Chess Improvement
The Life Lesson Blitz Chess Taught Me
2020 was a great year for online chess. With the explosion in the chess world due to The Queen’s Gambit and increasing popularity of online blitz it was a wonder to behold.
However, my online chess awakening occurred in early 2019 when the YouTube algorithm made the grave mistake of showing me chess videos and analysis from the legendary Ben Finegold. His dry humor and wit during lectures were the highlight of my day and led me down the road of watching numerous videos from many other chess channels streamers like Agadmator, Chessbrah, Eric Rosen, Hikaru Nakamura well past midnight.
Often after watching some spectacular games I’d be so bewildered as the moves evolved the game into an art form. And as great art does, it became easy to see it imitate patterns in everyday life. Over time, I began to see a principle in blitz chess that felt so resourceful, I had to take it off the chessboard.
This thought took root after seeing the same theme being played out in blitz for the thousandth time; this time transpiring with Hikaru Nakamura. He was in trouble, objectively a worse position closing in on an endgame. If this were a classical game this would be the point where the commentators say “there is no way for X to lose this except to blunder”.
But sadly, time is another limiting factor and Hikaru’s opponent in this case had below 20 seconds to Hikaru’s 1+ minutes with no time increment. In the end, Nakamura won on time but, hey, his opponent had a better position, right?
This transpires in numerous chess games and despite I and numerous players knowing this, we still end up making the mistake of wasting time on a move that will mean nothing if we don’t have more time to calculate other continuations down the line.
Now I’m not encouraging anyone to mindlessly blitz out moves because that just leads to blunders. But the nugget I got from that game was what Hikaru said after. It was to the effect of “relentlessly trying to find the best move will never help you win at blitz, finding the best incrementally better idea quickly does”.
As the top-rated blitz player in the world, I think that strategy carries a lot of weight. Unlike computers, we mere mortals can’t calculate long engine lines within milliseconds but if we can find a good idea quickly, why not run with it and see where the road takes you. It might not be exactly where you want but it’s more likely you’ll have enough time to make up for it when you get there.
Something about that stream resonated with me the night I watched it. It was sometime late on a Thursday night after debugging a MATLAB script for hours the day before. At the time I had this all-consuming desire to make my code as robust as possible: numerous error codes for input mistakes, faster processing times, any improvement I could think of, but at what cost?
I had other equally important projects I wanted to accomplish that day but as with earlier in the week, I didn’t even begin them. All because I wanted to write the ‘perfect code’.
Sadly, the modifications to the code weren’t of any benefit because my additional efforts increased the execution time for the script and created an error I noticed after submitting the code. This self-defeat in addition to the procrastination from earlier sent me into this mounting existential fury.
This and numerous other occurrences have made me question the value of putting in that extra work to the detriment of other areas in my life. Sometimes after staying up late to: finish a school project, study for an exam, expand a report for an employer, buy the best product on Amazon, etc., it would result in mediocre to poor results.
Shouldn’t one put in their all to achieve the best? Doesn’t exceptionality involve sacrifice? Well, the answer to that is yes but not in the way I thought.
That night I realized that the issue I was facing was not my lack of hard work but rather my lack of assigning time to it. Counterintuitively, work expands to the time you allocate to it. If you don’t limit the time you spend on a task you can end up spending an insufferable amount of time only to come to a marginally better or even worse outcome.
The truth is that even if you had infinite time, you would never be able to complete a task to perfection. Just like in blitz you need to understand that you will likely never find that computer line. Think for too long and you’ll still lose in the long term.
Similarly, with tasks, the answer isn’t always working longer or finding the best possible solution on Earth. Sometimes the solution is to look at a clock, pace yourself and move on. That could mean taking a break, switching to another task, or simply accepting the progress you’ve made for the day.
On a broader basis, this also applies to things that aren’t pending. Long-term goals you could have for yourself in areas like fitness, playing an instrument, or making YouTube videos. You may not be aware of it as intensely but time does keep moving. Unlike blitz, the game isn’t immediate, pending, or cathartic, it just slowly passes by.
Aside from helping you be more productive on active goals, time limits also keep you more accountable for aspirational ones too. You may not even get it right at first like me with these essays which are meant to release biweekly but are a week off as at publishing. In the end, I did complete this essay and in the future, I will complete more.
I’d like to think I’d have realized all this without chess but the fact that this principle became so obvious to me through chess undeniably cemented in my mind that the game can portray broad truths and principles. I hope in some small way I’ve helped share this one with you.
Picture credits:
- Image by Charis Tsevis from flickr.com
- Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixbay.com
- Image by Eden, Janine and Jim from flickr.com
