How to make chess easy (not what you expect)

@Shone_RL If anyone gets burnt out from a 'tough training session once a week', then serious chess isn't for them.

If a person wins millions at Poker, then they have a good mentality. Being comfortable helped him win, and reminding himself he'd been in much harder situations before and prevailed, helped him get comfortable.

@seb54749014 said in #10:
> Good thing you know better than a GM and can guide us on improvment :P
> We are talking about people who want to improve here, not people who just enjoy sitting on the same rating forever.
> By all means, if you don't want to improve, feel free to ignore his advice and don't train hard.

I don't mean to be disrespectful here but someone being a GM doesn't instantly make them an infallible and perfect teacher in same way someone having a Masters degree and being an university professor doesn't necessarily make them a better teacher than say, a Bachelors degree high school teacher.

I am an improver at many different things, not just limited to Chess and if it's something I can tell you from experience that has done me well is that people just have to find what works for them. I disagree that you should always push yourself and have a "hard" training session at least once a week. Instead you should find the pace at which you can continue to put in the effort to improve. There's no point in pushing yourself if you are not going to persevere through it and realistically how many people actually have the discipline to keep up with it.

@Tuck_Fheory said in #11:
> @Shone_RL If anyone gets burnt out from a 'tough training session once a week', then serious chess isn't for them.
>
> If a person wins millions at Poker, then they have a good mentality. Being comfortable helped him win, and reminding himself he'd been in much harder situations before and prevailed, helped him get comfortable.

Bear in mind the audience for this post consists of many different people, among them both lower-rated and higher-rated improvers and also casual people. You absolutely can get burnt out from a single training session once a week and pushing "hardness" as a concept of improvement is double-edged. Like in all things, you need balance, training shouldn't be so easy that you find it trivial but it also shouldn't be so hard you constantly get headaches over it as I explained above.

I only decided to comment on this post since I often see blog posts from this GM.

Some of their posts are a good read but a lot of them just have me questioning their purpose because they're slightly like if I asked an AI chatbot for logical ideas, you can absolutely agree on the surface level but when you think about it you might actually have a different opinion or even completely reject the idea.

I'm sorry if my tone sounds a bit too negative, some of these days I'll look into how I can make some posts and I'll try to provide something meaningful to the community in my limited experience. Just trying to be constructive here, that is all.

There is a separation between training hard and training to burn out. You can do the 1st without the 2nd, and the 2nd without the 1st. Of course I agree everyone is different, but everyone has to train harder in practice so they find the real games easier, and this was the article's point @Shone_RL

No need to mock the article just because it doesn't delve into deep detail, it still provides very important advice that most players ignore.

Also @Shone_RL is there 1 advice that will fit to everyone? No, yet life coaches, gym experts, nutrition coaches and
lichess bloggers will still share what worked for them, or for most of their students/clients/followers

Thanks for your motivating thoughts, Noel.

@Shone_RL said in #12:
> Some of their posts are a good read but a lot of them just have me questioning their purpose

Well, the purpose is obviously to sell their courses/training/etc. plus some component of truly good will to help people become better at chess, of course.

What I would like to see in that blog post, though, is a concrete example of how that "hard" session "once a week" could look like. Let's say I'm playing one classical game in OTB tournament once a week (which is true), the game typically lasts about 3 hours, give or take. Should I then be playing two 3 hours game in a row once a week online or what?

@Shone_RL I have huge respect for the real-World grind of getting titled in Chess, but I wouldn't dismiss your words over a GM's....In fact, I'd rather have a lesson with a 2000 rated player than a GM,...but not any old 2000 :)

I've never done a minute of training, so my entire chess experience is brutal training!
I see chess a life long hobby, so I'm taking the scenic route
Good day & GG's

Nice post,nice experiences. Had fun reading,will try stuffing lots than my limit from now on.Thanks!And nice dialogue 'Piece of cake '.

Great, all this amateur chess player has to do is train 10 hours a day and a classical game will feel easy, how practical

Moreover I disagree with doing impossibly hard compositions that you mostly dont understand. You are learning and practicing zero patterns. And if you spend an hour per puzzle, you are practicing a Time control that you will never play (even if the game is longer than an hour, you won't be able to go into the tank for a single move that long).