I Call It The Infant Survival Swimming… For Chess Players… Tweak #
after the famous infant survival swimming taught to infants in order for them to quickly learn how to swim. How exactly does this work? Well the infants are simply tossed in the pool while the mothers plug their ears, close their eyes and shout “lah lah lah lah lah I’m not listening!” for ten minutes. At the end of the ten minutes the babies that are still floating get to live… or something along those lines. The tweak I’m about to show you sort of follows this logic but far less gruesome.
Before I show you this trick I want to emphasize that this does not involve any training, requires no knowledge of opening tricks, learning advanced tactics or anything remotely related to studying more chess which, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, is the most boring part of chess. We all just want to be better players without putting in any work. Well, I gotchu!
Here’s what you do #
Head over to your chess.com account, log in and navigate to the Play Online page with the board on it.
From here you want to click on the settings icon (the little gear) in the top righthand corner of the chess board.
Play tab. Notice the Incoming and Outgoing settings
-25 to infinity
… AND BEYOND!
Well that’s it. Now watch your chess.com rating climb like a mountain goat.
Why Does This Work? #
What’s the wise old saying? “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” Well essentially this little settings tweak gets you in the right room by limiting your opponents to only those that are a mere 25 elo points lower rated than you while on the other end you are potentially paired with the infamous DrDrunkenstein himself (however unlikely).
Now, you might think that if you’re more likely to get paired with players that are better than you that you’ll be losing elo more often… and that can’t be good, right? Wrong. Here’s the sneaky little caveat: the elo system works in a way that if you lose to an opponent that is significantly higher rated you only lose a small amount of elo, but if you lose to an opponent than is significantly worse than you you lose a lot of elo which can set you back quite a ways.
Examining the other scenario, if you beat a significantly lower rated player you hardly gain any rating points, but, and this is the main point here, if you beat an opponent who is significantly higher rated you gain a lot of elo.
By minimizing elo on the negative end of the pairing spectrum and maximizing elo on the positive end you’re reducing the possibility of losing big while at the same time increasing the possibility of winning big.
This settings tweak is essentially like putting your foot on the gas. You go full throttle acceleration, all rocket boosters engaged.
As a counter argument to my swiss cheese logic, you might think “…Yeah sure. That… sort of makes sense, except for the fact that I’ll just lose far more often”. This is simply not true. The great thing is that because of the random nature of the pairings, you don’t notice that you’re playing stronger opponents more than you’re playing weaker opponents or even opponents that are around your skill. You’re brain just gets acclimated to playing stronger opponents by being forced to play better. Inadvertently, and without notice you’ll just end up improving. The other point I want to make is that you rarely get paired with folks that are more than 200 points higher rated anyways because those folks don’t want to risk losing big either.
My Recommendations #
Because this tweak is very pronounced when you’re just starting out, for fresh accounts this should be the first and single most important setting you should change. Not only will it help you improve naturally the way I way described above, but your rating will ‘artificially’ climb faster due to the nature of the elo system. I can with full honesty say that this little tweak has singlehandedly improved my rating by one to two hundred points. I will personally kick myself in the testes if I ever forget to use this during any speedrun. And I have