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Last week, I wrote a piece about taking less risk and playing good enough moves. With limited upside (maximum 1 point per game), excessive risk taking simply doesn’t pay off.
A fair follow-up question I sometimes get when I talk about good enough moves is:
“But are we not supposed to make mistakes to get better? Isn’t playing a game about learning, not just the result?”.
Absolutely. Today, I want to make a point about why playing good enough moves not only leads to better results, but also better mistakes.
Two Types Of Mistakes
One of the biggest problems of adult improvers is that they aren’t as ready to make mistakes as Kids are. That leads to more anxiety during games, less learning, and less progress.
So, I’m a big encourager of mistakes. So much so, that I wrote a full piece on mistakes and how they are the secret weapon to chess mastery.
However, we need a little more nuance here to understand my claim. There are two types of mistakes.
- Good mistakes → When you follow a proper process, make a move that suits your play level and learn something from it.
- Bad mistakes → Often blunders that seem like they don’t make any sense. Sacrificing material while trying to go for a brilliancy fits this bracket. Very often, you look back at such a move and find yourself guessing: “What the hell did I think when making this move?”.
The goal, for better results but especially more learning, is to cut down on the bad mistakes, and allow yourself to do more good mistakes.
The Main Difference
The key difference is that with good mistakes, you can look back and say you did play according to your rating and thus learn something new that will help you get stronger.
With bad mistakes, you simply say “duh, why am I so stupid?”, figure you’d have to see this next time and thus remain at the same level, just a little more frustrated.
If you imagine the level of each move on a graph, and you are rated 1800, here is how this would look in both scenarios:
The problem is that bad mistakes are often so obvious and big that we just lose the game after them. This robs us of all the learning possibilities that would come in the rest of the game.
How To Avoid Bad Mistakes
The good news is that avoiding those bad mistakes is no mystery. And it comes with the side effect of having more good mistakes.
That’s what happened with a student of mine. After a lot of work on the basics, he recently wrote to me that his games don’t feel the same anymore.
“Nobody really blunders, so I’m not sure if Tactics really matter all that much.”
Was his thought. But that’s the wrong takeaway.
Once both sides avoid these bad mistakes, that’s when the game of chess gets really beautiful and fun. You might lose games and not fully be aware where you lost them. Every time you look at such a game, you learn something new. And get a tiny bit better.
So here is the main takeaway from today’s newsletter:
By avoiding unnecessary, bad mistakes, you allow yourself to make more good mistakes.
That’s what simple chess with good enough moves, without any fancy combos or potential double exclamation mark moves, does for you.
Here is to more good mistakes,
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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