Lessons from IM Yee Weng

I was sitting with rapt attention when Yee Weng was talking. For so long now it was like the blind leading the blind with Mark. The main thing I could not help Mark with was the technical aspects of the game. So we tried many things, went down many dead ends and wasted alot of time. The evening before, Mark spent a few hours with Yee Weng and that helped clear up some of the technical problems still plaguing us.

But the point I want to raise from Yee Weng's talk, that caught my attention, was when he told of his defeats. How hard it was to take up the games he lost and look at his defeats. To me that is courage. It is hard to look at our mistakes, and it is harder to evaluate correctly where the mistakes came from. The normal response is to make excuses or to blame.

But without correct evaluation we are doomed to make the same mistakes again and again. Chess is about thinking, about correct evaluations, it's about looking at the evidence no matter how hard and reaching the correct conclusions or we cannot improve.

If we cannot see past the illusions and self delusions, if we cannot look at the evidence with courage, without flinching, then we are that far from our first GM.