Chess is 99% taking pieces

The rest is just details

Last Sunday I watched the finals of Wimbledon between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovich. The match was full of spectacular plays – drop shots, lobs, scorching winners, unbelievable returns, and so on. Then on Wednesday I went out and played some tennis. I currently play tennis about once a year, and when I do, I tend to alternate between placing my shots in the net and about 50 yards beyond the baseline. It was a reminder that for most people, tennis is 99% not missing. All the spectacular shots and plays are part of that last 1%.

Chess is much the same way. There is fantastically deep strategy: brilliant sacrifices, deep opening novelties, intricate endgames, and so on. But this is all part of the last 1%. In chess the first 99% is taking pieces: taking your opponent’s pieces when you can, and not hanging your own pieces.

For players who feel they are consistently learning a lot about chess, but not seeing any improvement in their competitive results, it’s often the case that the things they’re learning are far more advanced than what’s actually holding back their results. They’re learning more and more about the last 1%, but still messing up the 99%. For many players (especially adults) it can be difficult to admit that what they need to work on is in fact extremely basic – basic conceptually, that is, but very difficult to execute consistently.

I’ve seen some players say they decided to play very safely for one reason or another in a particular game. To me, these games usually don’t look especially safe; they just look like good chess. If a normal person could see a master’s thought process, it would probably appear to be psychotically cautious. But if you want to compete at a high level, you can never ever ever ever randomly give away your pieces. That’s just the reality of chess. Just like in tennis, it doesn’t matter how spectacular your winners are if you blast half of your shots out of the court.

Doesn’t devoting this level of care to not hanging pieces make playing chess a pain in the ass? At first, yes. But keeping your pieces safe eventually becomes automatic, to the point where you’re not aware of it. That’s when you can start focusing on the 1%.

Learning how to keep your pieces safe is somewhat of a blind spot for chess instruction. Traditionally, this was learned when you were a kid, by playing a ton of games. This may not be the most efficient way, but kids generally don’t mind. By the time instruction got serious, the kids already knew how to hold onto their pieces. But now we have more and more adults starting with chess. Unlike kids, they are concerned with things like efficiency, not embarrassing themselves, and their own impending mortality. Is there a more efficient way to learn how to keep your pieces safe than losing thousands of games to hanging your queen?

Probably, yes. But the exercises to work on this aren’t found in most chess books. There are exceptions like Everyone’s First Chess Workbook, Learn Chess the Right Way. Dan Heisman even has a whole book called Is Your Move Safe? Overall, defensive puzzles make up a small percentage of all published chess puzzles, but they’re worth seeking out, especially if you lose a lot of games to blundering your pieces.

Of course, knowing how to spot safe moves doesn’t help much if you don’t check for safe moves in real games. For many people, the hard part isn’t learning to spot safe moves, it’s remembering to do it in real games. My friend Ono has a great post about this.

If you feel like you know a lot more about chess than you used to, but your results don’t seem to be improving, I would suggest reviewing some recent games, especially losses, and trying to be really honest about what factors are deciding most of your games. Are those the factors you’re focusing on in your study? If not, how could you adjust your study routine to focus on what really matters in your games?