When you do play against experts, they will probably beat you badly. Playing them will teach you what not to do. Do this, and they punish you horribly. Do that, and the game is lost. Playing them will teach you which moves are “unsafe” or “terrible,” and you must learn to make fewer and fewer of these moves that will lose you the game. Of course, if all you do is remove moves from your repertoire, you are playing a safer game that is less likely to be lost at any moment, but you also must make moves to win! You should be making good progress on not losing so quickly when you play these experts, but how can you learn to win? Watch what the experts do to you. They are likely extremely efficient at stealing a game. When you make a mistake, watch exactly how they punish you. Watch exactly which sequence they use to end the game.
Again, some of my friends swear by only playing against experts, and there is surely much to be learned from that. But once you have learned how the experts win, it can be very difficult to practice those maneuvers against them. The opportunity to exercise your winning muscles will show itself only rarely. It is at this point that I prefer to play against weaker players. The weaker players will present plenty of opportunities for you to practice your endgame skills. You can try variations on your attack patterns all day on them. You can hone your skills at ending a game. Often, attacking patterns will leave you vulnerable, so practice until your attack sequences leave no gaps of vulnerability. You won’t truly know if you’ve accomplished this until you play against the experts later, though.
The idea is to use the beginners as a way to get an extraordinary amount of practice in the tactics that win the game in a short amount of time. The experts rarely allow such situations to arise, but when they do, you will need to capitalize on them professionally. When the opponent makes a fatal mistake, you need to be able to confidently take control of the game and win it. This act must be natural, something you’ve done a thousand times before. When the rare opportunity to win presents itself while playing the expert, you shouldn’t have to think “I’m pretty sure I can win this in theory. The textbooks say I should do X.” You should take control of the game simply, quickly, and instinctively, just as you have done countless times against the beginners.
The experts keep you honest. They remind you, “That was not a safe move. You cannot trick me with that. That will not stop my advances.” The expert also teaches you how to win, but presents only very few opportunities to practice winning. The beginner, on the other hand, will let you practice winning until it’s second nature. At that time, you must return to the experts.
There will soon come a time when beginners and even intermediate players are of very little use to you. They do not know how to punish your mistakes properly, so you can develop bad habits. They fall for tricks that are not “real,” meaning that experts would never fall from them. And perhaps worst of all, they often defeat themselves. If you play safely for long enough against beginners or intermediates, they are likely to eventually make a mistake that gives you the win. It might teach you that long, drawn-out conservative play is the road to victory. But what will you do when the expert never hands you the game? What if the opponent is good enough that you must actively beat him rather than wait for him to beat himself? This is why you must focus all of your attention on playing experts when you are ready.
