[eggbrain]

I struggle with how I'm supposed to grok this advice, as it feels like a tautology.

E.g. with his chess example, I can't see how blundering isn't just a result of a lack of the things he mentions -- practicing technique, drilling puzzles, etc. How can we as amateurs know _not_ to make blunders without knowing _why_ it was a blunder, which usually involves being properly skilled to identify the blunder ahead of time in some fashion?

The main caveats I can think of are ego/recklessness/apathy/emotion, which revolve around not caring about making a blunder, along with distraction/hastiness, which revolve around not having the appropriate mental energy to not make a blunder.

[Dove]

Some of the best advice I've ever heard comes from the following observation:

    Blundering is often a result of trying to overplay a small advantage.

If you are playing thoughtfully, with an eye on the whole game, you are smart enough not to blunder. It's when you get excited about pursuing an opportunity that you overlook mistakes.

Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight of the big picture. Or alternatively, when you see an opportunity, look for the danger.

The insight has served me extremely well in competitive and security contexts, and I think it accounts for a lot of blunders in product design as well.

[tech_ken]

> Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight of the big picture.

Almost nothing is more dangerous to my winning chances than exiting the opening with a small material or positional advantage. Opponent is now incentivized to attack ferociously, and I'm left struggling to figure out the safest way to convert without playing too passively but also not over-pushing.

[setgree]

I agree. I like the way Arnold Kling expresses a similar idea [1]: "One of my beliefs about competition is that the business world is very forgiving of mistakes... On October 11, 1999, our business, along with the Scottsdale relocation business, was sold to homestore.com for $85 million. My share was quite dilute by this point...But a couple of percent of $85 million is still real money, particularly considering the sequence of mistakes, miscalculations, misjudgments, and erroneous forecasts that led to it."

Kling and coworkers had an important insight about what the internet was going to do to home-buying. This made up, in part, for such obvious blunders as failing to buy MapQuest.

[1] https://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst218.html

[greedo]

Most blunders (at least 1500 ELO and below) are often board observation blunders, where your board vision lets you down. Either you're too tunnel visioned on your own attack or you just expose yourself to simple tactics. When I first started playing online, I would routinely blunder my queen roughly 10% of the time. Luckily I've improved and only do it 9% of the time...

[a_t48]

Many many chess blunders are as simple as “I moved a piece where it can be immediately taken”.