It’s not a failure, it’s a step to success

In April 2023, basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo said this after being asked if he considered the past season a failure: Do you get a promotion every year at your job? No, right? So every year, your work is a failure? No. Every year, you work towards something, which is a goal: It’s to get a …

Read more

Nigel Davies on “The How and the What”

The how is more important than the what. It really doesn’t matter what you study, the important thing is to use this as a training ground for thinking rather than trying to assimilate a mind-numbing amount of information. In these days of a zillion different chess products this message seems to be quite lost, and …

Read more

Hwang In-seong 8d on Eastern vs Western Go players

Hwang In-seong 8d, in his live commentary on the 16th KPMC Preliminary League game between Edwin Halim 3d (Indonesia) vs Denis Karadaban 3d (France), said (slightly reworded): Asian Go players are more practical, more aggressive. They get their level by playing many games. In the West they get their level by studying a lot, like …

Read more

Hein Donner on pondering and touching the Chess pieces

In the oddly-titled Dutch Chess documentary “The Love for Wood”, at 2:00 (with subtitles), eccentric Chess player Hein Donner says: […] a remarkable moment is the moment you will make your move. It’s the exact moment you touch the piece. In the split second you touch the piece you’ll see more than you have seen …

Read more

Garry Kasparov on playing computers and humans

For all of chess history, even the greatest players had been sheltered from the sort of incredibly complex tactical play that computers handled almost trivially by 1993. You knew that your human opponents had roughly the same limitations as you did when it came to dealing with whatever arose on the board. […] Generally, I …

Read more

David Bull on the ten-thousand hours rule

When it comes to developing ability at something, a craft like this, or perhaps at a sport, anything really, we commonly hear people talking about such things as “it takes ten thousand hours” as though it were simply a matter of spending enough time and making enough repetitions. But that’s not true. […]. It’s no …

Read more