This week, the Financial Times had a great profile on Viswanathan Anand — a fellow South Indian and the current chess world champion. I really enjoyed reading it after growing up hearing stories of Anand's success from my dad, a competitive chess player who grew up in the same city around the same time.
As part of the article, Anand describes how chess has changed with technological advances and more open data:
Top competitors who once relied on particular styles of play are now forced to mix up their strategies, for fear that powerful analysis engines will be used to reveal fatal weaknesses in favoured openings. The result has in some ways made chess more defensive, increasing the risks of daring, adventurous gambits. But in championship matches, where draws are common and the final result is likely to be decided by just a handful of victories, unexpected approaches become even more prized. “Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer,” Anand says.
I fear that many budding chess players will take out of that passage an understanding that they have the change their approach as that's what the "experts" are doing.
What beginners often don't realize is that what works for experts won't often work for you. Poker strategies from the WSOP won't work at your local cash game, the same way Dropbox's customer acquisition efforts won't necessarily work in other markets. Experts are likely optimizing the last 1% (having gained the benefits of everything else).
It's here where I realize that a lot of working on a craft comes down to mastering the fundamentals and that experts are created out of an appreciation and expertise of the basics. Sometimes they base an entire career on this.
While fun to read success stories and about the nitty-gritty tactics of experts, it's important to step back and be cognizant of all the dirty work that came before it. There's no silver bullet to success.