Punishment versus reward in the postmortem

Everyone in the chess improvement business agrees that it is crucial to go over your own games. And, it is always added, especially your losses. Indeed, my old coach would frown when I'd bring a win to the table for us to go over. The losses will highlight the weakest parts of your game, and it is necessary to eliminate weaknesses to get better at chess.

There are two reasons this approach to postmortem analysis is flawed. First, at my level, I make multiple errors in all my games whether they be wins, losses, or draws. The percentage of suboptimal moves is about the same in my wins and losses, so why forsake the opportunity to see how I could have played better in a win (e.g., my game posted yesterday was a win, but I made a few awful moves).

Second, it ignores the importance of positive reinforcement in learning. It is well known that animals learn faster if they are coaxed into a behavior via rewards rather than punishment. It can be quite useful to receive positive feedback on excellent moves that I made, moves whose power I didn't actually appreciate at the time, the happy accidents. Having such moves reinforced, studying them, making sure I see why they are good, will help maintain my skill level and make it more likely I'll make the move again in the future. Again, the frequency of such moves in my games is similar in wins, losses, and draws. Plenty of opportunity to learn.

This can be especially important in the opening: many novices play book openings without fully understanding why the moves are good. Pointing out the principles on which the book moves are based will reinforce them so that the student can be better equipped to apply said principles when they are brought out of book. This is better than merely quickly going through the opening until you find the first off-book move, and then simply looking up the right move. Of course, a coach doesn't want to waste the student's time. If your student is rated 2200, you don't need to tell her "That was a good move: it's called a fork and creates an unstoppable threat." Duh.

It is up to the teacher to know the level of his student and pitch his lessons appropriately. In solipsistic postmortems it is especially easy to know the level of the student, but harder to see without help the good and bad moves that you overlooked during the game. That's why Fritz can be so helpful: an objective teacher that will show you GM-level moves, but frustratingly leaves it up to you to explain why they are good (or why the one you played is bad). Fritz is a tiny super-GM that lives in your computer. Sweet. My new method of postmortem is to go over the game adding copious annotations on my own, and then go through one more time with the help of GM Fritz. When I was doing the Circles, I didn't have a lot of time for postmortem, so I would just quickly go through games with Fritz to get a sense for the good and bad moves.

The stuff above on positive reinforcement is teaching 101, something all teachers know. And what better people to learn from, about learning, than the people whose livelihood depends on its success? That said, they also know that different people have different styles. Some students learn better through punishment and guidance than through mere positive reinforcement. But it is easy to integrate both into your postmortems to find what mixture seems best for your personal learning style. It may feel like you are learning more when your self-esteem is shot, you are feeling the gut-wrenching agony of a defeat, having someone tell you how bad a move was and why. But almost a century of experiments in psychology suggest that you will learn just as much, if not more, through positive reinforcement. Don't you think you'll learn something when your teacher says "Damn, that was a great move! You've created a threat of a knight fork, you are opening up lines for your pieces giving yourself attacking chances, and at the same time dominating his bishop."

Hat tip to Squirrelchess, who brought this topic up in a recent post.