Tactics - The 80/20 of Chess

So there was once this Italian guy named Vilfredo Pareto (maybe you've already heard of him and heard this story). He was an economist and sociologist, but he was also a gardener, he grew some of his own plants and food. And so of course when you do this, your plants produce their fruit and they produce more seeds so that you can plant, essentially, the next generation of plants.

And one day, Vilfredo noticed that the number of seeds he got from his pea pods was not uniformly distributed among the plants, or even normally distributed. He noticed that a relatively small number of plants produced a large proportion of the seeds for the next generation. His estimation was that 80% of the seeds came from only 20% of the plants.

Being an economist, he had an inkling that this kind of distribution appeared not just with plants but all over society. For a simple example, the richest 20% of people might have 80% (or more) of all the wealth in a country. But the distribution could be even more extreme in certain areas. Thinking about art and painting...probably 1% or less of all the people who regularly pick up a paint brush make 99% or more of the money that is associated with paintings.

And so we have this general idea that a large proportion of the results or outputs of something are concentrated in a small amount of the inputs. This became known as the Pareto principle (or the Pareto distribution) after Vilfredo. And sometimes when we look at something like this in income distribution it can be a little depressing, but we can't change that at the drop of a hat. But what we can realize is that this doesn't just apply to population wide mechanics and metrics. We can also apply this principle to our learning process, and today I'm going to talk about how to do this with chess.

The Pareto principle is profoundly important for learning any subject, because there's a LOT to learn about anything. But not all of it is equally valuable. Not all of it will contribute equally to whatever output or goal you're trying to get from your studies. This is especially true if, like me, you aren't really trying to become world class in your subject. If you want to be the best in the world, you really need to know 100% of the things, and you'll need to focus on all that remaining 80% of effort to get the extra 20% of knowledge. But if you're not, you can get to that "80% competence" level a lot more easily IF you prioritize the right knowledge.

For one example, let's think about learning a language. There are tens of thousands of words in most European languages. So let's say you're trying to learn Spanish. It can be daunting to think about learning ten or twenty thousand words.

But depending on your goals, you don't really need to learn all those words. If all you're doing is traveling to a Spanish-speaking country as a tourist and you just need basic functional knowledge, you can accomplish that with as little as 500 words. If you'd like to be able to have more complex conversations with people, you still only need about one thousand to three thousand words in your vocabulary by most estimates. And so, if these are your goals, you can easily get 90% of the way to your goal by learning a fairly small fraction of the language. So you should make sure that you prioritize sources that will focus on these specific areas. Being able to order off a menu, or buy public transit tickets are very important for a tourist. Giving a detailed description of Spanish historical events? Not as important if you're just visiting for a week or two.

The Pareto Principle in Chess

A couple weeks ago I talked about this statement that I've heard from many different chess masters: that you can basically get to expert or even master level strength basically by just studying endgames and tactics. These two areas are that 20% of "skills" that will get you 80% of the results you want. I've done a couple articles now on endgames, which were a really weak area for me, but now I'm going to shift to tactics, which I was a little better at when I was growing up.

Tactics, in chess or anything else really, are short-term maneuvers you can do in a lot of situations to gain an advantage. So for chess, this advantage usually means you "win material", that is, you capture more of your opponents pieces than they take of yours, or you capture a more important piece like the queen for a lesser piece like a knight. In the video below I'm going to show some examples of these basic tactics and how I practice them. Soon, we'll see how to build on these basic tactics to make more advanced tactics and ideas.

To see how the Pareto principle fits into the rest of my general framework of learning, you should download my free Learning Checklist. Now let's get on to the chess tactics!