Having 30+ years history in a knowledge domain, it’s a surprise if sudden level ups start appearing. Metalearning seems to have done that for my chess, after a longish warm up period of getting tuned in for the game.
LLMs are an inspiring success story, and AI is sometimes giving feelings of “getting everything solved”. This was the motivation for trying to really understand why I don’t play better chess. I know my openings, I’m quick enough for some speed chess, can show mating combinations and middle game strategy, and don’t need to be afraid of rook end games. So what’s the problem then? Well, in addition to negating everything on that list and some other ideas about the quality of my existing game histories, I was growing the thought for some time that the major problem for all those years must have been that I’m wasting time. The factor can be dramatically large.
Chess is amazingly complex even theoretically speaking, and it is not easy to say how to make the brain work better with it. Chess books and other materials, opening databases, annotated position evaluations, and human and AI opponents are easy to find, but are these enough? It started feeling that my way of accessing the whole industry was somehow flawed. Realizing that was actually a cool moment.
Getting deeper to the position evaluations was one important thing. I had been too happy playing the fourth best alternative, when it was often the first that can really skew the probabilities into my favour. It’s a different thing just saying this than making yourself understand it, and then there’s the question on how exactly can these evaluations be replicated / generated. Also, I was lead to giving up my previous idea that my chess should be about positional or tactical thoughts instead of numeric position evaluations. It’s good feeling visionary, but it shouldn’t make me deviate too much from making the best moves, and it may not be the best guide in the game.
Other important tricks have been big hours with chess opening flash cards (exclamation mark for this), recording self talk during games and analysing it (trying it out maybe ten times seemed to already have a positive impact), learning to use pre game random numbers for confusion (my poker player side is really loving this), paying attention on statistical analysis (wip: pre game scripts for typical opponent psychological modeling), thinking about video blog content and tournament broadcasts and not only having good time watching them. Chess puzzles I could still do more, and also running and analysing my own machine tournaments.
All this has been driving the game towards more complex and tactical positions, often slightly scattered, going more strongly for initiative, attack, and space advantage, trying to win the game through piece or quality sacrifices, avoiding making losing mistakes and avoiding playing when tired. Mostly it feels like playing a different game than before. Obviously, strictly following the rules of fair play and anti-cheating.