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Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

• hasty_pudding 3y ago
  The problem is you don't know if it's a blunder until after.
  • titusjohnson 3y ago
    Blunders are things you _could_ or _should_ have avoided, had you only taken a moment to pause and think.
    • CharlesW 3y ago
      By "blunders", the author includes both those which can be prevented (see section "Preventable blunders") and those which can't. This is one of the reasons this article is silly. Next in the series is, "Avoid accidents: 80% of being a good driver."
      • 317070 3y ago
        To be fair, you could stop calling them accidents. "Avoiding collisions" does sound like it will get you to 80% of being a good driver. Like the author, I also play chess, and I could have written the same advice. Maybe the charitable take here is "Don't worry about long term plans so much, at least until you manage to stop making trivial mistakes, evaluated looking retro-actively at decisions you made."
      • marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Driving accidents are largely avoidable though. If you avoid the wheel while tired or with alcohol in your system, you'll slash a big part of the risk. Avoid conversations in the car, on the phone or with your passenger(s), that's even more risk reduced. Keep your tires in good shape, your windshield clean, that's even better. Finally, if if you practice defensive driving, situational awareness, more still accidents can be avoided. Nothing will of course mitigate all accidents, but there are definitely things that make you more or less accident prone in traffic.
    • iopq 3y ago
      That's not applicable to chess. Some blunders are deep and neither player sees mate in 10. The computer immediately sees mate in 10 and calls the last move a blunder. The opponent misses the mate in 10 and moves elsewhere, the computer puts it as a blunder. Both players blundered without even seeing a clear win, and it would take them an hour of analysis to see the exact sequence and prove there's no way to escape it even though there are a hundred variations
    • rapsey 3y ago
      So success is more likely by not being an idiot. Not exactly helpful advice.
• rightbyte 3y ago
  This effect is why I am like 10 times as effective working 1/10 as much as in my younger years in my career. You can only afford to work fast when not in a hurry. If I also take credit for work I've not done I am probably a 1000x dev. Multi year projects shut down in under a hour before they became any trouble.
  • none_to_remain 3y ago
    Creating code is the lowest level of programming. Deleting code is much more refined. Preventing code is sublime.
    • Jensson 3y ago
      This leads to analysis paralysis. Building things helps you think clearer.
      • otterley 3y ago
        I’ve learned at Amazon that writing about what you want to build, and why, and why not do something else - in a way that others can clearly comprehend, and before ever touching a line of code - helps you think even more clearly.
        • ffsm8 3y ago
          It really doesn't, unless you've already implemented a variation of the thing before. There is a time for reflection and planning/thinking about a given software problem, but you're mostly wasting time doing so in-depth before you've done/looked through a rudimentary implementation. Your planned architecture will be worse then the one from the person that interated several times while introspecting the resulting code, discovering misconceptions on the way. Do note that this initial implementation is only there to learn the domain of the software, basically. The phase can be skipped if you're not really changing anything and mostly just reimplement something you've done before. At that point, you're not doing something new however.
• nocoiner 3y ago
  Based on the last thing I read from this guy, I’m surprised he didn’t include having a spouse, kids or friends on his list of avoidable blunders.
  • ycombinatrix 3y ago
    link please
    • chplushsieh 3y ago
      Not GP, but perhaps this is the post: https://longform.asmartbear.com/two-big-things/ https://longform.asmartbear.com/two-big-things/
      • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        That doesn't say they're avoidable blunders. It says that they cost time and energy, and therefore preclude other opportunities. But is having a good marriage a blunder compared to having a great career? I don't think he's saying that.
      • skeeter2020 3y ago
        This is such a simplistic, winner-take-all viewpoint. Example: having an awesome marriage can open a bunch of doors and afford you the time, energy & space to DO a lot more things. Same with a family & friends. It must be sad to go through life viewing every course of action as work that eats limited capacity.
      • ycombinatrix 3y ago
        thank you. also, what does "GP" mean in this context? mistyping of "OP"?
        • chplushsieh 3y ago
          No problem. And I’m delighted to find out that there is actually an Ask HN to answer your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8363625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8363625 So in our case here, GP is nocoiner.
• throwup238 3y ago
  Stop that blundering! https://youtube.com/watch?v=QoSN7oalIec https://youtube.com/watch?v=QoSN7oalIec
• djtriptych 3y ago
  Thought of chess immediately after seeing the title. I really do recommend everyone play. There are innumerable insights like this that arise (though this may be true of any sufficiently complex game).
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• intalentive 3y ago
  A tattered sign hanging over Chesterton's fence: this way lie blunders.
• ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  So it's not "ok to fail" this week?
  • Jensson 3y ago
    It is ok for others to fail, don't put pressure on them. It isn't ok for you yourself to fail, put pressure on yourself, at least if you want to outdo others.
  • StefanBatory 3y ago
    Failure was never alright despite what people claim.
    • anon012012 3y ago
      They say "you need to fail to succeed". The key thing is that it is not enough to fail, you also have to reflect on why you failed, and this is the reflection which has you progress. It is not the failure itself which is progress, it is the act of failing, then feeling BAD, and then thinking about how not to feel BAD anymore. Failure without feedback is pointless failure. (This is the same idea than deliberate practice.)
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    I think that's "fail" in a way that's different from "blunder". Let's say I'm a programmer. I try an approach. It doesn't work. I realize it doesn't work and back out my changes. That's a failure. Let's say instead I try an approach. It' doesn't work. I keep trying to force it to work, distorting the overall architecture and still leaving an unreliable, unmaintainable mess. That's a blunder.
• kevin_nisbet 3y ago
  Also luck is probably a much larger factor than most people realize. It's not just bad luck leading to failure, but luck leading to customers/revenue. As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
  • onion2k 3y ago
    if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are. Temporarily. Once people see you're doing well with no competition the competition will spring forth, no matter how good you are. If you're also doing things badly those competitors will eat your lunch. That isn't a reason not to launch when your product is very basic and scrappy. You don't need to make it good, and definitely not perfect. You just need to go fast.
    • iopq 3y ago
      Unless your first mover advantage lets you just stay there for decades. See: PayPal they have only now been dethroned as the default credit card processor despite being awful to work with when I tried to integrate their API circa 2010
      • toast0 3y ago
        If first mover advantage in internet payment processing was important, CyberCash would still be around. I'm pretty sure there was another internet payment processor around before PayPal too. Setup was harder, and the integration wasn't the same, but it was before PCI, so integrating with CyberCash meant you could own the whole payment flow, and have a better experience than PayPal, where you send the user off, and when they come back, PayPal may not have confirmed payment yet.
        • iopq 3y ago
          Yes, but PayPal was growing off the back of eBay, CyberCash never became entrenched to get the first mover's advantage > The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001. VeriSign acquired the Cybercash assets (except for ICVerify) and name a couple of months later. On November 21, 2005 PayPal (already an eBay company) acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash so in a way, PayPal ate a lot of the other payment processors
• WorkerBee28474 3y ago
  The general message reminds me of both "95th percentile isn't that hard to reach" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560345) and "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686997)
• kevmo314 3y ago
  > To win at chess, blunder less. How to win: don't lose. C'mon it's not like people actively choose to make mistakes.
  • pkulak 3y ago
    Sure, but you can choose your play style. I find I’m way more likely to win a chess game if I play a few moves of a really safe, boring opening, and then just focus on keeping everything protected and never extend myself too much until the opponent hangs their queen (I’m about 400, so that’s actually very likely). If I get creative and come out all aggressive, I hang my queen. But the former is boring as hell, which is why I don’t play chess.
    • iopq 3y ago
      That's you, when I play aggressive chess the OTHER side makes blunders. It will show up as "the other player made a mistake so you won" and as an unforced error of course it's unforced, if we all played perfectly there would be no game to play, but the aggression is what showed their bad tactical play
• philbo 3y ago
  It seems to me that the main difference between chess and startups is that in chess you only have one opponent. The more opponents you have, the more likelihood that not blundering on its own is not sufficient.
  • passion__desire 3y ago
    I read a blogpost long time ago which said he made more money on working on startups which he sold during the bubble economy rather than bust. All boats rise during high tide. It is better to sell your boat during high tides.
  • ilaksh 3y ago
    I think that there are at least 10 main differences between chess (or other sports) and startups. It's a very weak analogy. He does have a few good points though if you disregard that.
• iopq 3y ago
  Avoid blundering? To do that, you need to learn opening strategy, endgame strategy, tactics, etc. This isn't helpful
  • voiper1 3y ago
    In amatuer tennis, he would say that indeed you need to learn how to play. But you just play and return the ball. You don't need anything fancy to make you win. You just keep playing until your opponent makes a mistake.
    • iopq 3y ago
      Just hit the ball back, simple as
• bjackman 3y ago
  I think this is very true, I've found the same thing in e.g: - Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does. - Squash: getting stronger and faster doesn't make you win games, getting less exhausted does, because you make less mistakes. These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus. The corresponding insight for building software is this: "Brilliant" ideas for your engineering are probably not the right place to invest energy. Instead you are likely to create more success by ensuring you have excellent testing, qualification, user feedback, monitoring, rollouts, stuff like that. This also just comes back to investment+return again. If _you_ think you gave great ideas then that's fine. But if you can keep your race/game/project/startup alive and stable then you start to unlock extra "passive income" from your teammates having good ideas (and the latitude to execute them) and your competitors fumbling their opportunities. So take your ego out of the equation and do the humble stuff first. Don't reward your "rockstar programmers", reward the person who set up the dashboards and the e2e tests and threw up together that spreadsheet of 'most common user complaints'.
  • chillfox 3y ago
    "These are surely not true when you're at a high level" I don't know what you mean by high level, but I suspect that avoiding mistakes continues to be very important regardless of level in most things. I play Marvel Snap in the top 1000 and at that level most of the games comes down to whoever makes a mistake first loses.
    • voiper1 3y ago
      >This observation applies only to amateur tennis. In professional tennis it’s just the opposite: 80% of the rallies are won rather than lost, as unforced errors are infrequent. This is true in chess as well, as high-level players don’t blunder, and thus it really is that litany of other skills that results in high standings. I think this means at a high level, you're already not blundering. So you need to actually do something MORE in order to win. You need to force your oponent to lose, and not just play "OK" and wait for them to make a mistake.
• sakras 3y ago
  A famous Super Smash Bros player, when asked for advice, would always respond with "Don't get hit". Seems this principle of not blundering has wide-reaching applications!
  • nxobject 3y ago
    That is surprisingly true: knowing nothing about Smash, I sometimes get roped into playing it at parties. I've managed to do respectably well, knowing nothing about special powers or any of the controls beyond navigating and jumping, simply by dodging like crazy and not getting hit. I don't even bother attacking. It annoys everyone.
  • dinkleberg 3y ago
    I’ve been discovering this is also very true for Elden Ring. Most of my deaths in the game are from being greedy and wanting to get in one more hit, but winning tough fights is almost all about avoiding getting hit. And I agree, I think the idea of avoiding losing is better than “trying to win” in many cases. Like with health and fitness, it would be very hard to identify what the right action to “win” would be (what does win even mean?). But it is much easier to do the things that keep you from losing. Don’t eat poorly, don’t be inactive all the time, and so on. The avoidance approach won’t have you reaching the Olympic level, but you’ll be doing a lot better than most.
• spxneo 3y ago
  this is the greatest article i ever read on HN in the past 12 years i been coming here
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• irjustin 3y ago
  "Product Market Fit" that's it - #4 in the article. Few startups fail due to #1-3 after achieving #4. So many startups blame #1-3 because they couldn't find #4. If you don't have PMF, you're burning cash, pivoting, arguing (founder disputes) to figure out your way there. All #1-3. PMF is incredibly hard and don't let anyone fool you.
  • rrr_oh_man 3y ago
    "If you’re asking yourself 'Do I have PMF?' then you don’t have it"
  • asah 3y ago
    Sorry but no: I've seen lots of great companies die from #1-3 and competitors copy the PMF product and win. One of my saddest investments was an amazing company gummed up in co-founder squabbles too far gone to recover, even while the product was growing like weeds. Company died in lawsuits and walkaways. Another was pre-PMF and ran into this, I learned from the previous experience and jumped in and helped them keep the band together. They found PMF the next year and off to the moon ($1M ARR, 100% QoQ growth, 36 months that, <6 months to truly profitable). I have lots of examples of all 3 and more. It's all 100x easier than PMF but if you don't do FIRST then you don't get to work on PMF.
• sph 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  A better way to read this is "80% of a not losing strategy". The author agrees with this but buries the lede at the very end of the piece: "Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The rest of the game does matter." I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or have higher chances) if you don't blunder. The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability. Is reducing blunders the highest order bit? "An entrepreneur may look at a successful diner and think that customers are there because of the hip decor on the walls. She sets up a competing diner across the street with better decor only to find that it can't pull any customers away. The highest-order bit isn't the decor. It's actually the cheap but high-quality coffee that customers care most about. Without getting the coffee right, no amount of aesthetics will beat the competition." https://commoncog.com/highest-order-bit/ https://commoncog.com/highest-order-bit/ The only time this is a winning strategy is if survival has compounding effects. For startups, they tend to be default dead. This memo by Howard Marks explores the case when survival is actually a winning strategy: "If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves" https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/fewer-losers-or-more-winners https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/fewer-losers-or... Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context.
  • salamo 3y ago
    > The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability. Maybe you could compare it to playing chess against a much higher rated player. In that sense, minimizing your weaknesses is still useful. And looking at the "blunders" the author lists we can definitely say that making these errors is worse than not making them. One place where this analogy breaks down is that chess is a zero-sum perfect information game. Business is neither zero-sum (competition can encourage innovation and better products) nor perfect information. In chess, we can calculate for each of the candidate moves and have theoretically perfect knowledge of the future state of the board. In business and many other situations, this kind of thing isn't possible. The upshot is that several of the "blunders" the author lists may only turn out to be blunders after the fact.
• koonsolo 3y ago
  Once he started talking about chess, I knew it was going to be a limited view on things. There are 2 kinds of games: those that punish mistakes very badly, and those that reward exploited opportunities very richly. I was never good at games like chess because of this exact same reason: I don't cover all my bases and lose from a stupid oversight. However, I'm pretty good at poker, because I know how to exploit an opportunity when it arrives. So in the end, you have to know which game you are currently playing. Some things require "the devil is in the details", and other things you can just fix problems when they arrive (because those problems won't kill your overall progress) I would argue that startups are more playing the 'exploit opportunities' game and not the 'cover all your bases' game. For example, a startup shouldn't cover all legal aspects or risks. In the end, when you are generating enough revenue, you can deal with earlier legal mistakes. There are plenty of examples. When your startup is not exploiting opportunities, no "cover all legal aspects" is going to save it.
  • blowski 3y ago
    I don’t understand your distinction between types of games. In Chess, your stupid mistake creates an opportunity your opponent can exploit. The failure to exploit an opportunity is itself a mistake. I guess in Poker there is an element of luck of the deal - is that the kind of opportunity you’re talking about?
    • gizmo 3y ago
      In Poker it isn't so much about how many hands you win or lose, it's about creating big pots when you have good hands and small pots otherwise. That's how good poker players can profitably play bad cards (that are statistically unlikely to make good hands). In chess the table stakes are always the same. One point for a win, half a point for a draw. To win consistently at chess you have to play the openings carefully, play the mid game strategically, and grind out all the end games. Sloppy players who occasionally make brilliant moves don't get anywhere in chess, because a brilliant sequence of moves will only earn you a single point while small mistakes will still result in full point losses. In cash game poker you can play sloppy but when you see the opportunity win a huge pot that makes up for all the mistakes and then some. Tournament poker is a bit more like chess. Successful tournament poker players win by grinding out small victories over the course of many hours.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  > the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time In some sense this is almost tautological. While finding an exact definition for a chess blunder isn't straightforward, here is one example from the Lichess UI: https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/b527746b179cdde64382b07e4f267bf8a27810c1/ui/analyse/src/practice/practiceCtrl.ts#L118 https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/b527746b179cdde6438... Basically, if you make a move which decreases your winning probability more than 14% over the best move, that's a blunder. But winning probability is a nonlinear function of stockfish centipawns. A drop in 100 centipawns when you're up 15 points isn't a blunder. When the game was equal, it is. Point is, by the time you know it's a blunder you already know something about the outcome of that move, that it swung the winning probability by more than 14%. So the analysis is kind of just measuring some function of winning probability and saying that it is highly correlated with winning probability.
  • matsemann 3y ago
    Also, getting better changes what a blunder is. When I began, hanging my queen was a blunder. Then allowing a discovered check was a blunder. Then allowing the threat of a future discovered check affect my move is a blunder etc.
  • smatija 3y ago
    These evaluation-centric definitions of blunder are a bit awkward though. Traditionally blunders were defined in more player-centric way: player blundered, when he made a mistake obvious enough, that a player of his strength is very unlikely to make. So what is a blunder for a strong player may merely be a mistake for a weaker player. Problem with evaluation-centric definition is that not all moves that worsen position by 14% are equally obvious - if you hang a queen in one that is certainly a blunder, if you miss a non-trivial sacrificial combination on the other hand...
    • salamo 3y ago
      Chess.com is also definitely using an evaluation-centric definition to label moves as blunders. The issue is that this definition is also some function of the change in winning probability. > So what is a blunder for a strong player may merely be a mistake for a weaker player. Statistically this intuition appears to be correct. Your winning probability is still more than 25% when down a queen against an 800 rated player, but under 10% if playing a 2200: https://web.chessdigits.com/articles/when-should-you-resign#h.9rzdbhraiwgd https://web.chessdigits.com/articles/when-should-you-resign#... So it would make sense for the definition to take into account the opponent's Elo rating.
• fedeb95 3y ago
  This goes back to the medieval idea of via negativa, defining through negations. Interesting it worked out for you.
• salamo 3y ago
  As a side note, I think this blunder-centric approach to chess is underappreciated, especially at low to mid levels where the vast majority of players peak. In addition to working on tactics, players should also specifically work on not blundering. What this means in practice would be something like an "anti-tactic". In normal tactics, we need to find the best move which will usually win the game or give a decisive advantage. But an anti-tactic is a fight with your intuition: you want to make a move but that move is actually a blunder. There are several correct answers but one or two attractive but very wrong answers. Of course the "rest of the owl" is how to determine which moves are very attractive to certain players. That is something I am working on now.
• scotty79 3y ago
  But the blunders are where all the fun is. Apart from them, games are boring mechanistic jobs. If the enemy doesn't blunder I start to blunder as I'm getting more and more bored with the game. If enemy plays bad I also get bored and blunder. Anything to put the spark back into the activity that was supposed to be engaging.
• zheng_qm 3y ago
  It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. -- Charlie Munger
• joss82 3y ago
  This only works where the number of moves is finite, and you can only iterate in lockstep with your opponent: tennis and chess are good examples. If you are a startup, you don't have to wait for your competitors to play before making a move, you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead. A blunder is not as bad as not making enough great moves.
  • vaylian 3y ago
    > you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead. The tricky part is not getting ahead in the wrong direction, because that could be a blunder if the strategy behind that move is not well thought through.
  • smartbear 3y ago
    (Author of the article) I agree with your counter-point. The finiteness and lock-step are interesting characteristics; I wonder what the set of characteristics are, for when this "rule" is especially applicable. And then we could ask: Is a startup like that? Are some kinds of businesses like that, but some are not? (e.g. a one-person accounting service vs a "change the world" startup?) I do agree that often with startups it's whether you find the 1-2 things that REALLY matter, and execute those REALLY well.
    • joss82 3y ago
      It's a bit like trying to know if a geometric series is going to converge to 0 or diverge towards infinity. If a blunder is a 0, then avoiding blunders is super important. For example if you are in finance or accounting, commiting fraud makes you lose your license and set your business value to zero.
• max_ 3y ago
  It is easier to avoid errors and accidents than it is to be good at emergency room surgery.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Any good coach will tell you to spend the majority of your time honing the fundaments, in any sport or competitive activity. This is a big part of why.
• gizmo 3y ago
  The author seems to be at Elo 1100. At this level players don't think even a single move ahead and blunder their queen every other game. Slightly better amateur players realize that they should trade pieces once they're ahead to get to a winning end game. Avoiding blunders only works at chess at the lowest levels. It's the same for tennis. Complete amateurs can win just by returning the ball but at higher amateur levels you will have a bad time if you try this.
  • ozim 3y ago
    Article is not about becoming a pro - it is about creating a company that doesn't fold like most of companies. Most startup companies are run by amateurs and that is advice for amateurs. People who have experience already stuff that is in article ;)
  • noxvilleza 3y ago
    It's "Elo", not "ELO" (it's not an acronym).
    • gizmo 3y ago
      You're right. Fixed.
  • iknownothow 3y ago
    I get your point but in your analogy don't you think startups should be considered amateur chess players rather than experts? "Forced errors" are a thing in chess and tennis but I don't see that applying to startups. I can see Apple, Microsoft and other big companies playing chess through lobbyists and lawsuits but I think the article was about startups. P.S. I've never founded a company or have any experience with it.
    • gizmo 3y ago
      Your local pizzeria will probably do well by just not blundering. If the pizzas, location, decor, menu, and staff are good enough then the place will do reasonably well. If you do everything right as a pizza place you survive, if you blunder you go bankrupt. On the flip side, they don't have to do anything original. Just doing OK in all dimensions is the winning strategy. Software isn't like that. It lives in the right tail of the distribution. You can blunder everything except product and still do extremely well, because software costs nothing to produce. Your gross margins are 95%. You can blunder left and right and it doesn't matter when people like your product and pay for it. Mistakes that would destroy any other low margin business you can shrug off. A pizza place is a local business. They differentiate themselves from other pizza places by being closer to you. Software is global. Your tiny startup competes with open source, big tech, and everything in between. If your product is mediocre you'll struggle or fail (and rightly so). If your product is great you get a fire hose that spews money. In basically every interview with successful founders they joke about the giant mistakes they made (that ended up just not mattering). The kind of blunders that destroy any other business are no big deal in software. The article is wrong and the lesson should be the opposite.
• gadders 3y ago
  Eric Sink from Source Gear made a similar point in a 2005 (I'm so old) essay explaining competition and business topics to developers via sports/game metaphors: https://ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html https://ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html "The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you can often win without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot of players think the way to win is to slam the ball really hard. The problem with this strategy is that a slam is a high-risk/high-reward shot. If you do it right, you almost certainly score a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. If you do it wrong, you give your opponent a point. Modesty aside, I consider myself a "pretty good" Ping Pong player. I can slam the ball when necessary, but I hardly ever do. I can beat most other players by simply returning every shot with a little backspin. Hitting the ball hard simply isn't necessary. All I need to do is wait for the other player to make 21 mistakes. How software is similar You can beat a lot of competitors by simply not beating yourself. Most companies go out of business because of their own stupid mistakes, not because of the brilliance or strength of their competitor. Stay conservative, and stay in business. Watch the years go by, and you'll be surprised how many of your competitors come and go."
  • npteljes 3y ago
    Very good metaphor. I score similarly in Rainbow 6 Siege, an online FPS game. On the level I play, the game can be very fast paced. Often I score simply because I'm more patient, not because I click more accurately or faster.
    • skeeter2020 3y ago
      This is what professional poker players do, and if the goal is winning it works. It also changes what was originally a pleasurable social activity into a grinding job, which I don't want for things that I currently find fun, like ping pong.
      • fernandopj 3y ago
        Exactly. This is the reason at one point I stopped being invited to casual poker games with friends of friends. I was amateur level compared to professionals, but just because I don't make blunders, any game session 4 hours long were enough for me to systematically get most if not all of everyone else's money and ruin their fun.
• taneq 3y ago
  Not sure if it's been linked in this thread yet (although I did see it on another post yesterday) but iirc this is one of the core messages of Playing To Win by David Sirlin (https://www.sirlin.net/ptw https://www.sirlin.net/ptw). To win, all you have to do is not lose.
• Omroth 3y ago
  "Not strategy, not memorizing opening lines, not practicing your end-game technique, not studying the Great Games of History, not drilling with puzzles to get better at tactics," "In my games, the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time." Goodness I wonder what methods one could use to reduce their blunder rate.
  • ruined 3y ago
    it's simple. if i were playing the game, i would make moves that lead to victory, and i wouldn't make moves that lead to defeat. that way, i would always win. making mistakes seems really stupid and i'm not sure why anyone would do that.
  • javier123454321 3y ago
    I think the point is to, instead of being on the lookout for the winning strategy, put more of your limited attention on preventing basic mistakes. It's about shifting focus, presumably, there's a baseline of competence in the endeavor at hand.
  • tech_ken 3y ago
    These things all help, but ultimately reduction of blunders is the result of consciously checking whether you're blundering something, not being a genius calculator. Most blunders in chess (outside of the higher-levels) aren't the result of failing to see some 5-move tactical sequence, they're just hanging a rook because you were hyper-focused on your own initiative. Controlling your blunder rate is IMO a game of attending to your own mental state: ensuring that you're giving proper consideration to your opponents threats, being realistic about your advantages, and preventing your imagination from running away on you. Obviously study and puzzles can help you do these things more effectively (for example making you more likely to pick up material when your opponent blunders), but they are a necessity not a sufficiency. At the end of the day 'not blundering' is about staying humble, playing slowly, and not freaking out; everything else is points on the margin.
  • bsder 3y ago
    > Goodness I wonder what methods one could use to reduce their blunder rate. Checklist: 1) Is there a checkmate? Yeah, you might want to stop it if you don't want to lose. 2) Is there a check? Checks are forcing and can make you do things you don't want to do. You probably want to prevent them. 3) Is there a capture? A piece with no defenders that can be grabbed probably needs to have something done about it. 4) Is there an undefended piece? Undefended pieces become capturable. Defend it. 5) Do you have any plan at all? Even a bad one is better than none at all. The problem is that there are lots of these on a board. When you first start doing this, it's a slow process, and it is not fun. But you will get much better very quickly.
• komposit 3y ago
  IN many ways this is just another perspective on the need for taking calculated risks. I think this becomes even more interesting when you add the factor time into it. I usually play 3+2 type games where each player gets 3 minutes on the clock plus 2 for each additional move. In this kind of setup i've found that playing more risky aggressive moves on the one hand exposes you to make blunders, but it also gives you the initiative and causes the opposing player to spend more compute time checking possible variations.
• skeeter2020 3y ago
  So the advice is "don't make so many small mistakes that it kills you"? and 20% of the time "don't make a fatal mistake". I just don't find this very helpful. Anyone who's worked at a startup already knows (1) it is a daily grind, (2) you don't die as often as you enter a zombie state.
  • viggity 3y ago
    "zombie state". I love that. I was the CTO of a healthcare startup for 6 years. Would have been a wonderful business for like 1-2 people to own but we raised venture funding. We made good money, had ok growth (attrition was high because well, that's what happens when your patient population is 70yo and have heart problems). I liked to phrase it as "a mediocre success is worse than a failure". You just get strung along, looking for a breakout, but are stuck with 10% growth.
• jprete 3y ago
  I think the sports analogy is bad. Using table tennis as an example, a point can look blundered from the outside, but really the opponent hit a very difficult shot to return and the player did their best to do so. There's also the ongoing factor of one's position relative to the table and one's read of the opponent's likely next shot. These aren't factors that can be judged just with a simple measure of whether the player's return hit went wide.
• topaz0 3y ago
  I think this is a case where doing the automated analysis on a large dataset is misleading, because the automated analysis is based on an automated evaluation of how good a move is. Another way of saying "don't blunder" in this context is "choose a move that is not much worse than the best move". That is hardly more useful advice than "choose the best move". The advice "don't blunder" only becomes useful when you can also give advice about how to recognize blunders: "check whether your pieces are hanging", "check whether your opponent has mate in 1", "check for forks". Probably many of the blunders in that dataset are simple things like this, but others are long forcing lines or counterintuitive sacrifices that are difficult to recognize both for you and for your opponent. The computer doesn't distinguish, but it's much easier to improve by focusing on the former than the latter. (obviously to continue to improve you have to do both, but "not hanging pieces" is a lot less work).
• lakomen 3y ago
  What a useless post. BRB while I control things I'm never able to control
• vundercind 3y ago
  I’m bad enough at chess that every match features some blunders. It’s why I can only play humans. Any not-extremely-subtle-in-its-badness blunder is spotted too consistently by even “easy” chess engines. IIRC I used to go about 50/50 versus the weakest computer on Chessmaster and the entire experience was stressful rather than fun, LOL.
• keeptrying 3y ago
  On the face of it this seems to imply, moving slowly and deliberately. However this is not always true. Example: Detroit lions Vs SF in 2023 playoffs. Avoiding blundering means being adaptable to the situation at hand - not using instinct derived from previous battles.
• upwardbound 3y ago
  > I computed a simple “error score” that includes mistakes while giving blunders more weight: [number of mistakes] × 2*[number of blunders] This doesn't give blunders more weight.. Multiplication is commutative and associative, so the author's formula is also the same as this one: 2*[number of mistakes] × [number of blunders] To give more weight to blunders, you could use an exponent, which is a common trick in baseball statistics (SABRmetrics), like this: [number of mistakes] × [number of blunders ^ 1.1] See e.g. some of the formula concepts invented by Bill James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James#Innovations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James#Innovations
  • rKarpinski 3y ago
    Think the star represents exponent, otherwise they are using two different symbols for multiplication.
    • jprete 3y ago
      It's possible, but that formula is (after a log2 transformation) equivalent in comparison power to log2(mistakes) + blunders. This is almost reducing the mistake term to a tiebreaker, because mistakes and blunders are on the same scale (a proportion of the number of actions taken in a game).
      • rKarpinski 3y ago
        > This is almost reducing the mistake term to a tiebreaker Isn't that exactly what it's supposed to be? >> However, in 40% of the games both players had an equal number of blunders. So I also included “mistakes”—the next-worst kind of error.
  • smartbear 3y ago
    (Author of article) Sorry, that was supposed to be +, not * ! You're right. Just a typo! Now fixed.
• talldatethrow 3y ago
  Totally unrelated side note, but I was in car sales for almost a decade and was better than top 1% nationwide basically since the first year. Averaging 34 cars a month when national average is 11. People always asked for advice and in general my advice was "don't shoot yourself in the foot". Actual particular style or methods aren't that important because whatever style you have will work on some and not on others, so just keep yourself and your pipeline busy with people that are ok with that style. But don't mess up in a way to loose people. You don't need the world's best opener. You need an opener that doesn't turn people off. You don't need to be the best more charismatic person, just don't turn people off. You don't need to be the world strongest closer, just don't turn people off making them get up and leave. Stop making mistakes, and the rest is usually fine.
  • petsfed 3y ago
    Turns out "get the hell out of the way" is very good baseline advice for a lot of situations. Want to make a sale? Get a customer in the room with a good product, then get the hell out of the way. Want your team of engineers to build incredible things? Hire good people, then get the hell out of the way. Its not perfect, it hinges a lot on starting from a good place, but if you're in a situation where everybody in the room wants essentially the same thing (for the project to succeed, for the customer to drive away with a new car, etc), the best thing you can do is simply not interfere with the process that arises organically.
    • spxneo 3y ago
      i like this even better! so much workflows often get tainted by top down ego. delegate and trust.
    • runamuck 3y ago
      I hope you don't mind. I just took your idea, had chat GPT write an airport book about it, slapped "Get the H*ll out of the way!" on the title and sold it to Harper Collins for $1M.
  • spxneo 3y ago
    very sound advice not just in sales but dating too dont be a turn off dont signal turn off behaviour
• eggbrain 3y ago
  I struggle with how I'm supposed to grok this advice, as it feels like a tautology. E.g. with his chess example, I can't see how blundering isn't just a result of a lack of the things he mentions -- practicing technique, drilling puzzles, etc. How can we as amateurs know _not_ to make blunders without knowing _why_ it was a blunder, which usually involves being properly skilled to identify the blunder ahead of time in some fashion? The main caveats I can think of are ego/recklessness/apathy/emotion, which revolve around not caring about making a blunder, along with distraction/hastiness, which revolve around not having the appropriate mental energy to not make a blunder.
  • a_t48 3y ago
    Many many chess blunders are as simple as “I moved a piece where it can be immediately taken”.
  • Dove 3y ago
    Some of the best advice I've ever heard comes from the following observation: Blundering is often a result of trying to overplay a small advantage. If you are playing thoughtfully, with an eye on the whole game, you are smart enough not to blunder. It's when you get excited about pursuing an opportunity that you overlook mistakes. Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight of the big picture. Or alternatively, when you see an opportunity, look for the danger. The insight has served me extremely well in competitive and security contexts, and I think it accounts for a lot of blunders in product design as well.
    • tech_ken 3y ago
      > Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight of the big picture. Almost nothing is more dangerous to my winning chances than exiting the opening with a small material or positional advantage. Opponent is now incentivized to attack ferociously, and I'm left struggling to figure out the safest way to convert without playing too passively but also not over-pushing.
  • setgree 3y ago
    I agree. I like the way Arnold Kling expresses a similar idea [1]: "One of my beliefs about competition is that the business world is very forgiving of mistakes... On October 11, 1999, our business, along with the Scottsdale relocation business, was sold to homestore.com for $85 million. My share was quite dilute by this point...But a couple of percent of $85 million is still real money, particularly considering the sequence of mistakes, miscalculations, misjudgments, and erroneous forecasts that led to it." Kling and coworkers had an important insight about what the internet was going to do to home-buying. This made up, in part, for such obvious blunders as failing to buy MapQuest. [1] https://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst218.html https://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst218.html
• sourcepluck 3y ago
  There are some major misunderstandings about chess amongst the general public. "Wanting to not blunder" and "not blundering" are two very different things. I remember an in-person rapid tournament, 12m with a 3s increment, I was rated ~1600, playing a lot at the time, reading books, etc. In the first round got matched against the highest rated player there (which is normal, someone has to play them in the first round). He was an IM, skittish small fellow, something like ~2200 or ~2300, I can't remember. Table 1 was up on a little podium. So we go through the opening, middle-game, and this guy is just sitting back. Solid, non-threatening, relaxed, barely used any time on his clock. I'm sweating, taking ages, nervous, seeing dragons around each corner. I try reason with myself: look, this guy is in a worse spot than you, he has more to lose, etc. He's waiting for you to make a mistake. He is avoiding exchanges, and making little probing threats, at best. Just breathe, stay in the game, let him attempt an attack! Just keep things solid, and don't blunder! We go back and forth like this for at best 4 or 5 moves into the middlegame let's say. His move: he smiles apologetically and takes the rook I just put on an unprotected square his bishop was very clearly hitting. I resign with an embarrassed look and whisper an apology for my stupidity. My advice to anyone who is feeling too big for their jodhpurs: go study chess as hard as you can, for as long as you like, and then go play a few tournaments. 12-year-olds will wipe the floor with you and then their Mom will make them a sandwich while they move on with their life.
  • tech_ken 3y ago
    > 12-year-olds will wipe the floor with you Was chatting with a guy who used to play pick up games at the Marshall and I remember him talking about how humbling it was to get your head kicked in by like a 7 year old. I think this is one of the coolest things about chess: in most other competitions age is a huge predictor of the outcome (I'd crush a 7 year old in basketball), but in chess it can be almost harder to face a young opponent because their learning rate is so ferocious and they're young enough that pride often isn't a distractor. One of my ongoing struggles in getting my Elo higher is to try and keep the childlike playfulness front-and-center. As you say in your anecdote: it's all about playing simple moves and not getting tilted. Let the super-GMs calculate 15-move lines.
• zoogeny 3y ago
  This is mostly tangential to the article contents, but I've been watching interviews and talks by Benoit Mandelbrot [1] recently. I was a little surprised to find his work outside of fractals to be extremely interesting. He characterizes his own work as being on the general concept of "roughness". The reason I bring it up in context of this article for blundering, is that he studies the chaotic movement of stock markets from the abstract perspective of "roughness". That is, he is interested in categorizing patterns that are in some kind of grey zone between smooth and completely chaotic. One of the features I recall him mentioning in one of his introductions was related to "black swan" type events in markets. He suggests that only a few stock movements over time account for the majority of loss/gain. This is a feature he was interested in exploring and recreating using mathematical models and it lead him to investigate sampling from stochastic distributions that are not Gaussian. This view is forcing me to evaluate some of this startup/business advice in a new light. This article seems to assume that both in chess and business that "blunders" are distributed in a normal way (probably not the correct mathematical term but I hope it communicates what I mean). But in reality, some blunders are tiny and some are massive. Consider, you can avoid 99 out of 100 blunders but if the 1 blunder you make is that black swan blunder then you are dead. Conversely, you can make 99 out of 100 blunders but if you avoid that 1 black swan blunder then you can survive and even thrive. Of course, avoiding all blunders just happens to ensure that you also miss the catastrophic ones. I haven't fully digested this idea but I think it is the basis for some profound advancement in our understanding. The problem is we can't really tell at any given moment which events are the ones that will end up being the most impactful, that seems to only come in hindsight. But even just realizing that there is an unequal distribution to the contribution of events over time feels pretty important to me. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot
• bluedino 3y ago
  People always tell me they wish they were good at cooking. The biggest thing is don't mess up. Don't burn anything, don't undercook it, don't overseason, don't underseason. Even if it's just "okay", if you can avoid ruining food, consistently, people will start to refer to you as a 'good cook'. Or in another way, just don't be a bad cook and you'll be a good one.
  • jitl 3y ago
    A lot of this is recipe selection too! If you are a beginner, and have people coming over, don't pick a new recipe or a complicated old recipe. Do something easy, especially if you're doubling to feed more mouths. corollary: Thanksgiving is a day for cooking standards, not innovating (unless you've practiced)
    • phone8675309 3y ago
      I've never seen anyone more stressed in the kitchen than my partner trying to debone and roll a turkey for Thanksgiving as opposed to doing it the standard way in the oven. They went to culinary school, but this was a production for family and was uniquely stressful for them. It turned out fantastic but they were wrecked for the rest of that long weekend.
    • Doxin 3y ago
      also: A lot of recipes are absolutely terrible. That included internet recipes but also recipes by renowned chefs and whatnot. There seems to be some sort of evolutionary pressure for over complicating recipes out the wazoo. E.g. when trying to find a recipe for a vegetable lasagna, and skipping all the incomplete recipes, you end up with a recipe that involves 10 ingredients, involves a pan, a couple of bowls, an oven dish, quite some prep-work, and an oven. The lasagna recipe I prefer has 6 ingredients, uses an oven dish, an oven, and no prep work. If you don't count the time it spends in the oven it's maybe 10 minutes of work. It's tasty to the point where the first time I made it I overate to the point of having a stomach ache for hours afterwards. Guess which recipe is better for someone new-ish to cooking?
      • 3y ago
• CSMastermind 3y ago
  "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast" This applies to software engineering and I've had a hard time explaining it to people throughout my career.
  • hinkley 3y ago
    Arrogance. We believe our domain is singular and concepts and wisdom don’t translate from other specialties.
• OwenAiden 3y ago
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