Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan explores the idea of learning from your losses in a beginner-level lecture at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis.
Back in high school, some of my friends on the track team were also on the chess team. When one of them couldn't make it to a match, I would fill in and play the worst player on the other team. One day, after playing my match, I played a friendly game against the other team's best player. I think I got checkmated in less than 10 moves. About a year later I read in one of the Seattle newspapers that the same kid had become one of the youngest grandmasters in US history. That little chess wizard was Yasser. Totally forgot about it until I stated playing again about a year ago and saw his videos on RU-vid. It truly is a small world.
I doubt Yasser will ever see this but I can see one piece of talent from the white player. The white player had a plan! Was it a bad plan? Obviously, but he had one, he made it himself. It's better to have a bad plan than no plan. Well done young Yasser!
The plan that Yasser had that made him stand out so much was his plan to learn from his mistakes, and even though we may think that other novices do this, they do a poor job of this. This reminds me of back when I joined the school chess club, back in 1973, and had an idea of how the pieces move but not much else, and in my first game I fell for scholar's mate. Wow, I sure felt like a fool! I lost the game, sure, but came away with a more important win, the lesson. Still though, it wasn't until almost 50 years later that I really understood the importance of learning versus just making the same mistakes over and over again, and you get to the point where you correct the mistakes you can see but miss the ones you don't, and if you don't learn how to do this, you remain stuck in the mud. So I'd pick up the game for a while, get frustrated that I wasn't really improving much, then give it up , pick it up again some years later only to end up rinsing and repeating. That's fine for some players who can just play for years and be stuck in the 1400 range and be happy but I wanted to be a good player and my approach was not aligned with this, until recently when I took up the game one more time but with a much better plan, this time it was about actually striving to get better. It's all about finding the right balance for you, and mine happens to be extremely skewed towards improvement and this even has me watching beginners videos like this and I always come away with something of value. My plan is to watch every video on this site in addition to the other content I watch. I even started at the beginner kids playlist and watched every one of them and am starting with the regular beginners ones now. I'm finally getting somewhere and there's no substitute for the proper foundation, it just took me 50 years to figure this out :)
Actually another talent I can see is that that terrible player understood the value of symmetry even at that point, especially in the pawn structure. If you want to draw a better player, it's one of the ways to achieve it as long as you are able to navigate through the tactics.
Just send a message to the support about it. Usually people in chess.com are either quiet or decent. Rarely bad or nice, depending of course on your activeness in conversation and general "niceness"
