Deliberate Practice with Endgames

Practice makes perfect. Or at least, that's what a lot of us were told when we're growing up. As long as you practice and put in the time, you'll get better, right?

Well not quite. The more appropriate phrase I've heard to replace that mantra is, "practice makes permanent". Whatever you focus on in your practice will become the habits that you repeat over and over again without thinking about it. But these habits might not be good! It's possible that you'll pick up habits that are, in fact, counter-productive that will hold you back in your further development.

I started playing the cello when I was about seven or eight years old. But I didn't really start taking private lessons until middle school, when I was twelve or so. But over the first lesson, my teacher identified that there were several things that were just systematically wrong about my posture and basic playing form. I could get away with all that because the music we played in middle school orchestra wasn't particularly demanding. But it would be impossible for me to play more advanced music (especially any kind of solo music) without improving these things.

But it wasn't just a matter of learning the right things. I had to spend a lot of time "unlearning" those bad habits I already had before I could really make improvements. If I just played through a piece focusing on the notes and making the sounds, all those bad habits would creep through. In order to make them go away, I had to focus specifically on those elements of form without necessarily trying to play the piece well or even play a piece at all.

In order to really improve those habits, I had to engage in something called "deliberate practice". This concept is referenced all over the literature on learning. Josh Waitzkin talks about it in The Art of Learning, and another book, Talent is Overrated also goes into details about it. Basically, if you want to get better at a skill, you can't just "practice" mindlessly. You have to think consciously about one element of your skill and focus on that. Today I'll show you some examples of how I'm trying to use this technique in chess and how you might be able to apply this in whatever your skill is.

Don't Just "Play"

There's definitely a "wrong" way to get better at chess, especially now that online chess is so prevalent. It's very easy to sit down at your computer and just play a bunch of games, win some and lose some, and not really think about your play. You could tell yourself, "I'm getting better, I'm practicing after all!" But while that's going on, you're not deliberately addressing your weak areas and you might very well be accentuating your bad habits.

So if you actually want to get better, you have to nail down some of your weak areas. In my last video I mentioned endgames in my chess play. There were a few different baseline games where I had a big advantage going into the endgame but let it slip and either drew the game, lost the game, or even if I won I gave my opponent a good chance to draw.

Endgames seem kind of boring but they're also really really important if you want to get better. I showed a clip of me taking a "pre-evaluation test" on basic endgames, which further highlighted a few problem areas for me.

Now, there are a few different ways for me to deliberately practice endgames. One way is through specific study material. This is what I'm doing with the 100 chess endgames course that I started and showed a little bit of in last week's video.

Another way is through puzzles. A number of chess sites have lots of puzzles you can solve, and many of them allow you to filter puzzles by theme. So for example on Lichess, I can filter it so that I'm only doing pawn endgames or rook endgames.

Eventually I'm going to have to transfer this information into real games though. So another thing I could do is to play some games but to really try to maneuver those games into endgame scenarios that I'm trying to practice. This can be very difficult in practice. I might want to have multiple goals that I'm working towards, but have a deliberate practice rule of "If I'm in X specific endgame, I will do Y."

The more specific you make your deliberate practice goal, the easier it is to actually deliberately practice. So I might take just a couple specific positions that come from Rook/pawn endgames (for example, the Philidor position and Lucena position you'll see in the video). I'll learn the right approaches for the winning side and the losing side in these positions. And then I'll do some puzzles with rook pawn endgames and specifically look for these positions. I can also play some practice games and keep an eye out for these.

Now of course, deliberate practice can relate to a LOT of different disciplines, though sometimes it's a bit tricky. With music, or learning an instrument, you might want to focus on a specific technique, whether that's how you start your sound with the bow on a stringed instrument, or as you blow into a wind instrument. And in order to focus on ONLY that technique you should start with simple music like just playing scales. This is part of the reason scales are so important in music. Practicing scales gives you the chance to work on nothing but those basic techniques.

If you're studying an academic subject it can be a little more tricky. You have to find some way to challenge your knowledge and verify that you're actually learning something, like practice essay questions or practice quizzes. In a subject like Physics, deliberate practice might look like saying, hey, "Every time I start a problem, I'm going to write down the fundamental equations that relate to this problem." So before you get carried away even writing variables down or numeric calculations, just write down Newton's second law, or the equation for conservation of momentum in a collision or whatever you think you'll need. Even if you don't know the full approach to the problem, it's still a "win" if you get that first step down.

Now of course I do want to show a little bit of chess here, so I'll show a few clips of me doing this kind of deliberate practice on these endgames I talked about. If you want to see how deliberate practice fits into my overall learning strategy, make sure you download my free Learning Checklist. I hope you enjoy the video content below!