Chess. Relationship between postmortem and decision.

What did you learn from your time in chess? Did you find out that an accurate postmortem is essential to your development? If your postmortem is flawed then you have no idea of what went wrong and very liable to make the same mistakes again. Agreed?

Let us use the KL Open again as an illustration. With every KL Open, the organisers make more and more enemies within the chess community. I offered to act as the go between to mitigate the issue but nobody has taken up the offer. Why is this? Ref: Here. It seems to me that our top players are willing to forgo this event so that they will be able to keep their anger because of their perception that Peter has somehow insulted them. Which is probably true.

But what I can't understand is why there were no accurate postmortem of the past KL Opens? Did those events meet the objectives and goals of KLCA? Even the sponsor and President of KLCA has asked that I quote his name to bring in more players. Ref: Here. But apparently to no avail.

So accurate postmortems are important yes? Has the event achieved the goals and objectives?

But postmortems are still only a part of the story. It is useless on it's own. I have written on this blog a few years back that postmortems are only good at finding out why a building has collapsed AFTER it has collapsed. So it really has no practical use by itself although the exercise is essential as the first step.

The other half of the story is decision making.

How to make better decisions the next time, from the accurate postmortems, BEFORE the building has collapsed.

So it appears we have 2 problems in Malaysian chess. No proper postmortems and then the inability to use those lessons, if any, to make sure we don't make same mistakes again.

Is that what you learnt from chess too? Well you should have if you have been taught right. Do you not see that this is a problem that is plaguing the whole Country? Read this again. Here.