What is the point of winning with an opening trap
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. As always, I am your host, Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I wanna talk about, oh, my hated opening traps

And this is not only about opening traps, but really more about a right mindset of approaching chess. So no matter if you love them, I don't hope you love... No, no, no, no. Okay. For all of us that hate opening traps, this is still important even if you already know that you hate opening traps. And if you still love them, hmm, I don't have advice for you.

I'm sorry

Because I generally don't get the point of winning with an opening trap. Now, this might, , sound weird, but, like, I understand, like, you can win the game, but what is the point of it? Let's put aside that it will stop working [00:01:00] quicker than all the clickbaiters and people who sell that trash to you, like to admit

But when you repeat a memorized line you learned from a YouTube video or a course or whatever, and then you win the game, you didn't do anything on your own, right? The only thing you did is memorize. Like, what reason do you have to be happy? You won the game, your ELO went up. But

How was your experience? You didn't learn anything. You didn't use any critical decision-making skills. But who the heck cares? Because you don't make money from chess. You don't win prizes. This is just a hobby, and nobody cares about your rating. And what you're doing with an opening trap is you're just inflating your rating without learning anything or getting better.

Even if it would be, like, the secret hack, I still don't understand it. , , there are websites that are saying, "Hey, you can win without thinking." , That sounds terrible. Well, , what do you mean? That's, cheating. And, , it [00:02:00] feels like it is the similar mindset that obviously it's much more extreme to cheat.

I don't wanna say that people using opening traps are cheating, but, it is a similar mindset of, like, you don't have anything to be proud of, but the only thing you value is the outcome, that you win, right? But deep down, especially if we talk about cheaters, they are very insecure because deep down they understand that it's not them, right?

And so opening traps, like, you're just inflating your rating, and it goes bigger than that. It's not only about opening traps. It's like, if you just care about winning, if you only, you know, want this rating to go up, something deep down in you will understand that you're not worth that rating if you're not worth it.

You don't have anything to be proud of, right? The things that we can be truly proud of are, like, you know, going through a difficult game, losing it, and recovering from it, learning from it, okay? Doing a very hard calculation and figuring out something during a game. That's something to be [00:03:00] proud of.

If you win or not, that, that's just, , the consequence of playing well. That's how it should be. And I'm making this episode because I did a poll on my YouTube audience And I hoped that, you know, my YouTube audience would be, aware of mindset issues, you know, kind of like, um, not liking opening traps.

But 39%, so I asked, "Would you rather win with an opening trap or lose an interesting game?" And 39% of the people said they would prefer winning with an opening trap, 52% said lose the interesting game, 9% were just checking results. And now it's so obvious as I ask this question that from my perspective, the right answer would be lose the interesting game, that I believe that there are quite a few people that clicked lose the interesting game that actually feel emotionally like they would prefer winning with an opening trap And what makes it even worse is if you go check the comments below that poll, because [00:04:00] some people really have no capacity of thinking that anyone in their right mind and being honest would click lusty interesting game.

There were comments like, quote, "52% are lying," end of quote. Or, "All right, I'll say it, people who picked interesting game aren't playing real chess tournaments and are just virtue signaling."

And that's crazy, , and I hope you listening this, you are squarely in my camp. But then why am I recording this? It's because it should be a reminder to us that I believe everybody has some part of that fixed rating-focused mindset inside. I talk about this a lot that I, you know, didn't have the right mindset when I was a professional player.

In my mind, it was like, "Okay, because I'm a professional player, I need to value the result more," and so that's why I say, hey, for amateurs, this is even more absurd because who cares about your results? At least I could say, well, my money depends on my result. And [00:05:00] still in that case, I firmly believe now that the right way is to focus on, you know, enjoying the process, doing the right things, and the results are the results.

They are there or not, but I as a professional player, to make more money long term, I need to improve more, and so I need to, you know, be okay with losing games, learning from them, and getting better

And maybe for you it's like you hate opening, , traps, I had a student, replying to the YouTube video I made about this saying, "Hey, it was a good reminder because I usually offer draws in winning positions." This is a similar mindset. It's, less bad than opening traps, but it's the similar mindset, is you're so scared of losing a game, right?

That you do everything not to do it. But you destroy the experience of it. You're feeling stressed. When you're winning, you're always thinking, "Should I offer a draw? Should I not?" You know, you're trying to avoid an outcome instead of focusing on the experience, on just doing the best you can

And so I just wanted to [00:06:00] record this episode to say no matter how small or big part of this results-focused mindset you have, living in a results-oriented environment will always push this part out, right? We sadly live in a world where, most people think mostly it's about results. It's about money, it's about fame, it's about status, it's about, all, you know, all these things that m- might matter to a certain extent, but it is not about them.

It's not about these things

And so realizing that your chess improvement story is more about growth, learning, pushing yourself, doing hard things, having fun while getting a challenge, you know, all of these things. Realizing that is great, but that's the first step. And then you need to continuously remind yourself of the right approach, because from outside, what you'll get is always this energy of, your rating matters, your rating defines you.

If you're below [00:07:00] 1,000, you're stupid. If you're this, you're that, you're that. Like, that's all the nonsense that we all the time hear. And even if we don't fully believe it ourselves, we will have a small part that believes it, and it's so hard. So we repeatedly, you can, take five minutes a day to write down, "Why am I doing chess?

I do it to enjoy. I do it to grow. I do it to push myself," right? It's like these daily reminders, these small things that are so important for us. And I usually get to, talk about these things when something in my life was, I was too focused about the outcome and not enjoying this experience enough.

That's what makes me think of these things. Then I see it in my students. I'm like, "Oh no, I also got there again." And we gotta remind ourselves over and over and over again And it's so important to just accept that losses are part of the journey. We are the weird ones. If we wanna enjoy the journey, if we wanna focus on growth, if we wanna do the right thing, we are the [00:08:00] weird ones out.

A majority will not get there, and we don't need to try to convince them. So this is not, an episode trying to convince people that play opening traps to stop playing opening traps. , This is an episode for the people that realize playing opening traps is the wrong thing, but have a small part of them, in them that you would say, "Hmm, I would like to just have that win instead of having to suffer for it."

That's the thing that we need to kind of consciously remind ourselves. It is about a journey. It is about a process. And if you wanna read about growth mindset versus fixed mindset, or process-based mindset versus results mindset, there really is one book I can highly recommend. It is Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Just a fabulous read. Anything by Carol Dweck on the mindset is very, very fascinating and interesting. And you'll realize this doesn't only apply to chess, this applies to anything you do in your life. And when we [00:09:00] slowly can work on bringing more of that growth mindset out, it's not only we improve more, but we can enjoy the journey so much more.

So, here is to many more interesting losses

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