Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% talent!

Being a Grandmaster and a Chess Mom can be tricky sometimes. After a lot of dedication and hard work, my elder son Tommy finally broke through and won the National 2nd Grade Championship in December 2006. He also became the #1 ranked 7 year old in the country. This was the beginning of the downfall.

After the wonderful successes, Tommy became “over confident”. He resisted solving puzzles. He resisted working on his endgame. He resisted practicing, learning and improving. He thought he was the King of the Hill! This happens to a lot of young players with early strong results.

So what happened? There is no miracle in chess. When you do not practice, you do not improve. In fact, you become less sharp and weaker. Moves do not come so fast anymore. Your calculation skill starts to falter. As the result of this, Tommy lost rating points in 2 consecutive tournaments. Losing rating points is not the issue. The issue is he was struggling with his game.

On one Friday, he played in a scholastic tournament in NY City. So how did he do? As the #1 seed, he went 0-3 and lost 64 rating points! As a Chess Mom, it was a horrible feeling to see my son failed so miserably. But as a Chess Coach, this was the best thing that could have happened to Tommy. It was a real wake up call to him. He finally realized that he is not the King of the Hill anymore. He is now committed to working hard on his chess again. He learned a very hard lesson.

As my father used to say, every day that you do not practice chess, you lose the knowledge of 10 days. Practice makes perfect and it has to be done on a consistent basis. 15-30 minutes a day on busy days is still better than nothing. Even for a son of a Grandmaster and a former Women’s World Champion, there is no magic pill. And this is the moral of the story. Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% talent!

(Tom is now in his mid 20’s. He graduated from Webster University with with honors with his BS and MS degrees. He is over 2300 but no longer plays chess competitively. He lives and works in the Dallas area in Texas.)