You don't have to be a chess scientist to become a good player

Study less, play more.

The above video by YouTube science channel Veritasium struck me in a very interesting way that reminded me of something about chess.

I don’t really pay attention to American football very much, but I know that Tom Brady is really good at throwing a football. Watching this video, I was struck by how he thinks about throwing a pass, and his understanding of the science behind it. To be clear, (I’m 99.9% positive) Tom Brady does not have a Ph.D in physics. He doesn’t know how to calculate the parabola of a thrown ball. But nevertheless he knows how to throw the ball, and make it go where he wants it to. It’s extremely impressive. His power and accuracy as shown in the above boggles the mind. But the way he discusses it — the grammar of a football player — is quite distinct from the guys at Veritasium, who are scientists. He talks about things in a way that makes it clear that he intuits most of what he knows about throwing a football.

He didn’t do this by studying the physics of the football; he did this by a life’s worth of training his mind and body to play Football. Thousands of practice sessions. Maintaining his fitness through exercise and a good diet. And the results show in the number of Super Bowl titles he’s taken his teams to. He boasts a long career full of many wins.

Tom Brady is not a scientist — he’s a player. He doesn’t consciously think about the physics of a football. He’s just really good at throwing a football. And probably, he didn’t read too many books to get there.

Obviously, I’m not saying that chess players aspiring to become stronger shouldn’t read books; I for one do both of those things. But the meat of anyone’s journey to becoming a stronger player is playing chess all the time, the same way that Tom Brady played Football all the time.

Of course, books can be really helpful; since chess is an intellectual exercise, and players need to peer into positions and take time to apprehend a deeper conception of what is happening at the board, it pays to learn how to think well during a game. But, it appears to me, a lot of chess players tend to mistake thinking during a game as being a sort of academic exercise like when they are studying a chess book. This is just usually not the case; your body has a nervous response system that responds nervously to certain situations on the board. You have a fight or flight reflex telling you whether you should move forward or hold your ground, or even retreat to safer waters. Your mind is constantly struggling to stay focused on the task at hand, and this is exhausting, so it pings your body for things to distract it with — suddenly you’re very aware of someone’s unconscious mouth sounds ten feet away from you. Playing chess is not like reading a chess book.

In order to become a stronger player, there’s an entire psychological and competitive aspect to the game that has to come into play. It’s not enough to have read about what a knight outpost is; you will have to remember this while under the pressure of the game. But in order to actually exploit such a position in a meaningful way, you also need to be aware of all the concrete tactical and temporal elements of the position. If you put that knight on c5, are you hanging a pawn, or worse, a whole piece? Is your opponent making a threat that you’ve long-since forgotten because you were so focused on one square on the left side of the board that you entirely forgot what they were doing on the other side?

A quarterback like Brady has to make a number of decisions in a split second before deciding if, where, and how to fire the ball in another direction and move it forward. Comparably, chess gives us a little bit more time between actions. But, I think for most players, they tend to quickly see whatever possibilities they’ve trained to look for. If they’ve only studied or read about it and not put that knowledge into practice, the move may not occur to them so quickly, or they’ll find it quickly and go for it right away, without the commensurate experience and familiarity that subconsciously informs them of the various pitfalls they need to check for first. In other words, during a chess game, you usually cannot afford to approach the game entirely scientifically and in the realm of the theory; you have to play the game like a competitor.

And if you want to get good, you have to play a lot more than you read. So make sure you keep the balance where it should be, which should be much more heavily on playing than on studying. Studying can bring a new concept into your sight. But playing drives it into your bones.

So, yeah, I guess I’m saying chess is different from football, but maybe not as much as I had consciously thought about until I watched that video on Veritasium.

Cheers.