Something is better than nothing

One of my beliefs about how to get better at any activity is that doing something is always better than doing nothing. It applies to chess but just about everything else too. If you want to get stronger muscles, you go the gym and get to work; you don't stay home and think about how great it would be if you were stronger.

In the fitness world there are constant arguments about what exercises should be done, how many reps and how much weight and how many days per week, but that kind of stuff only matters once you've made the commitment to get down to the gym and work out. Someone who performs the worst weight training routine imaginable but is at least down at the gym lifting weights is still going to end up a lot stronger than the guy sitting at home going over in his mind what the proper training regimen is.

We have the same thing in chess when it comes to improvement. We go back and forth about whether we need to do more tactics or whether we need to play more slow games or whether blitz games are helpful at all. Should we even bother studying the endgame? What about openings?

The interesting thing is that all the knowledge we have about what helps us improve is anecdotal. There have been no controlled studies of large numbers of players at various rating levels to determine what helps them improve. In other words, we don't really know. Nevertheless, even without any data we do know one thing with certainty: you won't get better if you don't play or study chess in some way. Indeed, if you never played I don't know how we could even measure any improvement.

So when we discuss what's best for improvement at chess, what we really mean is, what activities work better and faster than others? And assuming we can figure out what works best for most people, does something else work best for a particular player? We often gloss over this last question when it's really just as important.

People learn things different ways and what works for most people most of the time doesn't work for everybody all the time. If you're an improver yourself (some aren't, but if you're reading this you probably are) or you're an instructor, one of the things you have to figure out is whether whatever it is you're doing to help you or your student improve is actually doing so. It's not easy, because often we're using many different training methods at once (playing, analyzing our own games, analyzing grandmaster games, doing tactics problems, watching instructional videos, studying endgames, whatever) so even if we do improve it's very difficult to determine which of the activities are helping and which are not.

Our tendency is to hope that whatever activity we enjoy will also help us improve. Compared to doing nothing, it will. If you enjoy playing blitz, you're likely to play a lot of blitz and see if that helps you get better before you try something else that you find less enjoyable. Some older, allegedly wiser people will try to talk you out of it, insisting that you're wasting your time and that only through rigorous, tedious work will you ever see any improvement.

They might be right as a general proposition. For most people, blitz would appear to be more helpful than not playing chess at all, but less than tactics work or careful analysis. The thing is, some people have improved greatly by only playing blitz and have become very strong even at slower time controls despite using lots of their training time on blitz.

It does happen. But what the improver wants to know is, will it work for me? My position is, if you enjoy doing it, try it and find out. If you're very lucky, the key to your improvement is something that you already wanted to do anyway. At worst you don't get much better, but at that point you can decide if you want to make the sacrifice of doing other stuff you don't like as much but that you think might make you a better player. If you don't you're still ahead of that guy who won't bother to get down to the gym.