The Reason People Don't Get Better At Chess According to Ben Finegold

the reason people don't get better at chess is twofold one is stop being so like you know hard to chew one is they don't have a good side of the board and they make bad moves that they know they're bad but they don't know they're bad when they play them it's not like they weaken their king and i say you weakened your king and they're like what that's not what's happening they hang a rock and their opponent plays queenie five check and takes a rook and they're like what ah but they just never stop doing it okay a good example well first of all i want to do a caps because i'm really mad at how juboff played this game they probably played 99. i'll give you a funny example of what i'm talking about delicious he played 87.5 and white played 96.4 all right okay this is a well-known position in the wing gambit the people who play the wing gambit play bishop b2 or knight f3 here in the 1980 it's either three four or five i can't remember i want to say 83 but i i could be wrong shirazi had white against jack peters jack peters is an i am you've never heard of california you probably should be a gm but he's older than me that's possible my industry is alive but anyway shirazi played this and then jack peters played that and shirazi resigned because he hung a rook now shirazi who's an im he hangs a rook very infrequently in fact that's the only example i know it's a funny example because it's early low rated players just hang everything every game and they're like i never get better and that's because when your opponent has a winning move you just never see it you're not thinking about your opponents what you're thinking about your own so when your king is exposed that has to be ingrained in whatever brain you have and your rook's on an open diagonal and then they intersect here the answer is pi and whenever you you blunder and miss a tactic the only way to get better at chess is to remember that tactic not do it anymore not blunder anymore and do that tactic to somebody else and most people who are between 500 and 1500 their whole life they don't do that they make the same blunder every game another thing they do is they play crazy on purpose because they would like to win by playing crazy there's some kind of adrenaline rush i sack two pieces and i won they prefer that to i wanna i wanna draw an ending because my opponent got bored and wanted to go eat and i just like winning i don't really care how i do it so there's two mistakes that weaker players make one is they make the same tactical mistake over and over again by accident and they also purposely give their pieces away because they have compensation i guess so when karen shows her game the strategy and the opening knowledge and who has a slight advantage will not matter none of that matters all of your chess coaches teach you things that don't matter that's all they do they're like look at this you understand this strategy now and you're like what what strategy and you got i mean this is irrelevant for you guys you guys hang your queen every move that doesn't matter how you play and at the lower levels there's just lots of blundering and i remember if you think i'm mean and that i'm making fun of you and so forth lawrence trent we were talking about teaching once because he wanted more students and he said when you're under 2200 don't you just need to do tactical puzzles until you're 2200. he thought he's not right but he thought opening uh memorization irrelevant end game memorization irrelevant um understanding positional ideas irrelevant it's like just do tactics and when you're good at tactics you'll get to 200. if you want to get better than that then you got to learn like an opening and a positional idea and what a weak pawn is and what an open can but i mean that just shows you how important tactics are is no matter what you understand in chess when you make a one move blunder like shirazi did it doesn't matter how good you are if magnus was magnus which he is and once again he decides to blunder a rook and every other movie's magnus and that matter he's 1200. he lose every game but he doesn't decide to blunder a rook every game he never decides that terrible yeah and if you look at your tournament games where you played slow chess you and you analyze them with an engine or with the caps or whatever game report you make blunders every game you've never played a game without a blunder in your life and when you don't make a blunder it's because your opponent every move they made was a blunder and it didn't matter what you did your opponent hung seven pieces the first 10 moves so every move you made was winning but if you if you're like a class player and you play somebody over 2000 in a slow game you're gonna blunder because that's what you do and until you stop doing that you can't get better because if if you're 1300 at chess and 1300 of blundering and then you get to 2000 at chess and 1300 of blundering you're still 1300. the blunders are more important and that's why grishook and karyakin and magnus like they never lose anybody because they don't blunder like ever and then karyaka made that blunder and i showed you that's good yeah shirazi blunder god damn terrible frankly ridiculous yeah i mean obviously trying to learn who's my man in amsterdam he blunders occasionally but he also will sacrifice material when it's unsound because he likes doing that and in tournaments where he has two three hours to play he used to use ten minutes so he had three issues and he got rid of the fastest year he plays slower now so he's winning some games and he plays more sane so he wins a lot more games but yeah it's hard not to be insane because that's the way you were brought up remember when karen said she's coming back in five minutes so my guess is she will come back and she won't have her score sheet that's my i should be like oh my score sheet stop wondering don't play anymore the only way to stop blundering is to blunder and then look at it and see why you blundered and what you didn't understand and understand it then don't do it anymore it's the same with poker and bridge people don't get better at poker the ones who don't because when they lose or they play bad or whatever they don't analyze it objectively and figure out how to get better bad players don't do that and what you need to do no matter how good you are a poker doesn't matter how good you are is you need to look at your plays with someone else and have a group discussion right so if phil hellmuth says my play was great and then five of his peers say no it wasn't then he should say oh let me let me think about that maybe my five peers aren't wrong and or phil might say what do you think of this play that i made because he's unsure and the five pros say yeah that's right good job okay so that's how you get better at poker that's how you get better at chess that's how you get better at bridge friend of mine who was a good bridge player she said when i was a bad bridge player we played bridge events then we go to the bar and eat and drink after the event and we would discuss every hand and that's how i got better right but poker players don't want to get better they just want to be they just want to think that they are unlucky right and what happens is if you play 300 hands in a night and on two of them you were unlucky it's pretty good two out of three hundred that's that's that's not very unlucky but that's the two hands you remember that's what you blame for your dreary play and then you just keep doing it i would have won but my aces lost to jax because the guy rivered a jack otherwise i would have won i mean that person is not going to get better because that person only looks at the hand they got rivered on and doesn't look at the other you know 300 hands so they the 300 hands where they won 200 and they lost 500 on the aces versus jax so they're down 300 for the night maybe they should have won 3 000 on the other 299 they play terrible if you see what i'm saying you don't but people who are good at stuff like trial and error analyze try to figure it out and people who aren't good say they're unlucky and they're tired and they forgot you know their clock and they didn't know it was touch move and that kid over there was making noise and i didn't want to play in the tournament and my brother came in from out of town i'd take a half point by because i forgot that's people who don't who don't play chess well people who play chess well like jeffrey jean he loses which he did a lot against vidit then he analyzes and figures out why he lost he tries to play better jeffrey doesn't say he was lucky he doesn't do that right he just says why did i lose and i better stop losing because that sucks and he tries to play better that's what good players do but you guys don't want to do that because the truth hurts psychologically you don't want to know that you're not good and that you could do things to improve yourself you just want to be told you're great and you're unlucky and that's you know it's nice psychologically when your chess coach tells you how well you played and that's not the kind of chess coach i was because i want you to get better i don't want you to be told you play well then you're not going to get better you're like yeah my coach said i played well great and another problem weak players have is they get fixated on one thing so you play at uh you play a nine round tournament i'm making it up and you were winning and you blundered your queen and then somebody says how'd that tournament go and you're like oh man in round five i was winning i was under my queen that was one move in one game or how did your tournament go oh in round seven i sacked my queen and i made it him that was my best tournament ever that was one move in one game that's not how you get better at chess by looking at your absolute best or absolute worst if i have a stream where i show you my best 10 games ever you'll think i'm better than carlson if i show you my worst 10 games ever you'll think you can beat me every game that's the how you analyze chess you gotta analyze them all and then you get you know some kind of rating that i have because you know like that my best games are great my terrible games are terrible and my average games used to be okay and now they're suspicious and that's how you play chess consistency if you watch somebody play pool and you're a good pool player you know billiards you know in five seconds how good they are they don't have to shoot the ball all they have to do is stand hold their stick see what their stroke is see what their bridge is see how they're looking see see the way they're standing i mean not good they are because good players always do the same thing that's really good and bad players just randomly you know random etc man karen's never coming back i killed a lot of time too oh this is the drink that doesn't end we only had one train man you guys are the worst

Channel: GMBenjaminFinegold

Views: 225,035

Rating: 4.735652 out of 5

Keywords: twitch, games, Chess, GM Ben Finegold, board, game, Ben Finegold, streaming, live, stream, winning, checkmate, losing, sacrifice, attack, openings, traps, forks, skewers, grandmaster, best chess channel, best youtube chess channel, karen, karen boyd, boyd, karen boyd chess, Queen's Gambit, daily dose of Ben Finegold, Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta, funny chess, CCSCAT, subscribe, asmr, Chess Advice

Id: SbF1bRwxIWY

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/destructive69420]

"My average games used to be okay but now they're suspicious"
- International Grandmaster Benjamin Philip Finegold

[u/[deleted]]

I genuinely believe GM Ben Finegold is the best chess teacher on the internet. He says things how they are, no bullshit.

[u/kieransquared1]

TL;DW: focus on preventing blunders. Constantly keep an eye out for what tactics your opponents want, and when you inevitably do blunder, figure out why you blundered, burn that tactical pattern into your brain, and do it to someone else. You’re only as strong as your worst moves.

[u/DoomedKiblets]

This was a valuable watch

[u/letouriste1]

You could say the same things about grades in school or many other things. We all tend to focus on one big mistake when we should focus on every details of the other answers, even the ones we were right about, to improve these answers

[u/ididnoteatyourcat]

Is there a tactics trainer for defensive blunders? The trainers I'm familiar with entirely focus on offensive tactics.

[u/kaperisk]

He's not wrong

[u/Yamhahaha]

The ego never helps, it only hurts

[u/Itscoldinthenorth]

I'll add to Finegolds, and the recent videos by Simon Williams, that... it is easy to see what they mean, but you'll still revert back to low-level ways if you pick blitz as they do. They are GMs so they make 3 and 5 minutes seem like an eternity to spot tactics and come up with plans, it's not so easy actually.

Try to go in much slower timecontrols so you start to get used to actually work through your vision and consideration of your opponents moves. Applying their advice in a 3 minute game will have you play great 7-10moves, then you are suddenly playing bullet and simply trying not to flag. Then you do flag, then you start stressing the next game to avoid the same situation and there you are stuck at your rating again.