The Marginal Gains Philosophy

Sir David John Brailsford, the former performance director of British cycling, revolutionized British cycling via the application of the Marginal Gains philosophy. When he was appointed in 2003, British cycling was in a poor state, with no wins in the Tour de France for 110 years and only one Olympic gold medal in cycling since 1908. At the end of his ten-year tenure, Great Britain had won:

• Two cycling gold medals at the 2004 Olympics.
• Eight cycling gold medals at each of the 2008 and 20012 Olympics.
• A total of 59 World Championships in road, track, BMX and mountain bike racing.

In 2010, Brailsford also became the manager of the new British-based professional team, Team Sky. Within two years, Team Sky began dominating the Tour de France, with six individual victories from 2012 to 2018 by Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas.

In essence, the aggregation of Marginal Gains is the application of tiny, 1% improvements across all areas of a specific discipline, as explained in this article by James Clear (https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains).

How does the theory apply to playing Chess on the Lichess online platform? Well, if one can win at least 51% of the time against random Lichess opponents with more or less the same rating, one's rating will always improve. This is true for all time controls, for novices as well as Grandmasters. The only exceptions are the very best players whose ratings stabilize at the upper thresholds, as they invariably play most of their games against lower rated players.

So the trick is to improve one's game by small margins in all areas of online play, across as many different topics as possible, inclusive of:

• Opening variations.
• Middle game tactics: pins, forks, double attacks, discovery, skewers, removing the guard, overworked pieces, no retreat, surprise moves, mating combinations, sacrifices, etc.
• Overall strategy.
• End games

Tiny improvements across the full spectrum will all add up cumulatively towards reaching the elusive 51% or more win ratio, proving David Brailsford philosophy of Marginal Gains, when applied to Chess.