The Plateau

There's this notion of the rating plateau. This is the idea that your rating improves until at some point you get stuck and stop improving for months or even years. There's a fair amount of discussion about what to do when you get to one of these plateaus.

What I don't like about it is that it seems to assume that improvement is a normal state of affairs, that as long as you're actively playing it's normal to be improving, and going through a period where you don't improve is an aberration, a problem that you overcome and then continue on an upward path to chess mastery.

That has not been my experience. In fact it's almost the exact opposite: periods of improvement are rare and it's normal to go for years with no increase in rating. I think the reason it seems like it's the other way around is because most people get a chess rating (official or online, it doesn't matter) long before they've reached their potential level without serious work.

What I mean by potential level is this: some people are more naturally skilled at chess than others and can continue to improve for a long time by doing nothing but playing a lot of games. Let's say you've got two people who just started playing online chess and their initial online ratings are both 1000. Player A improves for a month or two until he gets to 1200, and then no matter how much he plays he never gets any better. Player B also improves to 1200 after a month or two, but without doing any additional work he keeps going to 1400, then 1600, then 1800. Let's say at that point he too has reached his potential level and they both stop improving.

That's the plateau people describe: when you stop getting better. Both Player A and Player B might be able to get over their plateaus with additional work or study of some kind, but they also might not. This is the problem I have with the notion of the plateau, that it's just a temporary setback. It might not be. If you imagine that the activity we're talking about is not chess but some other skill-related activity such as soccer people reflexively understand this, that some people will reach a relatively low level and then never be able to get any better no matter how they train or try to improve. For some reason with athletics we freely accept that some people will never have the innate balance, reflexes, coordination or whatever to succeed past a low level, while with chess we assume that at least until we get to the elite level it's just a matter of how much work you do, that anyone without cognitive impairment can become a pretty good player.

I'm not convinced that's true. I've seen too many people at a low chess level struggle for years to get better with no success. That doesn't mean that at some point they didn't improve; just about anyone can get better than they were when all they knew was how the pieces moved, for instance. I'm talking about improving to a level where other players would agree that they are good.

Even to the extent that it is true that the only thing keeping all of us from being good players is that we're not working hard enough I still have some issues. The capacity for hard work can be considered a skill in itself, an opinion held by, among others, Garry Kasparov. Some people have it and a lot of people don't, especially if the reward for all that hard work is not something tangible. It might be sufficient motivation to do the hard work to get from a 1000 rating to 1800 if you get a million dollars for it; if the only thing you get is an 1800 rating it might not be.

But back to the discussion about potential level. The other thing that makes constant improvement seem like a normal state of affairs is that let's say Player A, who would have reached a plateau at around a 1200 rating if he did nothing but play, instead starts doing daily tactics exercises in addition to playing games. Because of that, he doesn't stop improving when he gets to 1200. He keeps going. Before he gets to 1400 he hires a coach so he doesn't stop at 1400 either, where let's say hypothetically he would have if he hadn't hired a coach.

If a player does this type of thing repeatedly, adding new exercises and training before he ever reaches a plateau, it would indeed seem normal to constantly improve. It must therefore be quite a shock when eventually they hit a plateau and stop improving, no matter what level they are when it happens. They probably wonder what the heck is going on, and how in the world can you go for a long time without getting better? It's never happened before, so why is it happening now?

I've heard players complain about being at a plateau when their rating hasn't improved for five or six months! Five or six months? That's nothing. That's a hiccup. Wait until you don't improve for five or six years, then tell me how you feel. If you haven't given up the game, that is.

All that happened was that the player reached his potential level with the amount of playing and training he was doing. To get over the plateau he'll have to either add new kinds of training, or do a lot more of what he was already doing. If he hasn't been doing a whole lot this isn't too burdensome, and he should be able to get over the plateau. But if he's already playing lots of games and devoting several hours a day to training already, just to get to the level he's stuck at now, he may not be willing or able to make additional sacrifices to get over the plateau.

If you're spending two hours a day, every day, on chess, can you afford to make it three? Some can, and do. But at the next plateau are you going to make it four? It's just inescapable that at some point you can't give any more. Whether it's a plateau or whatever you choose to call it, at some point that's just how good you are.

Of course it's not just the amount of time you spend. It could be that you're doing the wrong kind of studying, and you're focusing on the wrong thing. If you change your training, you can get better that way. Maybe. That's the problem with study; you never know if it's really helping or not. A few years ago when my online ratings went up a couple hundred points, I didn't know if it was because of the large number of games I was playing, the tactical exercises I was doing, or the time I was spending analyzing my own games. I suspect all three contributed to the improvement, but there's no way to know. If they did work, it's not as if the impact was felt right away; it took literally a couple of years of doing those things before they had any effect.

So, like everybody else I keep plugging away, thinking and hoping that just maybe I haven't quite reached my potential level yet. I probably can't afford to devote more time to chess than I already do, but maybe I haven't yet felt the effects of analyzing my own games and when it finally kicks in my strength will improve by a hundred points. Or maybe I'll find some new training method or exercise that's just exactly what I need and that will help more than what I'm doing now. Or maybe a coach or friend will come up with some insights on my play that I never would have figured out on my own, and that will be the magic ingredient.

But even if it is, I'll still eventually reach a plateau that I can't get over. Everybody does.