Is My Brain Lazy?

Is calculation largely a matter of willpower, or mental discipline? This question haunts my attempts to improve at chess. I ask this when I am calculating and visualizing a sequence of moves. “I take X, he takes Y, I take Z,” I think, for example, and then it feels like a white curtain or gray fog has overtaken my brain and made further thinking impossible. But is it really impossible? When this happens I fear that I am just being lazy, that if I exerted enough willpower I would be able to calculate the sequence further. Of course, I am not talking about grandmaster-level calculation here, but during the recent Candidates Tournament I was surprised and relieved to hear GM David Howell say that he was glad he wasn’t the one who had to do the calculation involved in a position that had been reached. To me this seemed to imply that he at least feels extended calculation to be extremely onerous, although we know that he would likely be up to the task. 

The only other experience I’ve had with that white curtain/gray fog feeling is when listening to speech in a foreign language that is at or just above my proficiency level in it. I will have been conversing adequately for a certain period of time, when suddenly a switch appears to go off and my brain just will not parse any more. I may catch some of the prominent words in the sentence, but a mental fogginess prohibits me from putting the pieces together any longer. The feeling is similar to what goes on when I am playing chess, except that with foreign languages it seems to be a matter of exhaustion after a period of successful communication. Certainly in chess I become mentally tired if a game goes on longer than I am used to, but this lazy brain syndrome can happen long before I have played enough chess to have brain-fatigue. 

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In addition to playing games and analyzing them, lately I have been doing the lichess Puzzle Streak as a warm up. My coach and I do it together sometimes, too, and he makes me say out loud the string of moves necessary to solve the puzzle. One thing that has helped me a lot when we do them together is that, when I get to where I can’t think anymore, he just calmly tells me it’s ok, start over from the beginning. He urges me, when doing a puzzle on my own, not to make a move until I have figured out the whole sequence. I know he’s right, but that means calculating and visualizing, and (I whine), it’s so much easier just to make that first check and see where the pieces end up. When I do the latter, I inevitably get some puzzles wrong. But I do mostly know better than to just make a check in an actual game without at least calculating my opponent’s possible responses.

I usually walk my dog before starting the chess puzzles portion of my morning routine. Sometimes during the walk I actually think to myself, “Today, I will be careful when doing my puzzles and not move until I have made a thorough calculation.” And then when I sit down and face that first puzzle, I either don’t try to calculate beyond one move or do so half-heartedly when I see it requires more than a couple of moves and give up before completing the sequence. This seems to indicate that I can’t will myself to make this effort just by some casual self-talk. But if I have not already exhausted my mental resources, I think I should be able to focus better.

I’m also wondering how my idea of willpower relates to our success or failure to apply a blunder check, and I’m interested in CM Azel Chua’s theory that we need a different approach than “Checks, captures, threats,” partly because that requires too much brain power over the course of a long game. (Hear him talk about this and other fascinating chess topics on Ben Johnson’s Perpetual Chess podcast and on Chess Goals’ No Pawn Intended.) But those are topics for another day. 

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