In business, we’re taught that taking bold risks is often worth it.
You can lose your entire investment, but the upside is nearly unlimited. If you angel invest in 50 startups and one of them becomes a unicorn, you’re massively profitable. The risk is capped (100% loss), but the reward isn’t. That’s what makes high-risk strategies attractive.
But chess doesn’t work like that.
If you try a fancy, speculative move 50 times, even if one of them ends up as a “Brilliant” and gets thousands of likes online, you still only scored 1 point out of 50. The other 49 games? Likely losses.
Now compare that to solid play. No brilliance. No fireworks. Just smart, stable decision-making. Maybe you draw 35 games, win 10, and lose 5. That’s a 30/50 score. Dramatically better than the one-hit-wonder.
The lesson? In chess, the upside is capped.
The best you can do is win the game. You don’t get bonus points for style. A flashy win counts just as much as a simple one.
Worse, going for brilliance when it isn’t justified often just leads to unnecessary losses.
So next time you hear a hero story about someone risking it all and winning big, sacrificing everything to become rich, famous, and happy ever after, remember three things:
- Most of these stories are at least slightly fabricated.
- You never hear about the millions who tried and failed.
- Even if you pull it off in chess, your reward is still capped at 1 point.
That’s not a good trade.
Not even if it works.
1465 to 1565 in 11 days
Here is a cool story to prove my point. Alessia, my lovely wife, has a student that LOVED random sacrifices. The pay-off when it worked was so big, he couldn’t stop himself. What he didn’t fully realize were all the games he lost when the sacrifice did not work.
So Alessia set a simple challenge for this student.
For 1 week, only sacrifice material if you have a concrete follow up that wins back the material or checkmates.
The result?
A new all time high rating. As it worked so well, the student kept going. +100 points in 11 days, another 40 points in 15 more days.
If you feel talked to, just follow that same challenge. For 1 week, stop any tries to play brilliantly and just go for good enough moves.
Only sacrifice material when you see a clear way to win it back.
You can always go back trying to play for brilliancies. But once you see the results of good enough moves, you might not want to.
Keep improving,
GM Noël Studer
PS: This article was initially sent out to my Newsletter list. If you want to get chess improvement advice for free in your inbox, join 17,000+ chess improvers by signing up for Friday Grandmaster Insights here.
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