Playing with good focus is key to improving your chess.
But I’ve realized that this advice often drives students into a dangerous trap: perfectionism. They wait for the “perfect” moment to play, and as a result, it becomes harder and harder to get themselves to actually play games.
When this happens, what was supposed to help you play games with high quality turns into a hurdle that stops you from having learning moments altogether.
Learning > Winning
Here is what I believe is the main misunderstanding. Playing games with good focus is NOT just to get better results.
Sure, it is nice if you perform better. And especially if you travel, take time off work, and invest finances into an OTB tournament, it would be sad to throw away the opportunity by playing with bad focus.
But that’s not the main reason I want you to play with good focus.
Playing games is your best opportunity to learn. It forces you to put yourself under pressure, think hard, and make tough decisions. This will inevitably lead to mistakes, and you can learn a massive amount from those (right) mistakes.
When you don’t focus properly, all of that learning opportunity is wasted. In the long term, it is not the short-term results, but the amount of things you learn from every single game that actually matters.
Not Playing Is Just Another Excuse
Inside the SCIS community, I see some students playing less because they feel they don’t have “ideal” focus. So, they go solve tactics or train the last third instead.
Occasionally, that can be a smart solution. If you are running on 3 hours of sleep and can’t think straight, you’d likely just blunder a piece and tilt.
But let me be brutally honest: all too often, this is just an excuse to avoid doing the hard thing**.** As an adult with a job, maybe a family, and other hobbies, it is completely natural that you won’t always have the A+ focus that professional athletes have. If you refuse to play every time your focus is only a “B+”, two things happen:
- You get more anxious when playing, because you play so few games.
- You lose your competitive edge. When you play an OTB tournament and you can’t just pull out because you feel a little tired, you go into the game already feeling like you don’t stand a chance.
Here is how you can prioritize focus without using it as an excuse to stop playing.
How to Fix It: The 1/3 Rule in Practice
Plan your week ahead of time. Look at the time slots that are most likely to give you the best focus this week. Make sure you use the 1/3 Rule and spend at least 33% of your total study time playing and analyzing.
Once you have planned your playing slots, do not change them on short notice except for extreme circumstances.
When your brain tries to convince you to change your playing slot for something easier (like the third third with Endgame/Opening/Strategy), ask yourself two questions:
- Is it guaranteed that I can’t learn anything from a game if I play right now?
- Is this exhaustion a once-in-a-month scenario?
If you can honestly answer “yes” to both, postpone your playing session. But immediately look into your calendar and swap a future tactics or studying session with this playing session.
Again, this is not about having “perfect” focus. It is about utilizing the best possible focus you’ll have in a given week.
Fixing the Real Problem (Sleep, Food, Stress)
If you find yourself skipping playing sessions more frequently than once or twice a month, you likely have a deeper focus issue. You need to go deep and figure out what is draining your energy.
- Are you consistently sleeping less than 7 hours?
- Are you training at the wrong time (like late in the evening after a grueling 10-hour workday)?
- Are you eating heavy, unhealthy meals before training?
If you truly have a focus issue, everything in your life will benefit from resolving it. For your chess, this might be the only thing that matters right now. So instead of learning some more opening theory or studying deep strategic ideas, take the time to remove this lifestyle issue slowly.
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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