Observation Without Judgement

Some would call that four years of wasted study, but there are many lessons you take from the university experience that go beyond the course material. And oddly enough, the passion I developed for rocks during my degree not only made me incredibly interesting to talk to at parties, but also meant I inadvertently knew a lot about soil which came in handy when I got into farming.

Another extraneous lesson I took from my degree that ended up being useful, was the importance of observation without conclusion.

My geology dissertation project saw me walking around the alps on the border of France and Italy for three months near the ski town of Val d'Isere. It was summer and the place was deserted. We were the sole occupants of a 400-room hotel. It was a bit eerie and it formed me in more ways than I realised back then. During my days I would hike up into the mountains and start walking from outcrop to outcrop observing. I would measure the angle of the planes within the rocks, write down the minerals I saw in the rocks and I would even taste the rocks to detect salt - but also because I was just really into rocks.

Over the months, I mapped out several square kilometres and took notes. My brain desperately wanted to start reconstructing the history of the area from the data I had gathered. My mind wanted to imagine how the tectonic plates had collided, folding and bending the layers of rock beneath my feet. But I had to stop it from doing any of that. Because as soon as an idea of how or why something might have happened enters your mind, you put yourself at risk of seeing evidence of something that doesn’t exist. You start to see things that confirm your idea. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By simply observing however, you open your mind to the possibility of other causes of the same physical phenomenon. But by considering the how first, you risk not finding the truth, but the truth you seek.

Alright. Enough about rocks. Let’s talk about chess. Wait? Where are you going?

This skill of non-judgmentally observing is one I have found very useful in many facets of my life, so it made sense to me to at least consider its application in chess. The idea came to me whilst I was out cycling (side-note: if you want to work exercise into your chess routine, I can recommend moving to the arse-end of nowhere and selling your car). Anyway, there I was, peddling away, thinking about how I could apply this concept to chess. And I wondered if the consideration of any singular move in chess could be seen as a conclusion.

As I learned all those years ago, concluding before observing can be fatal, you risk simply seeing what you want to see. And so in chess, if you first look at moves, if you first even consider them, you leave your mind at risk of finding ways to justify that very move. And from there you could start to see evidence that simply doesn’t exist in your evaluation of the position.

And so what I am trying to do in my chess, is to release from my mind the consideration of candidate moves and instead simply describe the position. I am trying to see the chess board as an observer, not as a judge.

I had until this point been falling into an odd trap, one of taking the moves my mind intuitively considered and only then looking and evaluating within the context of those moves. I have found from the analysis of my own games that the mere knowledge of what moves I wanted to play or had considered playing, was causing me to see things that simply didn’t exist, it was my mind making my move a character and the position a story in which it could thrive. But like an author, I was artificially creating the conditions in which my character fit. Because in chess, the character can change - there are (with the exception of some special types of zugzwang) many moves from which we can pick, many characters which we can insert into our story, but the world in which those potential character arcs take place is fixed in chess. The world is the current position and it is static. It cannot be changed and moulded to fit a character.

And so I am trying now to simply observe. In a practical sense, what that means is to describe to myself what I see. I am only describing. As if I was looking at a rock. The rock has a reddish appearance, it is made up of grains from 1-2 millimetres in size, it is not salty.

You probably shouldn’t taste your chess pieces, but you could try and describe the position to yourself in the most mundane and simple way. I have three pawns on the queenside. My opponent has two pawns on the queenside. I have two bishops. My opponent has two knights. My king is in the middle of the board. My opponent’s king is castled. There is an open c-file. These are observations.

Let’s talk about another descriptive piece of language: “I have more space”. Is this an observation or a conclusion? To me it is a conclusion. We can eventually say we have more space, but we might start at a more fundamental level. We might start by saying “I have a pawn in my opponent's half of the board. My opponent’s pawns are all on their starting squares.” From there it is not unreasonable to conclude that you have more space, but by starting at a more fundamental level we are less likely to draw conclusions that we want to be true in order to justify a move. We are less likely to add our own bias to the statement. For example, if our instinct is to first avoid a piece trade, our minds might point immediately to the fact that we have more space to justify our initial desired move. But by observing and describing all of the factors in the position first, we might conclude that we do not in fact have a space advantage. Or even if we do, we may have given ourselves the opportunity to observe and see other factors in the position which are more relevant - factors we would not have seen if we did not first see, but only judged.

Now I know there are some practical considerations here, we cannot do this every move. When I previously tried to implement a thinking process change like this, the results were painful. I tried to consciously ask myself two questions every time my opponent moved, and before each of my own moves, namely: “What does the move do?” and “What does the move no longer do?”. This left me in horrendous time trouble. But I didn’t mind that. The purpose was to first make this a conscious process to avoid just straight up hanging pieces. And I do still try to ask myself this every move in classical games - I am quicker at answering them and I can afford the seconds it takes in a classical game. But the initial idea was to train my mind in the hopes it would one day become a subconscious process, and to an extent I think it has.

With that in mind, I have a few practical tips if you chose to try and apply this. Firstly, when should you attempt to non-judgmentally describe the features of a position? Because the answer shouldn’t be on every move.

One idea, one I have practised, and this must be attributed to JJ Lang of the Chessfeels Podcast, is to use your opponent’s time. JJ talked in one episode about how you should best use your opponent’s clock time, and what they said blew my mind. Co-host Julia had the same reaction to the advice as I did because like me, she was also spending her opponent’s clock time attempting to predict her opponent’s move and then calculating her best response. JJ explained in the episode that this is a waste of time unless you think your opponent’s best moves are forcing. But if there are many options for your opponent, then spending time guessing and calculating a range of moves which are unlikely to come up is essentially a waste. It’s a simple point, but one that overhauled a major part of the way I think and play in my games. JJ explains that instead of playing ‘guess the opponent’s move’, your time is better spent considering the position as a whole.

And so it is on my opponent's clock time that I am trying to fully take in and observe the position. I just keep talking to myself and saying what I see, not what I think. It takes discipline. I want to not only say: “I have the bishop pair, my opponent does not”, but also immediately start looking at ways to open the position, because that is what Jeremy Silman told me to do. But I am trying to be disciplined in my approach. I am trying to stop my stream of consciousness in the observation phase (“I have the bishop pair”) and cut myself off before I start drawing conclusions from that observation (“I need to open the position”). I am trying to describe everything I see first and simply sit with those thoughts and observations for a moment, just see them and not think about what they mean.

The second instance in which I attempt to make the descriptive observations is on my own turn after my opponent has moved a pawn, because then the fundamental nature of the position has changed and I feel like it is worth re-orienting myself to the new features of the position.

So that’s it basically. It’s like holding a vase and not seeing a vase, but seeing a hollow container, which is blue, has a flat base and a flower in it. Having observed all that, you may conclude it is a vase and then, if you are anything like me, you’ll blunder, drop it on the floor and the fact that it was blue, had a flat base and a flower in it, will be utterly meaningless.

Hi you are reading this article a fair bit after it was published. I'm Ono (the author) appearing from the future to tell you that I do chess coaching now. You can read about that here.

You can also book a free 60-minute lesson with me.

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