The Chess Experience
The Chess Experience
Adult Improver Pod - Nick Visel: Pursuing Chess Improvement Without Burnout
107 Few adult club players are as committed to the game as Nick Visel. For years, he’s been racking up countless OTB classical games, poring through books and courses, and sharing his wisdom on Chess Twitter. Currently, Nick stands at 1600 USCF with ambitions of becoming a Class A player and reaching National Master.
Nick shares great tips from his earned wisdom, plus how he’s willing to scale back his chess when other areas of his life take priority.
In this episode, we discuss:
- A better way to learn openings beyond just tedious memorization.
- Why he’s reduced his chess study workload and how it helps him avoid burnout.
- Why he thinks Karpov would have beaten Fischer had they played in 1975.
- The importance of a poker face in OTB chess
More From Nick:
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>> Check out Daniel's chess.com profile. Witness his countless, embarrassing blitz losses. He even accepts some friend requests.
Hey, welcome to the chess experience On this show. It's all about helping adult improvers. I want to make learning chess easier for you to navigate and I also want you to have a more fun experience along the way. I'm your host, daniel Lona, a fellow chess amateur. Let's get to it.
Daniel:This show is sponsored by chesscom, the world's largest chess community. Chesscom recently launched a new way to learn from your games with a feature called insights. If you visit chesscom slash insights, you can get detailed stats and analysis in any of the time controls you've played and across any time period. What kind of things can you learn? Well, you can learn. What time of day do you play your best morning, afternoon or night? What part of the game are you strongest or weakest? Opening, middle game or end game? Are you making more or less mistakes than opponents at your level? You can find out all this great info and much more at chesscom slash insights.
Daniel:Welcome to this week's episode. Today, our guest is the awesome adult improver, nick Weisel. Personally, I believe Nick is one of the most committed, knowledgeable and inspiring club players I've had the pleasure to meet over the past few years. Nick has been playing chess as an adult for about six years. He's a class B player with a USCF rating of 1600. Nick is also very active in the chess punks community on chess Twitter. I recommend following him there, as he posts lots of great insights about his journey on that site, and we have a link to his Twitter account listed below in the show notes.
Daniel:In this episode, nick and I cover a lot of ground. We chat about several things, like what it was like for him to watch the modern chess boom unfold as someone who is an adult club player before the Queen's Gambit was released, why he's reduced his chess study workload and how it helps him avoid burnout, why he thinks Karpov would have beaten Fischer had they played back in 1975, and the importance of a poker face in OTB chess. Here's my interview with Nick. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, nick, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
Nick:Doing pretty good. How about yourself?
Daniel:Yeah, I'm doing very good. I'm super excited to chat with you, nick. I don't know if many of my listeners know this, but we've been connected on chess Twitter for a couple of years. We've interacted a ton over that time, so I feel like this interview is long overdue. To have you on the show and talk about your chess journey. So, yeah, just really excited to have a live conversation. Yeah, me too. I think it'll be fun. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I hold you in the highest regard as a fellow adult improver. You are one of the most inspirational people in that category for me. You, you are one of the most inspirational people in that category for me. You're so committed to chess and I know you just have a really good attitude, a positive attitude towards it, a productive attitude towards it. Just very high respect for you as a fellow chess player.
Nick:Yeah, I appreciate that Kind of blows me away because I feel like I'm just a regular guy. So the fact that I entire tar anybody is pretty cool. So yeah, thank you.
Daniel:Yeah, my pleasure. So, yeah, let's dive right into it. Well, actually, maybe I'm setting things up a little too much for chess right there. What I want to start with is just your life outside of chess, because 95% of this podcast will talk about chess, but just to kind of get to know you a little bit as a as a person outside of the game. What fills your days when you're not playing chess?
Nick:It's just a funny phrase to think about life outside of chess. So I need to Google that, figure out what that is. So, yeah, so besides chess, let's see, I'm married, I have a wife and two kids Go to church every Sunday, work Monday through Friday. I work in IT, so I work with a lot of computers and in the enterprise environments and whatnot, and I am currently, for the last couple months, trying to learn to read, speak, understand Japanese and occasionally I play video games. That's awesome.
Daniel:Very cool. A wide variety of things there that keeps you busy. With respect to Japanese, I guess chess just got a little easy there for a while. Huh, you had a new challenge.
Nick:Yeah, it probably happened when I was taking a bit of a break or stepping back from a little bit of chess study.
Daniel:So, yeah, sure, yeah, very cool. Well, unlike most of the adult club players that I've talked to on the show, your chess journey began in earnest well before the chess boom of 2020. Most of the people I talked to who are adult improvers kind of got swept up in that era of 2020 and beyond, and myself included in that, but yours began a couple of years before then. So how did your chess origin story unfold?
Nick:Yeah, so it's kind of just a random thing. And this was before, even like the huge chess boom on like YouTube, when YouTube just became a black hole of like a near infinite amount of information about chess and videos about chess. So this is like before Levy, rosman and Donya and Hikaru and all the big names we have now and this is more during the times when, like chess network and john bartholomew, I feel like we're like pretty big names in the chess youtube space. But I just happened upon a random video, thanks to the youtube algorithm, of a couple old guys playing, I think, bullet it might have been blitz, but it sure seemed like they were playing really fast like bullet, otb and um, I was just really enamored of the idea to be able to play chess that quickly because they looked like they knew what they were doing and there seemed to be a sort of like a rhythm to how they were making the moves and what they were doing.
Nick:It didn't seem like they were just making moves at random, but that there were actual ideas and plans behind it and I had never seen chess played like that at all. And it just I don't know, it's just a random video, it's buried underneath the algorithm. I've tried to find it so many times and I can't find it anymore. But yeah, that's like when I decided I was going to download chesscom app and just start playing blitz, and that's that's how I started. That was um. That was like about this time in 2016, when I just decided to do that that's very cool.
Daniel:I like that you were just um, attracted to sort of the mystique of the game and the way it looked when they were playing bullet. Uh, yeah, that's that's always like a nice, a nice reason to beique of the game and the way it looked when they were playing bullet. Uh, yeah, that's that's always like a nice, a nice reason to be attracted to the game, I think. I think that pulls in a lot of people. There is definitely a mystique to the game if you're not super familiar with it, and even if you are, I suppose too. But uh, yeah, that's, that's very cool. That that was what the catalyst was for you, so to speak yeah, this is, this is, um, this is.
Nick:the problem that I have is, I tend to see a YouTube video that somehow convinces me, oh, I could probably do that, or I could learn to do that, and then I just kind of dive headfirst into it, which is why I'm trying to learn Japanese right now too.
Nick:So because, I saw a YouTube video and I was like, hmm, I wonder if I could do that. But I've also taken some lessons that I've learned from that, so from like learning chess, and I'm applying that to learning Japanese, so that's kind of fun, so, but yeah, anyway, don't show me a YouTube video unless you want me to become very interested in the thing that the YouTube video is about is the takeaway. I don't have any more time for hobbies. I should have less hobbies.
Daniel:Right, try to not show you videos of big new endeavors that you could take on. Yeah.
Nick:Certain things I'm like I'm not going to watch that because I know what's going to happen.
Daniel:So yeah, Right no-transcript to see the game basically explode in popularity and in new branches of it. Like we have the YouTube content creators and things like that that flourished that we didn't really have as much before then. What was it like seeing all of that blossom?
Nick:I guess yeah, it was really cool. Um, it was cool to see that people uh were able to be persuaded that chess is, uh, maybe, uh it's sexier than they thought it was. Um, so it's like much more like socially acceptable to play chess. Um, like the queen's gambit like made it clear that you could um do things with a particular like aesthetic or a style, even when it came to the game, and that's actually something I think like queen's give.
Nick:It really like captured well was the fact that people kind of like had normal lives, or maybe not normalized, but they kind of looked like normal people. They were well dressed and, uh, they played chess really good and uh, kind of like chess isn't just for nerds sort of thing, right, right, um, because I think I think of like chess club in high school when I was growing up, which I didn't go to a school that had one, but I feel like the, the typical like trope was that chess club was for, you know, nerds or whatever, for the uh, the socially awkward, etc. And I feel like queen's gambit like showed that that didn't have to be the case. I mean, like the scene where Beth is playing I forget the other guy's name. Main character is Beth, so that's good. I remember some of it. I haven't watched her in a long time, benny.
Daniel:Yeah, yeah, the Karakhan, yeah, Benny.
Nick:She's playing him in the cafe for hours and he's cleaning her wallet out, but they're just playing, moves fast and it kind of looks like she's kind of tilting or whatnot. That's kind of what chess is like. They captured that really well, even the way the players touched the pieces, moved the pieces. It's a bunch of things that I think you don't think about until you, like, actually play chess in real life. And since most people watching that show, I don't think they really played chess in real life.
Nick:That was the first time they saw people playing chess in real life and or something close to real life, and they're like, oh, oh, that's actually kind of cool. Oh, I see like the light bulbs are going off in their heads that, oh, this is why people have been playing this game for so long, and so that was cool. Because then suddenly everybody wanted to talk to me about chess. You know, before I had to like find ways to shoehorn it into any conversation because you know I have problems and I have to talk about it. Uh, and this time it was like people initiating conversations with me about chess, which I loved, and then like, obviously, like the online internet, boom, people are just like, hey, I want to learn how to play chess and just kind of like putting themselves out there on social media and connecting with people, which is just very cool. So, um, yeah, that's kind of like that's what I remember the Queens Gambit boom kind of being like, of being like, and I'm really thankful for that. It was really cool.
Daniel:Yeah, those were some great perspectives and insights and I totally agree that chess has that more mainstream appeal. I don't know if we're quite mainstream, but we're more mainstream. Yes, yeah, that's the cool part.
Nick:It's still kind of niche, but it's much broader, I think, as a niche than it was before, and so you have a lot of people who may not typically have tried it a couple years ago who are now looking into it, and some of them are finding that it's a place they want to stay at, which is cool.
Daniel:Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Going back to your own chess journey, I'm curious how that progressed for you over the years, because my understanding is that you're much more focused on improvement now, and maybe in a more structured way perhaps, than you were initially, and if that's right, can you talk about how that progressed for you over the years? Yeah, so.
Nick:I started playing chess in 2016 and it was mostly just playing blitz on chesscom. And as far as studying goes, I wasn't, I was just playing, and that got me up to a good level about 1200 I started. I bottomed out at about like 425 or so and I I went all the way up to about 1200 at the end of a year and at that point I was still just kind of playing, but I was like, well, 1200 seems pretty decent, you know. So I should look into, like, what should I do next? And checked out the chess subreddit, which has some interesting advice sometimes.
Nick:But one common suggestion was go to a club. So I uh went to a chess club. Um, by the time I was about, you know, I think I've been 1200 for a couple, a couple weeks or months at that point and uh, like on chesscom, blitz, so, um, 1200 blitz, uh. So I went to the club and, um, that's just when I started playing and I met some people, including a national master named zoran. He taught me a lot about playing chess and just like getting good and kind of like showed me how much I didn't know. I really thought I was hot stuff because I had a 1200 blitz rating or whatever, and my experience at the chess club just proved me wrong that I I had a long way to go.
Nick:And I kept hanging out at the chess club, mostly hanging out with Zoran, the national master, playing chess and getting stronger, but COVID happens, and then the chess club doesn't meet for a while and it's around that time, like beginning of 2020, that, uh, I started looking into, like doing, like reading and studying books. I think the one of the first books that I got was how to beat your dad at chess, which, um, is basically like a middle game checkmating guide. Uh, it's, um, it's a wonderful book, and the only reason that I wouldn't suggest it is because the checkmate patterns manual exists now, but before that, I think how to beat your dad at chess is just amazing because it shows you how to just to just win in the middle of a game. Um, and uh, I think I read that like mid 2019 and like my rating shot up like quite a bit to like 1400. 2020 comes along, covid comes along. Uh, I discovered chessable and uh, like, in a certain sense, like the rest is history. I found a, I found a course on chessable for the black margamer gambit which I was playing at the time, and that's when I like started learning and like understanding that you could like actually learn chess theory, and so my study morphed from like me, like reading a couple random books or like random chapters of books to like actually going through and studying and trying to get good at playing a particular line and using an interface, to actually going through and studying and trying to get good at playing a particular line and using an interface to actually practice it over and over and over, and I think that just progressively continued to increase the amount of time that I was studying.
Nick:And then eventually I made my way to a tournament at my local club for the chess championship, like the club championship, and I played my first game there at the championship and it was just a cool experience. And I mean, ever since then, that's basically what I do. I go to tournaments. I was studying chess books and openings, but mostly openings, and that has kind of like shifted more towards like studying game collections, um, because, uh, I think game collections are just a great resource and, depending on how you study them, they can be really, really helpful. Um, so yeah, I mean I went from like books to like openings, to strategy books and then game collections, and I basically do all of that in more or less varied amounts depending on the day, and then I think, uh, just just the most important thing is getting to chess club almost every week to play and, even if there's not a tournament, just going there to play and hang out with people and to just kind of like be around other people who play chess. That's a really big thing, right?
Nick:So it's just kind of like progressively happened up until like I feel like I started going to the chess club regularly in like 2021 and I haven't stopped since that's awesome.
Daniel:I love that. Yeah, there's something that you mentioned that I'd like to dive into a bit because it tracks with my experience. That you mentioned that I'd like to dive into a bit because it tracks with my experience, and so I'm thinking maybe there's something to this that's not just particular to me, but maybe a bit more universal. So you mentioned that in 2020, you discovered Chessable and you said the rest is history. After that, and I mean obviously well before Chessable, there is God knows how many probably thousands and thousands of chess books that have been written over the decades and we all had access to that. But there was something different about Chessable in terms of, I think, making chess more appealing and accessible to just regular club players.
Daniel:I had that experience because when you said that line, I felt like I could have said that about my own journey, except for me. It was just one year later, in 21, when I discovered Chessable and I was just like, oh my God, there's courses, there's online courses on chess. That was the first time I realized that that was true and I absolutely loved it. I felt like a kid in a candy store, like video instruction, I understand, like studying chess in the 90s. It was hard to get video instruction for me, so this was a. This was like a brand new thing and it really made chess exciting and accessible for me. But I'm curious for you what was it about chessable that had triggered something, I guess, in your journey um, for me, uh, it's probably just the.
Nick:the move trainer is really nice to just have something that you can. You can just do your reps in and to have courses that are kind of built that way, obviously like it has limitations as a platform, but I think just to move trainer, just getting used to moving and making the moves that you need to make during your games and just feeling comfortable with putting this piece in this square and knowing that you have a planet, et cetera, and reading all that stuff, yeah, I think that just you know at the time and probably still like there's just nothing like it.
Nick:so it's just made it made study easy, and so, even though the courses uh command a bit of a premium over, say, like a book, um, I to me like it's, it's always been worth it to to pick those up because if I'm interested in a particular course or whatnot, so, um, I think it works best for like openings and for tactics. I think that for end games and strategic stuff depending on the strategic stuff, it might be okay for end games I feel like it's like the least well equipped for that. But as far as like studying openings, um, and doing like tactics, books like the woodpecker method or um a thousand one chess exercises, those, that series of books etc. Um checkmate patterns, manual, those are it's. It's great for that because you don't have to set up the board or do anything like that.
Nick:So, yeah, I quite like it. I mean there's definitely some traps that I've in lessons that I've learned about how I need to like not autopilot my way through my chessable studying. So you know, don't just like make a move because I'm guessing, but yeah, overall it just like transformed the way I was able to study chess because suddenly I could just take a chess book in my pocket with me anywhere on my phone and study it.
Nick:That was just so nice, and so it's definitely like still in my list of things that I do. Definitely like still in my uh, in my uh list of things that I do. Uh, I just like full disclosure because I'm not trying to advertise for chessable, but I have a 1600 plus day streak so I do it every day. Oh, wow. So, um, it's very, very useful, so that's why I like it so much. And, yeah, once I discovered a course for the black margimer gambit, which I was playing at the time, I just that was it.
Daniel:Sure, so yeah, so we kind of covered your journey up to present day and how you got where you are now with chess. Can you talk about, like, what you're working on these days, like what's important to you? What are you focused on in your chess improvement?
Nick:Yeah, so I'm always still studying, but in the past few few months I took a bit of a break to recatch some of the fire for setting chess after feeling a bit burned out and imbalanced from, uh, with the life and with the life that I have and the game that I was playing. And so about the last like six weeks or so, I've just been studying game collections. So I was going through um max erva's best games and now I'm going through the real paul paul morphy um, and so I've like basically always done that, because to me it's almost a little like leisurely to like read through a player's games and read some annotations and see how they did stuff. Um, totally agree and so. But also I kind of get to learn a lot and for me, like learning the history behind players and the lines that they played is like helpful. I definitely play through um game collections and and then it inspires me to play like those players, um, so I think that that's like that's like a good thing.
Nick:I know some people don't consider game collections to be like studying because you're not actively thinking through every single move, but I I just disagree.
Nick:I think like you get plenty of ideas from from that.
Nick:So, yeah, still doing game collections, um, I play blitz every day, just a couple games here or there, um, and I still have a bunch of daily games going on.
Nick:And then I still go to the club to play tournaments, even as I'm like taking this like kind of like break. But part of that break means I haven't gotten back to regular calculation and tactical study and I haven't done much analysis on a lot of my games and I haven't played a lot of rapid games. But when I'm not taking a break, or what I call a break, stepping back a little bit when I'm full bore, those are the things that I'm typically doing, and so I think to me the most important thing is enjoying the process. So if I don't enjoy it, I cut back until I do enjoy it. When I want to do more, it's going to be there and there will be more time to do that, and the study material isn't going to go anywhere. I have plenty to learn, so I don't feel rushed to get back into studying, so I'm just easing my way back in. So that's what I've been doing lately.
Daniel:Yeah, I love that perspective and I think it's great that you're just willing to say you know what I need to just ease back for a while, for whatever personal reasons those may be, but just at this time in your life it's best for you to just pull back a bit and I like the focus on just making it enjoyable for yourself and if that's, that's the form it takes, that's the form it takes. What I particularly appreciate about that is that you don't have an all-or-none attitude. You know it doesn't have to be well, if I, if I'm not, if I can't go, you know, like at a 10 out of 10 on intensity with chess, and it'll be zero, um, but you know, you just said let's, let's bring it back a few notches and that's, that's where we can live for a while.
Nick:Yeah, yeah, I don't want to burn myself out so completely that I, like I hate the game later, Right? So for me it's just just take a break and whatever goals I have, those goals can, those goals will still be there. And, uh, I'll be better equipped to step towards those goals if I'm I have a better attitude and I'm enjoying what I'm doing. So I don't want to make it a chore.
Daniel:Right. My next question for you is just more out of curiosity on how our skills survive breaks, not because like oh, you should be. I don't mean to imply in this question, like oh, you should be doing enough to sustain them, or isn't that a concern? Maybe it doesn't matter if our skills erode a little bit because we need a break. That's fine. But I am curious do you feel, like, with what you are doing the blitz, the uh game collections and the chess club, um that you're more or less able to maintain your skill?
Nick:I think that, um, I'm basically maintaining the floor of my skill, I'm not gaining any new like peaks, and so I kind of I think it's like healthy to think of your chess skill as a a range. You know it has an upper limit and a lower limit and, um, I just have an expectation that I'm not going to be at the upper limit of what I can play. So I can, I can have good games, but I'm not expecting that I'm going to play my best games at the moment. And so I do think that just keeping the game in my head a little bit, just playing a little bit of Blitz here or there, having some daily games, that I can look at a position and come back to it a little bit later after I've thought about it a little bit and see what kind of inspiration comes up in between those two points in time.
Nick:I think that that actually is really helpful because I can still do calculation during my daily games. I can still do calculation when I'm playing a little bit of Blitz. I can keep my repertoire kind of like fresh in my head, and basic tactical themes aren't going away, right, I'm not. So I definitely think that when you're maintaining, you're mostly like the best or what you should probably expect to maintain. If you're stepping back, it's probably like the floor of your skill, not the, not the peak right, not the ceiling.
Nick:So, I just kind of like have that expectation. But yeah, I, I mean I've only been taking a break for a couple months, but I don't feel like I'm that much worse. I think my Blitz rating shows that I'm not at the top of my game, but I also haven't cratered my rating by like 300 or 400 points.
Nick:I'm hovering around 1,700 instead of maybe 1,850, which might be where I was like three months ago. So I try not to worry about it and I'm still doing stuff. So I don't want to like completely cut out the game. That's why I always do a little bit of something every day just to keep it going.
Daniel:Yeah, that's fantastic. So I know that you're in a kind of a semi-break mode right now with chess Outside of that. Whenever you return to doing more in times previous to this, uh, where did otb classical fit into everything for you? Was it something that you tried to do, uh, regularly, or or just make happen whenever possible?
Nick:it's pretty regular, um, and even now it's still the core of like, I consider it the core of what I do chess wise. So, um, you know, when I'm like reading through a book and I see an idea that I think is kind of interesting, I'm thinking about the next time that I can use that idea over the board, or even thinking about, well, will it be possible that I'll remember this idea if I, if it comes up over the board? So I still take everything that I am learning throughout the week and trying to apply it in actual real life conditions at the, at the tournament, like right now, I'm, uh, I just finished game six of an eight of an eight game, uh, tournament, it's like once a week game like championship at the chess club same chess club I started at like three years ago, uh, and I just finished game game six of that. So I'm definitely still like doing tournaments. I'm just not, uh, trying to like, I'm trying to tamper, uh, not temper, not tamper, trying to temper my expectations of what my score should be or what my performance should be.
Nick:So, but, uh, in any case, yeah, otb is always there. So, um, I'm usually going and playing, I, I would guess, around 50 games a year, between weekend tournaments, which I partake in occasionally, and just the average weekly tournament that we have at the club. And I would say that, you know, at the club I think there's probably 30 to 35 games a year that fit into the classical time scheme, so they're usually 60 plus 15 increment, and so I get to play one of those almost every week. So, yeah, that's still definitely part of it. In fact, even if I wasn't doing any other study, I'd probably still be going to the chess club, just because it's part of my social life too. There's people that I like to see and talk, and since I want to play chess with them, I might as well keep up just a little bit Right, yeah, exactly.
Daniel:little bit Right, yeah, exactly. You know, one of the things I was excited about in having an interview with you, nick, is that you're a wealth of information and resources for people who are at the club level, and you can see that with all of your social media posts on Twitter that you've covered so many books. I don't know. You just know the ropes so well of what to expect with improvement and what that experience is like. So I want to ask you kind of just tap into that collected wisdom over the years. What would you say are maybe one or two of your top insights on how to approach improvement? Or some kind of aha moment like that?
Nick:So I think studying openings is good and I think that a major part of studying openings that may be underrated nowadays is studying games in which those openings are played and, if possible, studying those games in chronological order, because every opening, every good opening, has a pretty storied history, like the rui lopez right, which doesn't really start showing up until steinitz I mean. Uh, I mean anderson kind of like. He kind of like starts things off with like d3, 5d3 in in the rui lopez, but you don't really start to see the theory of the rui lopez like take forward. All at once it progressively becomes more and more of this huge theoretical beast over time. And so studying openings in chronological order kind of teach you, teaches you like what happens when the skill level of players just increase unilaterally, so like not just white is getting better at playing rui lopez, what happens when black starts playing stronger against the rui lopez, and how does white respond to that over time? And so when you study games chronologically, you learn.
Nick:For one, you get chess history, which is good, I think, for your, for your chess, chess culture. But you you also start to learn why particular moves are played, and that is like the best part of learning and opening is why is this move played? Knowing, why am I playing this move, why does this bishop go here, why does this pawn go there? Why do I not castle here? Why do I not play h3? Why do I wait for them to play this move before I play the next move, etc. Stuff like that, which are like practical lessons that you can just learn by studying games in the opening that you're you're learning, and so I think that that that's underrated and that was a big boost to my skills. So, if you're studying an opening, always, always, always, look at the model games. If your course has one, if your course on Chessable does not have model games, then get some model games, look up, get a book, like a Kindle book.
Nick:Open up an analysis board on Lead Chess and punch in the moves and look at all the annotations and see what they have to say about the opening etc.
Nick:Find players who play that opening and learn how they played it Basically.
Nick:Don't just let Chessable be the only thing you learn an opening from, because every move has a story.
Nick:There's a reason why we started playing Bishop e7 and not Knight captures e4 on the sixth move of the Ruy Lopez, and why we started playing bishop e7 and not knight captures e4 on the sixth move of the rui lopez, and why we started playing the, the closed rui lopez and not the open rui lopez. Right and like, that reason starts to become more and more clear in like the early 1900s when um, when, uh, when capo blanca and um and lasker are kind of experimenting with Rui Lopez and trying to make it a better weapon and Black has a lot of good tools and they get so good at beating the open Spanish that everybody starts playing the closed Spanish and then the closed Spanish just kind of comes along and then Marshall tries, the Marshall attack, and theory develops over time and so, studying players over time, studying games over time, you build your own opening book mentally in your head just through understanding the history of the opening, which makes you play the opening better yeah, I love that.
Daniel:I don't think I've heard that emphasized much anywhere else. I mean, I do hear the advice to look at model games, but not in the way that you described it, which is to go through your openings, history chronologically and understand the story behind its progression. That I don't hear much at all about. But I love that and I think that's fantastic advice and I think it takes it away from it just being something to memorize and, as you're saying, it's like reading a book and story about something and that makes it, I don't know when it has that kind of three-dimensionality and there's a I don't know, I'm repeating this word a lot, but, as you said, a story behind the opening and how the moves unfold. I just think it's probably ultimately an easier way to memorize it.
Nick:Ironically, anyhow, yeah, no, really, I think that that really helps. It helps you understand oh, this is why I play that move, rather than you just play a move because the course told you to play it, which isn't bad. But if you know why that move is preferred over another move, then that gives you like. It just enters, it's just in your consciousness as you are playing through that opening. Oh, I know I'm not supposed to make this move, because I've seen in the games what when this player makes this natural move and then a player makes this unexpected move and suddenly they're winning the game, right. So stuff like that is just like I I found it to be like very, very useful. Um, when I'm studying, when I'm studying an opening, opening is to make sure I really understand the story of the history behind it. So that's like the biggest advice I would give if it comes to studying openings.
Daniel:Yeah, that's awesome. I want to loop back to something you talked about earlier because I had a question I meant to ask it, but I'll ask it now. Which is your emphasis where you are currently with chess on studying game collection? Because I'm a big fan of annotated game collections and I assume you're referring to annotated game collections that I'd love to just dive a little bit more into that subject, and the question that I had for you on that was how do you determine which game collections to read? How do you find out which ones are worth your time?
Nick:So I tend to favor more recent game collections because the analysis, if they're annotated, the annotations are going to be up to date and not be outdated, um. But, uh, you know, I at first I was following, uh, dan heisman's like recommended book list, um, and so I picked up a couple of books from that and some, some of them were pretty good. Some of them were not my favorite, but it was still like good um. I feel like people often just recommend um logical chess, move by move, and I think that that one's good um. So just, it just depends on um who recommends it.
Nick:I think for me, and maybe sometimes it depends on who I'm looking for game collections for who I'm studying at the moment, right, so, like, I just finished reading Max Erva's best games a couple weeks ago and I picked up that book because there wasn't really any other book for Max Erva and it was written by Jan Timon and I trust him as an author because I've read other things of his that I really max erva. And it was written by yom timon and I trust him as an author because I've read other things of his that I really enjoy. But also it was just the only option, uh, but it was very obviously written by somebody who you could tell cared about those games. Like, I listened to the perpetual chess podcast episode where ben was interviewing uh, gm timon and um, I think that that just kind of like helped me realize, oh, this, this would be a good one to add to my, to my list of books to go through. So, um, yeah, I think, uh, if it's like an older book written by somebody who didn't play the game, so somebody who's who's commentating on if it's, if it's an older commentary, um, I have found that usually there's a lot of mistakes in those, and so it's not always the most helpful to um, the one caveat to that is if you're reading the player's own notes like, uh, aliokin wrote a lot of his own notes, uh, to his games, and so I have read through about, I think, like 250, maybe 270 Alyokin games. Those had all of his own notes and that kind of helped me to understand his thinking process and so that was useful.
Nick:So if it's a player you're interested in and they wrote their own book, then it's, it's probably always going to be worth reading. And if it's a player that you're interested in and it's written by a modern player who checked the analysis and has analyzed it. Uh, then it just comes down to the quality of annotations and whether or not you like their style of annotations. So, um, yeah, it's. It's hard to give a like a one-size-fits-all rule for it. Um, I just try to pay attention to what's coming out and see if it looks interesting and is this a player that I want to study? And then I go and do it. If it's a player who is a world champion, then usually it's somebody that I want to study. So that's typically how I'll at least start to prod and see if I want to read that particular book.
Daniel:Right, right. Yeah, that's great. Like I said, I've been impressed with the quality of your advice on chess on Twitter. It's very succinct, it's almost like it's coming from a coach, and so I couldn't help but make that connection in my head and wonder if you had ever considered offering coaching.
Nick:Yeah, I actually have occasionally coached some friends a bit here or there, and I can't make it a full-time thing, but I do offer coaching to friends. It's just kind of taken me a while to feel like I'm good enough to coach and to not feel as weird telling people what I think my coaching could potentially be worth. So I think in general I have a didactic streak, I like to talk and I like to teach, and so just on occasion, yeah, I have offered and given some friends coaching to give them some ideas of how they could improve, especially like I'm always trying to like save my friends from quitting chess. So they're like you know, they have like a bad night. They might have tilted for the last like two or three weeks and like I'm about to. You know they, they wish like the flip board button on chesscom allowed them to actually like flip the board over, um, and throw the pieces everywhere, um.
Nick:So that's when I reach out to my hey, you want to like help or whatever. So you know I've helped friends for free to just like, and that's given me a lot to them like, hey, do you want to help or whatever. So I've helped friends for free and that's given me a lot of experience with that. So yeah, actually I do do a little bit of coaching. I just don't. I'm not loud about it, gotcha.
Daniel:So, yeah, the helping friends not quit chess, that just strikes me as a brilliant business idea. That just strikes me as a brilliant business idea. So this service, that's like an emergency chess service when you're thinking of quitting, call Nick and he will talk you down and help you reconnect with your reasons for doing chess.
Nick:That is some help that people I feel like need at some point in their chess life always, yeah, I think everybody's been there where they're feeling like quitting, and that's when you need somebody who can kind of remind you, like how well you're doing. You know, sometimes it's kind of like a pep talk with with some of my friends hey, it's like you played well, you just had this one mistake. And I think that if you just uh, cut yourself a little, a little slack, and just recognize that everybody has bad days, et cetera, sometimes it's stuff like that. When you're tilting, you're usually thinking about all the things you've done wrong and none of the things that you've done right, and so being reminded of all the things that you've done right shows you that where you are is much further than where you actually think you are. You know, like the mistakes that you're making kind of prove that you're better than you were. It's like typically what I've found with my friends who are tilting they just need a break.
Daniel:Yeah, that's great, that's great. Well, I know who to reach out to now if I have a bad time?
Nick:Yeah, of course.
Daniel:But yeah, I love that you help people with that. It's actually an undervalued thing that that we could eat neat sometimes, I think, in our chess lives. So you know, I know you've done this multiple times, but I could only find the most recent thread where you've posted on chess twitter the opportunity to do hot takes, basically on chess, where the deal is reach like you'll do a new hot take thread gets pretty long because people want to hear your takes and I love them all frankly, thank you.
Daniel:Yeah, yeah, there's just a few that I'd like to dive into a little further, which I thought would be a fun thing to do, which I've not really been able to do with any other guest on this podcast, but this is some cool stuff that you've posted. So the first take that I want to quote and talk about is this one you said Fischer was really strong, but I think Karpov would have won had they played in 1975. Now I have no idea where titled players come down on that, that potential competition. That never happened, but that's interesting. Now, I'm very much a fan of Fischer as a player and so I just kind of like sort of blindly, as a fan of his chess, believe that he would have won. But I am curious to hear why you think he would not have won.
Nick:So I think that car pop was just a more universal player than Fisher. So car pop liked to play with space more and like like I feel like Fisher, like Jesse cry of the of chest dojo fame um has a has a wonderful lecture where he talks about um bobby fisher and his like one of bobby fisher's main weaknesses, which was like space and um karpov. Um karpov style is just very different from fisher's um, but I think it's like more universal. I think, like you also see, that carpo was just like very dominant up and until uh kasparov shows up, but then, like when kasparov uh quits fide, like carpov is still dominant uh for a really long time. But I mean karpov um was stronger than spassky by the time um 1975 came around and uh spassky was was pretty good too.
Nick:So, um, I just think that stylistically and this could just be me just showing that like I prefer karpov's ideas because karpov is um uh, I just like the way he plays uh, but I think that he was just a more universal player and he seemed to be very good in every position whereas, like I felt, fisher was like not so good in space positions. So yeah, I think it's just my intuition. Is that, based on what I've seen, karpov would have been strong. Now I think that it's possible that Fisher could also win that. I just think it's more likely that Karpov would have been strong. Now I think that it's possible that Fisher could also win that. I just think it's more likely that Karpov would have won.
Daniel:Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, well, I always lament that we never got to see that matchup, but yeah, I appreciate your perspective on that. That's really interesting. The next tweet that I want to cover from you, and I'll quote it work on your poker face during OTB games, at least if you think you're in a bad position or that you just made a losing move. Now, the reason I like this advice so much is that this is almost never talked about when discussing OTB advice. Now, there's advice for OTB tournaments that's somewhat independent of the chess itself and you know, like how to uh just manage your emotions or your energy or things like that. But what I almost never hear talked about is that poker face idea. So I love that. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Nick:yeah, so this particular advice comes, uh, directly from positive experiences that I've had of playing games and finding out that my opponents made a bad move because they couldn't keep their faces straight. So, uh, so the, the, you know the the inverse advice is look at your opponent's face and, like, pay attention to when they sigh, when they shake their head, when they like look away. You know, um, you can gain a lot of information about how your opponent is feeling about the position just based on how they react. If you just stay and pay attention to that right, um, which may also like, maybe like a good way to avoid the fact that you're like in a bad position and you don't want to let your opponent know, maybe get up from the desk, get up from the table, go away, so they can't stare you in the face to see how you feel about the position.
Nick:So, um, yeah, I think that, um, multiple times, I've found ways to like either save a game or even, um, win a game, based on being tipped off by my opponent's own behavior that they had made a mistake and uh, so that's why I say work on your poker face, because you're going to make mistakes, you just don't need to let your opponent know automatically that you made a mistake. You can make them look for it by not looking at it yourself, right? So yeah, that's just some practical advice. That sometimes people wear the evaluation of their position on their faces, you know, so don't do that you know, yeah, try to try not to do that.
Nick:So if you make a move and you think it's good, then try to keep your face straight. If you make a move and you find out it's bad, keep your face straight. You know, just uh. Try not to show any emotion that might give your opponent a hint that your position is worse than they might think it is.
Daniel:Yeah, yeah, I think that's the best word for it right? It's like you're giving your opponent a hint if you don't keep the poker face. So the third and final tweet of yours that I want to discuss briefly is this one, and I'll add why I think this is significant afterwards, but first let me read it is this one, and I'll add why I think this is significant afterwards, but first let me read it. You said punishing your opponent's opening is usually overrated and overblown. The best way to take advantage of a bad move in the opening is to make good moves that build up your position, while forcing your opponents to respond to threats constantly.
Daniel:Now, the interesting part of that to me is that I feel like from my coach, andres Toth, that I've heard. Well, he always wanted me to make sure I punished bad moves, and so this was a different perspective, and I appreciate that, because I'm not always convinced that there's just the one way to look at things. But he would be disappointed if I didn't seize opportunities. I would tell him like, oh yeah, I could tell that they didn't do a developing move, and so I thought the best way to counter that was by developing myself, which is sort of your advice, quote, and he would often say no, no, no, look for an opportunity to punish it first. Don't just do what you were already going to do, which was to develop. So kind of curious how you would respond to that, because I, I mean, I'm sure there's merit in both.
Nick:Yeah, for sure. So the first thing is, I agree with um. I am anders toff and far be it for me to disagree with him because yeah, he's, uh, he's a very good coach, he's, he knows what he's talking about. Uh, you know, he's rating dwarfs mind by, you know, eight, eight hundred points, officially, actually like infinitely, because I don't have a FIDE rating and he does. But also, he's an IM and I'm not. He's an IM and I am not, but yeah, so actually I agree with him.
Nick:You should look for opportunities to punish like a mistake that an opponent makes. Found is like, oftentimes somebody makes like a move like scandinavian e4, d5, e takes d5, queen captures d5, and then why? It's like, oh, I'm winning because I can play knight c3 and win a tempo on the queen, and suddenly they are freaking out about I should be able to refute this opening because it's inferior, right? Uh, you know the scandinavians like a worse caracan or something, uh, and so this should be, this should be like, quote, punishable and uh, I feel like, um, even like in the YouTube sphere, there will be things like punish the French defense or punish the Karakhan, or punish this line, and it makes it sound like there's like a secret sauce to defeating moves like whether good or bad, and usually there isn't the best way to respond to moves like that is the same old advice that you just have to remember. That still applies even when your opponent isn't playing by the rules or going by principles. So develop your pieces, etc. And get your king to safety castle, obviously, and control the center. Just ideas like that are the way that you so, following principles, I think, is the best way to punish a bad play.
Nick:And but Andres also says and I agree with him when he says, like, calculation trumps principles and so if there is something that you want to punish, you need to calculate to see if there's something you can do to punish it. And very often you'll find that if a player breaks principles, it is punishable. If you calculate and find, find your way through right, but suppose you don't calculate it and you still make normal moves a lot of the time, your position is still going to be better than theirs and it's going to be, uh, completely playable and you usually still will have like a positional plus anyway. So, um, I feel like the, the concept or like just the language of punishment makes it sound like, uh, um, there's more promise to the idea of, um, you know, beating somebody because they made bad moves, when usually the best way to like respond to bad moves is to just play moves that are good and so um oh yeah, like I agree with andres when he says, like calculate it out, right, don't just don't hand wave your way through the position.
Nick:You definitely need to like check to see if a move um leads up to a tactic, right. So don't just make a move without calculating. Always look at, look at what you can do. But I think just a mindset, uh, just get out of. I think get out of the mindset of I have to punish this move because it broke a principle, because a lot of the times, like your opponent can still kind of just get away with it. You know what I mean. You have to be careful, yeah, I mean like the, the carol con should be punishable because black is gonna play c5 anyway. So they might as well play it um later and not play c6.
Nick:But you can't really punish it. It's that it's like that good of a move. Black can just spend that time um solidifying their position and everything's okay. And then same with the french defense. You can't punish the french bishop, right? That's just uh, that's just an imbalance. That's going to be part of the part of the game. And if you try to punish black for playing the french defense, usually they end up just getting you on the queen side and then they break in the center with f6 and then it's over anyway. So, uh, you know, just just be careful with your attitude. Like every opening has has the right to exist, um, and it's up to you to prove prove that player wrong. But if you just think that, saying that that opening is bad and I'm just gonna punish you for it, uh, and then you don't punish them, it just ends up making you look like the dunce. So, you know, be careful. Yeah, that's, that's the thing.
Daniel:Yeah, I think that's yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it, because, um, I think the word punish does maybe carry with it this idea that there may be more there than there really is for you exactly gain. Um, it's not as though you know, if they move slowly, you know, like in terms of development or something, if they're a bit slow on that, that that means you're automatically going to go up a pawn or more. Now you know that it's it could be a slow burn advantage.
Nick:Yeah which is just as legitimate, right, it's just as legitimate to like have a space advantage than it is to, um, to like maybe, like win a pawn or something like. If you have a, if you can like squeeze your opponent and that's the way that you win the position, then that's, that's legitimate. You don't have to have a tactical shot, which is usually what I think people are thinking of as punishment. They're thinking of a tactical shot that wins out. Right, and usually it takes a series of mistakes for a tactical shot to pop up, so be careful yeah, yeah, right, yeah, no.
Daniel:That's. That's fantastic advice and, I think, a great way to frame it. So the last big topic that I want to talk about with you, nick, is your Substack account, which is called Nick Plays Chess, and for people listening, we'll have a link in the show notes for that if they want to check it out, which I definitely recommend. In your Substack, you offer book and course reviews, as well as some recaps of your tournament games. So, yeah, I just want to know a little bit about that. What motivated you to create your sub stack?
Nick:Yeah, so NickPlaysChess is just another outlet for me to talk about chess and because I always want to talk about it. But specifically, if you're like me, the problem with chess material and chess, studying chess and like looking for things to learn is that we have an an embarrassment of riches. There's a lot of good stuff out there that you might want to read and learn. I mean, everybody recommends how to reassess your chess, or I mean, nowadays people don't really recommend my system, but I think that the my system edition that I, the fast track edition that I just reviewed, I think that one's actually pretty good. But there's like two or three books that everybody always recommends. But then there's a bunch of books that are a bit more specialized that you're not necessarily going to have as many voices on because it's so specialized. So, like game collections, um, not everybody knows, uh, which game collection is like which morphe collection you should get, or um, which uh aliokin collection, or which books on capo blanca. I mean, there's been like thousands of not thousands, maybe thousands, but but there have been many books written about Capablanca. Which ones should you read, et cetera. And so these are questions that I had to ask. These are the things where I read reviews and had to figure some things out. But I'm a player in the 21st century, I'm a class B USCF player. I'm around 1600 um, um uscf and so around, like maybe 1600 fee day on a good day, but um, all of that to say um, there's a lot of book reviews by players who are like gms or master level and um, those book reviews are awesome, but I'm not sure that they're necessarily reflective of the things that a GM learned from that and what you could learn from that if you're not a GM. And so I like talking about this is why I looked at this book. I wanted to read it because it had these games in it, or have this player playing this game. This is what I learned from it. This is what I think you can take away from this book and whether or not I think it's worth picking up, and so to me that's kind of like important.
Nick:I also want to like support members of the the chess content creation community who aren't like big names, right, so like people who are just trying to to make a living off of like the chess content that they produce. Was this content worth looking at? Is it worth other people buying, et cetera. Was this content worth looking at? Is it worth other people buying, etc. And, um, I think that that's I, part of it's like to support the community and part of it's to like support other people's journey to become better players. Um, some of it's pretty like selfishly motivated too.
Nick:I post my recaps of my tournament games because it's a way to make sure that I analyze the game and, um, and I kind of put myself out there a little bit, and also, sometimes it's nice to show off a cool win that I had, you know, kind of like reminds me. This is why I do it, cause I really enjoyed winning. So, yeah, but a lot of people have questions hey, is this book good or whatnot? Or can I like even like like a big book, like big as in popular, like, um, how to win at chess by by levy rosman, like I wanted to review that because I wanted to be able to tell people whether or not they could get it for their like their chess enthusiastic child or adult or whoever, uh, somebody who's really getting in a chess and just wants one book to help them get that get, get to where they want to be, um, and I think, I think that's a great book, but I wouldn't be able to recommend it unless I actually like read through and read it and then I really want to like show people. No, I actually think it's this good. So I read a review about it, um, and so, yeah, part of it is just like it's an outlet for me. I like to do it for for myself, for me reasons, but also I could benefit other people, so why not? Why not post them publicly for other people to read? Yeah, I think that's it.
Nick:I and also like the cool thing about like chess books is, I feel like the like the chess book people who read chess books.
Nick:That community is pretty, um, pretty uh, like open and um accepting and like encouraging uh for all sorts of people to get into chess books. And I know chess books are kind of like a weird thing nowadays because, like, people can learn from youtube, which is like a completely legitimate avenue. But, um, I still, I still think it's best. If you want to like like I don't think you're going to get better than a game collection. That's like written down and printed, I think that. Or like maybe on kindle, but I think like stuff like that is best, like like it's still like a really highly concentrated content of a particular subject matter that you want to read and understand definitely right chess books. So that's why I post reviews about them. I want people to know what I thought was good and what I thought was bad and hopefully it helps them make a choice about what they want to read or what they want to get for somebody else.
Daniel:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those are great reasons for doing it and your content is fantastic. I went through some of it and I'm just really impressed with how thorough you are and the quality of insights that you offer. So, yeah, I definitely recommend people check out your Substack. There is one other question I forgot. Before we dive into like my fun rapid questions, there's one other question I wanted to ask you which is basically just looking ahead for you personally, in your own chess future, so to speak. You know, I know we discussed that right now you're kind of like in a downshift mode, but just looking ahead over the next year or two, I know you have, you know, still have ambitious goals to become a class, a player and possibly beyond the way. I want to ask it is like what, what motivates you at this stage to keep getting better?
Nick:you know, um, it's just kind of funny just was like the first thing that I really felt um competitive about and like I could never, like I I lacked, I lacked the empathy to understand why people were so into sports for a really long time, up until I like realized that I was getting excited and trying to tell my friends about this match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, uh, realizing they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Nick:But I'm really excited about these people who, like know nothing about me and what they do in their game somehow affects my life, um, and so, because of that, I I think that, uh, now I I understand it a little bit better.
Nick:So a lot of like my motivation for, like getting good at chess is, like I think chess is just hard, uh, it's hard to get good at it's, um, like it really is hard, and I think people underestimate how hard it is, and so it's a, it's a personal challenge to me, because I've never really felt competitive about anything before, like, like I do about chess, um, and it would just be a really cool goal to me, right, like I would love to make national master by 2031, which seems really far away, cause I think like at this point, to make NM I'd have to gain.
Nick:If I'm doing the math correct in my head, I have to gain almost a hundred points per year, reading wise, in order to get there, and obviously no journey is going to be a smooth uphill climb. So I'm not even sure that I'll even be able to make that goal, but it's. It's a pretty ambitious goal, but I've never had a goal like that before, never really felt like motivated to do it. But I'm just particularly like, internally self-motivated to become good at chess, to do it, but I'm just particularly like, internally self-motivated to become good at chess. Uh, and which is funny, because become good at chess because, like, being honest, like I'm not that bad, I'm just not as good as like the people that I'd like to be as good as.
Nick:so so yeah, I think, uh, just coming up in the next like year, um, I just want to keep playing tournament games. Um, if I don't make class a at the end of 2024, which was my goal, um, which I think is very unlikely I'll reach 20,. Uh, I'll reach 1800 by the end of 2024. It's going to be my goal for 2025. And maybe maybe beyond that.
Nick:Um, I've gained a little bit of perspective from taking a bit of a break from chess, so, like I feel like I can focus on studying some other things, like I might study it opening here or there, because, like, I need to feel like, uh, I might need to plug a hole in my ship, but usually I'm pretty convinced that my problem is I just need to do calculations and tactics more, and that's the thing that I haven't been working on.
Nick:So that's what I plan on doing when I get deeper into studying chess again playing longer, playing rapid games not just online blitz, but playing rapid games and analyzing them and, um, doing more calculation and tactics, um, particularly calculation, and um, maybe looking at some, uh, some more strategy books, like specifically strategy, not just like chess player game collections, which I'm definitely still looking through, but you know, I think after I'm done studying Morphe, who I'm restudying at the moment unless another Ali Oken book comes out I might take a bit of a break from studying master game collections, um, with with a couple here or there I might I might take a look at but and go back to like studying strategy, just kind of like in the abstract, um, and so that'll probably happen next year and then I'll just keep playing tournament games and trying to become the best player that I can and, um, yeah, I mean it's just uh, I mean in a certain sense, like chess is kind of it's just a thing I do.
Nick:I'm a chess player, like neil bruce says, like it's part of my identity. So, um, it's just something that I do because I'm a chess player, so I'm just gonna keep doing it chess players.
Daniel:Yeah, chess players play exactly right, yeah all right, so let's dive into uh, my final segment here of some fun rapid questions which I'm sure you're familiar with from listening to previous episodes. First question for you knights or bishops? Bishops, all the way.
Nick:All the way. Yeah, I mean, a knight is cool, but bishops are better.
Daniel:Right, right, I would answer the same way. So what's your favorite time control?
Nick:90 minutes with a 30 second increment.
Daniel:We're two for two here. That would be my answer as well. So I just love hearing that. But this is. I know I'm supposed to be asking you the questions. I can't help but get excited when someone has the same answer as I do. Of course yeah, who is your favorite player of all?
Nick:time. This is really hard for me to say. Sometimes I really like Eliokio can, but sometimes I feel like he's like a little too rigid. Um like, just like, from reading his analysis, I feel like he's too rigid. He's really hard on people like richard rady, which I think rady is like one of my favorite people to study. It's it's. This is a really hard question for me. Favorites are hard to pick. I think so far, the player whose games I find the most beautiful would be Tal's games Tal Tal yeah, tal yeah, misha yeah. So his games, I think, are just the most beautiful that I've seen. Awesome.
Daniel:If you could play any of the top players in the world right now, who would it be?
Nick:Probably Vishyanand Nice.
Daniel:Yeah, I don't think I've had someone answer him yet.
Nick:He's just so chill, he just seems like a chill guy, so I don't know.
Daniel:He seems cool. Yeah, I mean, aside from his awesome talent, he's the ultimate in sportsmanship too, right? Yeah, so he'd be really nice. Plus, there's that subway commercial. So if you could hang out with any chess celebrity for an evening, who would it be?
Nick:if it's just for one evening um town top.
Daniel:Okay, why? Why him I?
Nick:think, to just be a fly on the wall and to just see what he's like. He just seemed like he led a very interesting life, very bohemian, um, so I wouldn't necessarily like join him for all of the like, celebrations and imbibing of everything that he partook of. I would just want to be a witness there, unto gotcha gotcha what's your favorite opening as white?
Nick:this is another hard one. Uh, I waffle between the english opening, um, particularly the kingside, fianchetta, with uh early g3, and uh, the spanish and the like the slow italians with uh d3 and c3 what's your favorite? Opening is black uh, it's funny, these are gonna be like the complete opposite. Uh, so like the two knights defense, uh, or the martial attack, um, or maybe the banco gambit cool, and what's your favorite way to study or work on your chess?
Nick:I like to have a computer and a book and an analysis board, but I also like using chessable on my phone.
Daniel:What's your chess vice meaning for those? I mean? I think you know what I mean, but for anyone who's a little unclear on what I mean, I mean something along the lines of playing too much Bullet, watching too many chess like non-instructional chess, youtube videos, things like that.
Nick:Definitely getting sucked into Blitz after a bad loss. Like a bad Blitz loss, like I lose a game in blitz and I'm like, oh, I'm not gonna let that happen like this. Like today this morning I was playing in evans gambit and, uh, it was going awesome and then I just completely misplayed it because I was low on time and it frustrated me so badly that I lost that. I ended up playing like four, four more games to make up for it, which is fine in this case, because I did pretty good in those games, but when it doesn't go well, it just like compounds, you know. So, yeah, that's like my worst habit is playing immediately after losing something that I don't think I should have lost.
Daniel:Oh, I hear that, yes, if a chess genie existed and could grant you any one chess wish, what would you wish for?
Nick:uh, I would wish for everyone to realize how beautiful the game of chess is. Um, because I wish people could see chess like I see chess. I love that.
Daniel:So that includes in your answer, I assume, even people who don't currently play chess.
Nick:Yeah, absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah, Especially especially people who don't play chess right now.
Daniel:Yeah, that's a great answer. I absolutely love that answer, maybe one of my favorites that I've heard. Well, nick, it was such a pleasure chatting with you for the past hour or so. This is something I've been looking forward to for a long time. I've always known I wanted to have you on the show, so I'm glad it finally happened.
Daniel:And yeah, and you offer tons of great advice which I know people listening will benefit from. Yeah, like I said, you continue to be an inspiration for me as someone who is. You know, your passion for the game, your love of the game, inspires me and so, yeah, just honored to have you on the show.
Nick:So thank you very much, yeah, thanks for having me on.
Daniel:Thanks for listening. This has been a production of my business, adult Chess Academy, and that has a website with the same name. If you want to look for it, you can also find me being way too active on Twitter by searching my username Lona underscore chess. See you next week.
