A huge chess secret revealing to me by accident - not to be pushed around!

@odoaker2015 said in #19:
> Good article (blog). The concept of not primarily responding to threats directly was also taken up by Jeremy Silman in his famous book. In the part about psychology. Are you also making a YouTube video on the subject? That would be great and you could deepen the topic with it. For example, you can give more practical advice on how to train, how to be more aware of your potential in a position. And so on.

Thanks, I think we kind of accumulate bias by learning to respond to threats at first or learning to recapture, but then as we get stronger, we need to revisit those biases and try and eliminate them. As we might do also with fairly unsound openings, or at least only play those unsound openings at quicker time limits, and more solid openings at longer time limits.

I think Alexander Alekhine's quote about chess being the "search for objectivity"

"Chess first of all teaches you to be objective." - Alekhine

is related because he himself also seemed to reduce attacking bias generally of his chess when he overcame the seemingly invincible Capablanca in their world championship match.

As humans, we tend to accumulate biases, and these could be accreted over many years. To have to kind of "unlearn" automatic recaptures or respond often passively to threats, may need a big shake-up, and maybe saying "no" to biases generally helps increase objectivity in general - especially if "yes" before was a result of accumulated bias over many years. To pull of "no" though also requires increasing visualization and calculation capabilities to be able to justify potentially dynamic responses and sacrifices. Calculation skills seem very important here as well to build up for this "no-ness".

Beautiful.

article too unclear

@moonmaker said in #23:
> article too unclear

Okay if you look at the first example where it said:



"Black missed, Nc3+ followed by Qb6+ which picks up the unprotected rook on g1 - try and visualize this! :)"

Do you understand f3 as a "threat" - and I was biased to simply move the knight back. Is that understood? It turns out that perhaps a lot of players would just retreat the knight and not look out for better stuff. This is a kind of "bias". Hope you understand this example at least. Sometimes a "threat" contains not just a weakness of the last move, but also perhaps downsides of the opponent's position being enhanced. The g1 rook which was just an unprotected piece before is now "enhanced" because it is now accessible on the b6-g1 diagonal.

So in other words, it is good to be on the look out for opportunities when the opponent creates a "threat" like f3 which hits the knight. To see positions "objectively" without fear bias means that such opportunities might not be lost as easily.

I know but that is just common sense in chess- i.e. look for checks, captures and threats. That rule applies to any situation- it does not change when there is a threat. Your article is just saying exactly that in different words

I don't mean to offend anyone in this- I think this is a very interesting article about chess psycology - but I think it is stating the obvious

@moonmaker said in #26:
> I don't mean to offend anyone in this- I think this is a very interesting article about chess psycology - but I think it is stating the obvious

I think the idea of checking your mistakes and seeing what biases you had is a useful thing to try and play more objectively. Of course psychology is large part of chess. ‘No’ as an attitude against biases was not obvious to me and seemed to boost some results recently as mentioned.

Also I am saying the very motivation for checking for checks etc or downsides can be increased with the idea of saying no to biases you might have. Being too defensive on threats might be a key negative bias for many players. It is also good what you say to always check for checks etc but I think especially when one is about to go defensive like retreat an attacked knight.

@Toadofsky said in #17:
> It's challenging to offer pragmatic advice everyone can benefit from, but this entry does just that.

Thanks, I really appreciate your comment. I hope maybe people's results can improve from the blog, as they check for similarities in their post-mortem analysis "mistakes" and see if any biases keep recurring - which they can try and say "NO" to in future games and for example, be "less reactive" or in less "auto-recapture mode" but maybe also start to say "NO" to other biases which might be compromising their chess. Cheers.

@Kingscrusher-YouTube said in #27:
> I think the idea of checking your mistakes and seeing what biases you had is a useful thing to try and play more objectively. Of course psychology is large part of chess. ‘No’ as an attitude against biases was not obvious to me and seemed to boost some results recently as mentioned.
>
> Also I am saying the very motivation for checking for checks etc or downsides can be increased with the idea of saying no to biases you might have. Being too defensive on threats might be a key negative bias for many players. It is also good what you say to always check for checks etc but I think especially when one is about to go defensive like retreat an attacked knight.

Yes I agree. But for some this bias already does not exist. When I was taught chess, my coach would always tell me to check for these 'checks, captures and threats' and so it has become instinct for me to do so. But for a lot of people who would intuitively move that knight back, or instinctively take that queen, this is good advice.

"Moonmaker" : Have you ever considered this: "If you think you know everything, you will learn nothing. If you think you know nothing, you will learn everything.". A growth mindset can be improved by sometimes thinking you no nothing to be still open to other ideas or qualifying existing ideas etc. It seems you have just related the article to something else (which is valuable as well) but maybe missed the other more subtle points of the article. The major one was about "bias removal" - and remember Alekhine's quote about chess being the search for objectivity (see earlier in comments, or the main article).

It would be interesting if you did go through your games on longer time control and establish key mistakes and report them back here in the future. I would be interested in any recurring patterns. I bet you that many occurred when you had pieces threatened. I am not sure you are "covered" if you are just believing checking for checks at every turn will reduce this issue. Because that is hard work, and in some cases like Example 1 where f3 was played, it is a bit deeper. So "downsides" gives more reassurance that something exists in the first place. If you know an issue exists in the opponent's position ("downside"), you may calculate more broadly or deeper than you normally would within the constraints of human calculation which should in general prioritise forcing moves which are more likely to actually turn up on the board.

You seem to be biased towards hard-work calculation but this can be exhausting for long, longer-time control games, so that is also a bias you could work on to actually try and do less work in a game but achieve equal or better results. It is good sometimes for example to identify issues intuitively like "unprotected pieces" etc as well. Also chess is often about reverse-engineering patterns - tactical or checkmate patterns, so sometimes "forward-only search" isn't that effective as we aren't computers. But even computers nowadays leverage neural network technology for better evaluations.