Capablanca's 1932 Chess Lecture

On May 25, 1932, Jose Raul Capablanca gave a lecture at the Club de Comunicaciones de Prado in Cuba. Edward Winter provides a translation of the lecture's transcript here. The reason this comes up now is because purportedly the original typed manuscript (with hand-written notes by The Man himself) is for sale on Ebay, so if you've got $5,000 burning a hole in your pocket....

I'm not that interested in the sale, but I did read Mr. Winter's translation of the lecture. It's a decent enough lecture, I suppose, but some lines near the end caught my attention:

I should like to conclude by recommending you to use your imagination as much as possible; a player has to lose many games if he is to progress. Many players sometimes become annoyed because they lose, but one learns more by losing than by winning. When winning a player thinks he is doing very well and he does not realize the mistakes he is making; but when he loses he appreciates that somewhere he was mistaken and he attempts not to make the same errors in the future.

Standard enough advice that we've all heard 1,000 times, it seems. One learns more from losing than from winning, and Capablanca provides a good rationale for why this is true. "When winning a player thinks he is doing very well and he does not realize the mistakes he is making; but when he loses he appreciates that somewhere he was mistaken and he attempts not to make the same errors in the future."

But is that still true? Speaking strictly of chess and the moves played, it might not be so any more. With the advent of powerful computer programs, a player can easily see which mistakes he made even in successful games. A player can take some time looking over any of his wins with Stockfish or Komodo (or the program of his choice), and he will likely find plenty of errors - hopefully the small kind, but probably some fairly significant evaluation swings too. (I speak from experience. I'm often surprised at my poor play in my winning games - it's between humbling and humiliating!)

So now it's possible, speaking purely from a chess perspective, to learn as much from one's victories as from one's losses. One merely has to take the time to examine the games.

However, there are still the non-chess factors to be considered, and there the old saw is probably still true - but only for players willing to examine their efforts with some semblance of objectivity!