strong threat? If no, develop a piece or improve a piece's position.
16/1/2025Warm up With Hanging Pieces on Lichess (10')
16/1/2025Step Method 2 Tactics Exercises (45min)
16/1/2025Watch one attacking Games on ChessMood. If after going through the exercises anything is still completely unclear, mention it here and we go through it together.
17/1/2025Warm up With Hanging Pieces on Lichess (10min)
17/1/2025Play 1 game. Try playing as simple as possible. Can I give a nice check? capture something? Make a strong threat? If no, develop a piece or improve a piece's position. When finished with the game, analyse it. Take a break. Then a second game with the same process.
17/01/2025Watch one attacking Games on ChessMood. If after going through the exercises anything is still completely unclear, mention it here and we go through it together.
18/1/2025Warm up With Hanging Pieces on Lichess (10min)
18/1/2025The Hard Day --> Step Method 3 (45')
18/1/2025Focus in the Hard Day 8+? You can do this as an extra. If Focus was below 8, no extra :-) Play 1 game. Try playing as simple as possible. Can I give a nice check? capture something? Make a strong threat? If no, develop a piece or improve a piece's position. When finished with the game, analyse it. Take a break. Then a second game with the same process.
19/1/2025Warm up With Hanging Pieces on Lichess (10min)
19/01/2025Play 1 game. Try playing as simple as possible. Can I give a nice check? capture something? Make a strong threat? If no, develop a piece or improve a piece's position. When finished with the game, analyse it. Take a break. Then a second game with the same process.
19/01/2025Checkmates in 2 (30')
20/1/2025Chess Free Day
21/1/2025Warm up With Hanging Pieces on Lichess (10min)
21/1/2025ChessMood Tactic Ninja (30min)
21/1/2025One Puzzle Streak
21/1/2025The Weekly Review (15-30')
22/1/2025Lesson
22/1/2025Puzzle Streak Continuation (if you didn't finish yesterday)

I was not able to give myself the focus score in order to get the extra games on Saturday. My focus was strong, but it seemed self-serving to give myself an 8 when I rarely do so. 7 is typically the highest rating that I give myself and I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what the objective difference from one number to the next means. More to learn on that for sure.

I finally was able to get 100% on hanging pieces, which was a victory for me. Asking the question: "Is there a move from my opponent that prevents my desired move from working?" was a huge help. If I would have asked that question more carefully in my games, my results would have been much better. The results of my games this week were not what I wanted, but I do believe that (absent a few mistakes that I should have prevented), my play continues to improve and I'm trusting the process more and more.

I finished Chop Wood, Carry Water this week and there are three lessons that really impacted me from the book:

  • Surrender the results and trust in the process. Like many, I tend to focus on results to the exclusion of the process. So, this was a good reminder to surrender the results (that I really can't control) and focus on the process (the part of the journey that I can control.
  • The long-term impact of inches. The story is a fictional account of a person who goes to a training camp to become an archer. The journey is 10 years long and the student begins the journey with a lot of excitement to shoot a lot of arrows. Instead, they just practice the stance for several months. This is super boring for the student and he complains to his teacher. The teacher has him pick up a bow and has him shoot. He its the target. He then adjusts his stance by an inch and has him shoot. The arrow doesn't even come close to hitting the target. He then asks if the student knows what makes the difference between people who do very well and people who don't. After some failed responses, the teacher responds with - "inches." The point is that small changes, compounded over time, have the power to make huge changes in our lives (and chess). This really struck me and reminded me of my old professor's saying: "The secret to being excellent is being average every day."
  • The power of discouragement. There was a really interesting story where a witch was retiring and decided to sell all of the tools of her trade. There were lots of flashy tools like anger, pride, etc. All the bad things you would list. People came and, for whatever reason, bought all of these flashy tools. Toward the end of the day, there were just a couple of items left. One of the people who came to the sale noticed this worn out tool at the bottom of a pile and thought he could get a good deal on it, so he asked the witch how much she wanted for the worn out, ugly tool. The witch grabbed the tool, told him it was not for sale, and asked him to leave. On her death bed, the witch called her niece into the room and gave her the tool so she could carry on with the family trade. She gave her the old tool and the niece was not impressed. She complained that the witch sold all of her other fancy tools and only left her this worn out, ugly tool. The witch told her that this tool was the most powerful tool that she had by far and it was all that the niece really needed. The tool was discouragement. She told her niece that if she can discourage people, she doesn't need to do anything else destructive. That will be all that is needed. And the story goes, that niece grew to be the most powerful and destructive witch in the land. I have found this to be true in my life. If I am discouraged, everything loses color, loses meaning, loses purpose. This is also true in chess, being aware of discouragement and fighting it head on with truth, meaning and purpose has been crucial for my journey.

Lesson Reflections

Today's lesson was about reinforcing the focus on making my play more concrete. The theory is that if you make the game more concrete, it narrows the options and helps remove variables. In other words, making my chess more concrete is all out simplifying my chess. Noël's observation is that 95% of my mistakes are concrete in nature. His encouragement was to turn on my logical brain when I play, pushing emotions out as far as possible so that I can control my instincts and objectively calculating various moves.

We clicked through several of my games to illustrate and drive home the point and have another week of training planned to make some more progress.

As a final note, we did talk about adding some more nuance to the different focus scores and here was what Noël came up with:

0-5=very distracted, titled, not feeling good at all
6-7=Average focus for your current abilities
8-9=Felt really fresh, focused on what matters, process was great!
10=In no way shape or form could I focus better than this

Until the next installment!