How do I get better? That’s the question students ask more often than any other question. And then wait with bated breath, expecting me to reveal the secret move or idea that will guarantee good results. They know there’s a simple secret that will win game after game for them.

And my answer always disappoints.

Because there is no simple opening, or set of moves, that will win. My advice is best summed up in the title of this post: “Don’t get comfortable.”

As I look back on my early days, I let comfort get in the way of my improvement often, which is probably the main reason I didn’t advance any farther than I have. I got comfortable playing the Colle, playing the Stonewall Attack, and that limited my experience in other positions. I got comfortable playing the Grand Prix, which again limited the kind of positions I knew how to play. I got comfortable playing Bronstein’s Caro-Kann.

And all of these “comfort zones” were little more than prisons. Oh, some were quite comfortable (my lifetime 70% score with the GP, for example) I have to admit. But they denied me other experiences, of equal or greater value to me, and kept my knowledge of chess narrow.

I came to the idea of variety late in life (odd, I know, for a man whose chess idol was David Bronstein, but there it is, nonetheless). I got there when I was enlisted to coach a HS team. There were players of many stripes and temperments, and I began badly, because I couldn’t explain much outside of the narrow chess neighborhood I’d grown up in.

So I expanded my horizons. I went to tournaments with the resolution to play a completely different game every round, to never repeat myself.

And whole new vistas opened to me. More importantly, what I learned from these new positions I found could be brought back into the chessic “ghetto” that I’d grown up in, and enrich it as well (such as when I undertook a winning Queen-side attack from a Stonewall Dutch, something I would never have considered before).

After about a year of pain, I found I was getting better with every game, to the point where I was even able to win club tournaments that I would have finished well down in before.

I could blame it on opening study. Opening study is cheap and easy, and you can get seduced by some early fast wins, and you settle in. But that’s the actual problem, not the study itself. Especially as a developing player, once you get comfortable with an opening, with a set of positions, your growth stops. You simply begin to repeat yourself in game after game.

Far from being a welcome condition, this feeling of comfort should be a danger signal. It means it’s time to switch to a radically different set of openings, to completely unfamiliar positions, and begin to explore them.

That is the real road to improvement.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 9:39 am and is filed under Chess Instruction, General Chess. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.