How to Beat Your Friends at Chess
Putting the Pareto Principle to work. Also: a chess lesson with Ryan Nicodemus!
Happy new year! I hope everyone is dressed appropriately.
I wanted to kick off 2025 with a service-y piece that should still fit within the remit of this newsletter — i.e. writing about chess that can apply to how you think about any hobby, be it playing soccer, looking at birds, or… extreme ironing. I also think this should be useful for anyone ranging from a pretty-good chess player, like ~1600 chess.com (aka me), to someone who merely knows the rules but might one day find themselves sitting across a chess board from their six-year-old nephew and doesn’t want to get their ass kicked.
Personally, I have been trying to implement this idea in my own chess, and I’ve seen solid gains from it. Over the last three months or so, I’ve managed to gain 200 points on chess.com, rising like a phoenix from a soul-crushing nadir of 1434 all the way up to my current 1653 rating. While this is still short of my peak of 1697, which I hit back in February of 2024, it’s still pretty good for me. (Even when I hit that peak, I only spent a month over 1600.) My goal in 2025 — holding this very lightly — is to work my way toward 1800, which, at least according to the Chess Dojo rating conversions, would be more in line with my OTB rating.
So what’s my secret? Did I finally discover the magical opening that, as every YouTube video promises, will CRUSH my opponents? Did I make the right series of sacrifices to the chess gods? (Caissa, in case anyone is wondering.) Or did my son start sleeping through the night? That third part definitely has to do with it! But there’s something else.
First, how this idea came about. Last month, I gave a chess lesson to my friend and collaborator Ryan Nicodemus. Ryan and I have had a constant game of daily chess going on chess.com dating all the way back to July. With a rating in the 700s, Ryan is considerably less experienced than I am, but he’s a smart guy who wants to improve, so he understands that playing people who are stronger than you is a good way to do that. He’s also gotten a lot better over the time we’ve been playing!
I’m going to post the video of that lesson at the bottom of this newsletter — the quality’s a little rough, as I made the galaxy-brained decision to record it using the chess.com Classroom VC tech rather than, say, Zoom. But I still think it’s a pretty fun and illuminating glimpse into how to analyze your mistakes and understand where you need to improve.
That was the first chess lesson I’ve ever given, though, and it made me realize something. When people talk about what makes someone good at chess, they say a lot of different things. One idea — which I’ve been hearing going all the way back to childhood — is that chess is all about how many moves ahead you can think. The best chess players, according to this model, can see, like, a million moves ahead.
This isn’t… wrong. Alexander Alekhine, for example, was notorious for calculating an insane number of moves into the future. But there’s an apocryphal quote, often attributed to either Richard Réti or José Raúl Capablanca, which states that, when asked how many moves ahead they could calculate, the mysterious chess master replied: “One… but it is always the correct one.” (See this Edward Winter piece for a fascinating exploration of who did or didn’t say this.)
I’ve talked about this in past newsletters: every position has its own unique meaning. What came before doesn’t matter; what will come is uncertain. Even if you play perfectly, even if you play the best move — anything apart from a forcing move with only one response — your opponent can play whatever they want. If you’re so locked in to your perfect calculation, how you’re going to win a pawn at the end of this five-move sequence, you might miss them hanging their knight. And God forbid your calculations were wrong — that the fourth move in this seven-move chain wasn’t quite as forced as you thought. The more complicated you make it, the more likely this kind of outcome is.
Let’s agree, then: how good you are at chess isn’t necessarily about how far ahead you can calculate. That’s an advanced skill, one that can have huge benefits at higher levels, but that isn’t necessarily going to take you from a beginner to a capable novice.
What if you just want to beat your friends at chess? What should you focus on then?
Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle? It “states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.” These causes are called “the vital few.” It’s a cornerstone of self-help, managerial, and productivity thinking. Is it some magical law of nature, as it is often treated? Not necessarily! But I do think the general idea is valid: a minority percentage of your efforts will result in a majority of your returns.
In chess, and pretty much any other hobby, this has a pretty simple application: identify the ~20% and focus on it. Even if this doesn’t maximize your total returns, it will maximize your returns as they relate to time invested — and that’s what most of us, with limited resources available to devote to any given thing in our lives, are looking for.
Okay: got it. Focus on the 20%. Now we have to identify the 20%. We already understand that the 20% is not calculation, unless you’re a GM whose fundamentals are already rock solid. (If you are this person, and you are reading this newsletter… let’s talk?) So what is it?
Back to my lesson with Ryan. Across all of our games, I noticed that they usually came down to the same mistake: Ryan would either a) fail to defend an attacked piece, or b) fail to equalize material when he had the chance. Most interestingly, he often did this because he was trying to follow other chess strategies: he wanted to control the center, or he wanted to make his pieces more active. But by trying to observe those tenets of chess, he was overlooking a far more essential one.
Then I thought of how I learned chess. I largely taught myself using YouTube videos, in particular those of IM John Bartholomew, who is terrific. John has a series called “Chess Fundamentals,” where he walks you through different ideas that he considers fundamental to good chess. Conveniently, there are five of these, which means one of them is equal to 20%… which should, according to our magical Pareto Principle, produce 80% of our results. (You know. Loosely.) And that lined up with what I was thinking.
So if you want one rule for getting better at chess, one idea that will help you beat your friends and nieces and nephews and dad and boss and Death, here it is: defend your pieces.
Let’s start by understanding what I mean when I say “defending your pieces.” A piece is defended when it has at least one other piece that can take back if it is taken. But this is still pretty vague — Daniel Naroditsky (my other favorite chess YouTuber) actually refers to these as a type of undefended piece, what he calls a Type 2 undefended piece, because it’s easy to deflect the defender. A piece is truly defended if it is protected by a pawn.
There are nuances here, obviously. To go more in-depth on the nitty-gritty chess of it, I’d recommend watching John’s video on the subject:
But I strongly believe that, if you want to focus on one thing when you play chess, one strategy that will help you win over any other — aside from the very basic fact that you need to develop your pieces, and castle as soon as possible — you should obsessively defend your pieces. Don’t worry about openings. Don’t fixate on attacking. Don’t get hung up on controlling the center. DEFEND YOUR PIECES.
Why does this work? Because chess hinges on material. (And checkmate — but that’s a slightly different discussion.) Each side wants to take the other’s material. If you can make it more difficult for your opponent to take your material, then chances are that, driven by their fixation on capturing your pieces, they will take bigger and bigger risks to do so. When they do, you pounce.
All of this essentially boils down to “let your opponent make mistakes before you do.” But that isn’t good advice, because it isn’t actionable. “Defend your pieces” is actionable. Whenever you can, make sure a pawn is protecting your knights, bishops, rooks, and queen. When in doubt about where to place these pieces, place them where a pawn can protect them. If all of your pieces are already protected and you don’t know where to move them, then use them to protect each other. Overprotect. Protect, protect, protect.
“But wait,” you say. “How can I win if I don’t take any of the other person’s pieces? If I just protect, protect, protect, won’t we end up in a draw, at best?” Well, this has an attacking component as well. Always scan your opponent’s position for unprotected pieces (and pawns), and then attack those. If you defend your pieces well enough, particularly against inexperienced players, then they will, at some point, just hang material of their own, which you can scoop up without having to have devised some brilliant tactic or aggressive strategy.
Remember: Loose pieces drop off. LPDO. If you can keep this one idea in mind while you play, I bet you’ll improve immediately.
So there you have it: a chess New Year’s Resolution. Defend your pieces. DYP. Part of why I like this so much as advice for beginners (and even intermediate players) is that it’s simple and concrete. Calculation, thinking many moves ahead, is incredibly hard; it’s an advanced skill. You wouldn’t start trying to throw 25 yards down the field before you could throw five or 10 with accuracy; you wouldn’t start trying to shoot threes before you could make a layup; you wouldn’t focus on firing shots from outside the box if you could get near the net.
And other “principles,” like controlling the center, are rather abstract: after all, in the era of hypermodern chess, we know that there are many ways of controlling the center.
Defending your pieces is the 20% that will give you 80% of returns. Compared to this, just about everything else is less important. (Except maybe tactics. And checkmate. But again, these are subjects for another newsletter.) As the guys at the Growth Equation (highly recommended) like to put it: “don’t major in the minor.” In a nice little synchronicity, the same day I wrote this, I was listening to the Perpetual Chess podcast with GM-elect Mark Heimann, and Mark said those exact words about his extremely minimalist chess study: “don’t major in the minor.” I’d never heard this phrase applied to chess before, so I’m taking it as a good sign.
And if you aren’t a chess player, the applications should still be obvious: make it one of your resolutions to identify a 20% activity in some area of your life and commit to getting better at it, understanding that this is how you will create outsized returns without having to try and improve at everything.
How might a writer “defend their pieces?” Well, they’d probably focus on structure: if you can refine and reinforce the structure of a piece of writing, it’s undoubtedly going to be better than if you just blast through it without thinking about the whole. This has been a problem for me in the past, and I know that when I take the time to think structurally, it solves problems I didn’t even know I had.
If you try this in your own game and it works, let me know! If you see how this principle can be applied to other sports or parts of your life, let me know! If you have questions or thoughts or suggestions, let me know!
And here’s the video of my lesson with Ryan. Enjoy!