Before I even start, this is going to be way tl;dr. You've been warned.

In the BBV thread Tex was talking about plateaus and I offered to write up some of my thoughts on the subject. Years ago I was an avid pool player. I played for money, played in tournaments, even used it as a source of income for a few months in my late teens. I had a great opportunity to work with one of the best teachers in the world. One of his ideas was that in pool eventually you plateau, and you need professional instruction to break that plateau. That's the origin of it.

If we look at pretty much everything we do in life that involves a skillset of some sort, there will be many times where our skills plateau. My theory is that we need to do something different to move past the plateau and continue our climb. Problem is, everyone reacts to change and plateaus differently, and here's where a bit of soul searching comes into play.

For me, I know that in order to get over a plateau I need to make a fairly drastic change. I'm a lifelong musician and over time I've plateaued many times in my bass playing. Sometimes it's as easy as a new instrument, sometimes it's listening to a new band or style of music, sometimes it's learning a challenging song that I've never sat down and really learned before, etc. For some it may be taking private lessons, for others it may actually be teaching private lessons. I've plateaued in poker many times as well, and sometimes changing games helps, other times a break may help.

That brings us to the topic of chess. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I do know that for me a big change seems to work best. I played most of my chess 20+ years ago. I started in early high school as an unrated and all I knew was the 4 knights opening and some 5 move trick mate. I went in and lost damn near every game and my rating was around 800. I decided to really focus on it, I bought a few books, studied games that I could, watched the higher rated players in the tourneys I played in, and over the 4 years of high school managed to crawl out of that rating to about 1425 or so. Not anything to brag about by any means, but if you think about it, that's a 600 point jump playing only live games as a high school kid. When I left high school I sort of left chess behind, and I don't think I played more than a dozen games between 1991 and about 6 months ago. Last year a friend of mine got me back on chess.com where I started at 1500 or so. I won a few, lost a few, and got to that point where I knew I had to do something to make playing worthwhile. I grabbed some of my old games, a few books, and started studying again. I'm a few points shy of 1950 now over about 120 games.

So there's a lot of text to say not very much and I apologize for that, but I wasn't sure how else to present this. Now let's try to answer the question of how we progress past a plateau in chess. Suggestions:

- read a new book
- take a break
- try a new opening (this one can be huge)
- take a few hours of instruction with a really good coach
- if you play only online, play a live tourney, and vice versa

Maybe this will get some discussion started, maybe not. Interesting to see what you guys think, and maybe we can help Tex break 2000.

Logical. Plateaus^[1] occur when we improve the weaknesses we're aware of and know how to fix, leaving behind only the ones that are invisible or unfixable to us^[2]. An instructor can point these weaknesses out and give us actionable plans to fix them.

As I read your OP, this series of posts by Dire came to mind. Seems like the importance of tactical ability has a high enough profile that knowledgeable-enough players, ones willing to work sufficiently hard, will eventually get past tactics-based plateaus. But according to Dire--and I'm not 100% sure if this is right or not (I'm no expert on chess plateaus!)--not recognizing the importance of "creating favorable imbalances" is a more insidious snag.

I also thought of this blog post, which is about the importance of the fundamentals. Not a chess-specific post, btw.

I think your change theory is on the mark. New challenges demand 1) new strategies^[3], some of which might be improvements over some of our old ones, and 2) offer new perspectives, from which we might be able to spot our current shortcomings a bit more easily. Gawd, that sounds like abstract self-help fluff.


[1] I'll stick to discussing plateaus that can be overcome with a realistic amount of effort ("soft plateaus")--not ones that coincide with a hard ceiling in natural ability.

[2] And there are always "self-imposed" plateaus, too, where we *know* what to improve and how--still have visible, fixable weaknesses--but simply aren't willing to put in the effort.

[3] Using strategies in the general sense, not the chess-specific one.


(Sorry 'bout all the footnotes. I spotted a few things that needed clarification but didn't want to rewrite or jam a whole bunch of parentheticals into the main body of my post. )

Very good post. I also didn't mean for mine to be a self-help post, that's definitely not who I am considering I used to run a blog where the main focus was calling people idiots. LOL. I can't really take credit for any of my thoughts on this, but it's pretty interesting how I learned it at 19 years old or so and trying to apply it to consistency/improvement in playing 9 ball, and here I am at 40 and I've applied it to half a dozen major things in my life over the years. The thinking applies to chess really well I think.

No, I meant my sentence, the "New challenges ... a bit more easily" one.

Great stuff in here, well worth the wait

You mentioned that for yourself, fairly drastic changes are the way to go to get over plateaus. Did this come with some sort of trial and error over the years, or how did you come to this conclusion? I haven't put as much thought into as you have, but I can see myself needing something like this as well. If I only make minor changes in things, I could see myself sliding back into the old habits/ruts. Did you find this approach worked well regarding 9-ball?

Rei Ayanami, I enjoyed your post a lot as well. The link from an old thread with Dire's thoughts is pretty much right on the money. Great series of posts from him.

Also, in your post I thought your footnote about self-imposed plateaus is interesting. The mind is a powerful thing. When looking at my rating history over the past year during this period, I noticed a pattern that has occurred literally 4 times. My rating will get up somewhere between 1985-1990, then I'll have one bad event in which it falls to 1950-1960. Then I'll have 3-4 good events to get it back to 1985-1990, then it'll fall back to 1950-1960 again. Literally 4 times that has happened. And it cannot possibly just a coincidence that it has happened just below that 2000 barrier I've created in my own head. Clearly there is some psychology at play there beyond simply the moves on the board.

Cool glad you liked it. It was harder to put into words than I thought.

I didn't really figure the whole thing out in my pool playing days. It wasn't until about 2000 when I applied to my bass playing where I started to fully understand the concepts. There I made some pretty drastic changes: style of music I listened to, new bass, new style of playing, etc. and the plateau just melted away over the course of a few months.

I do think that a lot of it is mental, but the whole perception = reality thing, it might as well be an actual physical barrier. For you, I'd suggest something pretty drastic to at least get your mind off of it. Now, that's not to say that you have to permanently keep the change, it's just a mechanism to get over the plateau and continue on.

For me and chess, reading Jeremy Silman's Amateur's Mind was the one thing I needed to get me going. My ratings graph in the last 6 months looks like this: / lol. For you I think I'd suggest multiple changes sort of what I did with my music. Each change can be pretty small in itself, but putting them all together might just be the thing to get you over the hump.

I think you're right about needing some sort of change. I haven't exactly figured out what that will be, but clearly things right now aren't working.

A change I'm thinking about, after talking with someone else as well, could be to just take the game less seriously and have fun. I know that sounds cliche, but it would really help. I don't exactly know how to put it, but for the past few months I've taken a very robotic, scientific type approach to the game. A way of saying it would be putting too much emphasis on studying/improvement and forgetting how much fun the game can be. I think that mentality has really started to hinder/hurt progress, even though studying hard sounds like good intentions. As of right now I'm really trying to focus on letting go, having fun, even to the point of not caring about losses as long as I'm enjoying it.

After all, even if we all never improve past the level we're at now, chess is a game, and isn't a game supposed to be fun?

Yep. Get online, play some 3 or 5-min games where you just try new stuff, take a devil-may-care attitude towards the result. Myself and DIR have discussed the subject of "getting bored" before in these forums, I think some are more and some less prone to it.

I play over 5 or 6 Spielmann or Morphy games until I have them memorized and find I get more aggressive and fearless and have lots of fun playing.

If I were determined to improve I would study endgames. Yuck

I think taking a break is a big part of it. When you've studied too hard for too long without a break, you start to carry the weight of all your study with you in every game. Instead of evaluating a position on its own, you are trying subconsciously to incorporate too many of the things you've learned recently.