My Top Tips for Chess Improvement - Heisman133

My Top Tips for Chess Improvement Quote of the Month: There are no shortcuts: Getting better at chess – like other complex endeavors – takes years of practiced study. "The Making of an Expert," by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely, Harvard Business Review, July 2007.

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It isn't difficult to summarize what you have to do to get better at chess; what's difficult is weeding out all the bad advice and taking time to do the right stuff.

Novice Nook Dan Heisman

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From my experience instructing about 1,000 students, I have observed that many have the determination to get better, but still take the wrong path and/or have a multitude of reasons (many legitimate) why they can't do this or that necessary part. Many look for shortcuts that are not present; some lack perseverance; others do plenty of work but either in the wrong areas, or in some right areas but missing key ingredients (see Getting the Edge).

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Does talent help? Of course, but studies by psychologists have consistently shown that chess talent comes in many areas, and not all grandmasters are super-geniuses away from the chessboard (see the Harvard Business Review link above). Rolf Wetzell's book Chess Master at any Age suggests almost anyone can achieve that title; I am not sure that is possible – only about half-apercent of U.S. Chess Federation members are masters – but almost all weaker players could improve greatly by doing the proper work over significant time. I am amazed how many lower rated players who don't know how to analyze in slow games (currently the only time controls where federations award titles like "expert" and "master") hire instructors to teach them how to play the Caro-Kann or subtle rook and pawn endgames. When I watch these players in long time control games, they often play very quickly (or too slowly) and, when critical positions occur, have little idea how to recognize those positions nor attempt to carefully analyze them.

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I will go so far as to conjecture that if I could get aspirants to memorize MCO15, it would affect their rating very little (see my explanation in Adjusting Your Thought Process for Faster Time Controls). You could say the same about learning the most "exact" endgame positions like Lucena or Philidor rook and pawn positions. If you can't recognize critical positions or analyze them carefully and evaluate them correctly, then all that other knowledge is going to result in severely diminishing returns. But there are many chess activities that will put you in the right direction. The tips I'm about to present have all been written here before and in my book A Guide to Chess Improvement: The Best of Novice Nook. However, this advice is so important to the overall goal of this column that it is worth summarizing here. Note that browsing through the Novice Nook Archives will provide more detail on all of the following. So here are two dozen Top Tips on what you should do if you want to become a much stronger player: 1. Find strong players and analyze with them as much as possible. A total of 1,000+ hours is probably a good minimum – that's ten hours a week for two years. This may sound like a lot, but most good players found the time and the opportunity at some point in their career. Not everyone has this opportunity,

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but if you can seek it out, a tremendous benefit should result. This is the single most important advice for anyone wishing to improve; one IM appropriately called it "hanging out in the chess culture." Your advisor(s) can be strong club players, opponents, a relative, or an instructor. Extensively review games with them (yours and others); listen to their suggestions on your play, and pay attention to how they analyze. Try to understand how they determine candidate moves and their safety, figure out what were the losing moves, which principles apply in which positions, and any other analytical and evaluation information you can elicit. A computer won't do – it can't talk to you, explain what it is analyzing and why, and tell you where your analysis went wrong. You don't want to learn lines – you want to learn how to analyze and evaluate well. This includes the identification of critical positions. Players who analyze and evaluate well are good players, no matter how much they know about specific opening or endgames. 2. Play as many long time control games as possible (30+5 or, preferably, slower). Until you are 1700+ FIDE/USCF, avoid intermediate time controls (ten to thirty minutes per game), which may entrench poor/hasty thought process habits. Taking your time in slow time control games is an important step in learning how to analyze moves carefully, comparing various candidate moves to see which offers the best chance. Playing slowly and consistently and analyzing and comparing is a necessary part of improving that skill. You are a better chess player when you learn to chose better moves, so taking your time and learning to consider move options better is about as important a skill as you can practice. 3. Once you are past the beginner level, play plenty of speed games mixed in with the slow games. But make sure to look up your openings in opening books (databases are not yet as helpful, although they do offer some benefits), so you don't keep making the same mistakes. At a recent talk at our club, former U.S. Woman's Champion Jen Shahade also emphasized the importance of looking up openings after speed games; I just sat and smiled. Importantly, play speed games with the same increment or time delay as your important over-the-board tournament games. Failing to do so will train your brain to think sub-optimally when you run low on time in those important games. If your important OTB games are played at a thirty second increment, then perhaps a five second increment for speed games will have to do. 4. Play almost entirely against humans – computers play differently, and don't play the style of chess nor put up the kind of psychological barriers you need to engender strong improvement. With the advent of Internet chess servers, there are human opponents available at any time. Want to play out games where GMs resigned to see if you can win, too? For this exercise computer opponents are great; they don't mind being punching bags in hopeless positions. 5. Play mostly against players slightly higher rated to push yourself and learn. But also play a reasonable percentage of games against players slightly weaker to avoid negative expectations, learn how to win won games ("technique), and play for wins when the position offers equal chances. Playing mostly opponents far above or below your level results in diminishing returns on your learning experience (exception: if the opponent far above you is willing to review the game with you – essentially a free lesson). Don't be afraid of anyone and always play with confidence, aggression, and respect for your opponent's moves and ideas. 6. Play in every event you can. If you have a choice of playing in an event where you are clearly the strongest or weakest player and the alternative is to not play at all, then play. Live events are more effective than online, which are also acceptable. Of course, if you have the choice of multiple events, chose the one where you are most likely to meet players slightly stronger than yourself. Waiting until you are "good" to play in events is also a common error; you won't improve as quickly without consistent live competition; locking yourself in a closet to just study is rarely the optimum path. Taking your lumps is a necessary part of the learning process and the younger you start, the better chance you have. Most really good players play hundreds of tournaments over a period of years during their improvement phase. Anyone wishing to be a really strong player should take time to reference Grandmaster

Alex Lenderman's event history to realize the enormous effort that was required to take him from young beginner to grandmaster. Students who play two or more slow games per week seem to improve more rapidly than those that average closer to one; Alex played between one and two events – not games – per week, and that only includes his rated events, not his fun and practice ones. 7. To enhance your ability to benefit from some of the above suggestions, join the best local club you can and start making friends; everyone is a stranger on their first visit, but it doesn't have to stay that way. If you do not live near a club, then start one! You can also join an Internet server like the Internet Chess Club (ICC) and start making friends there. Discuss your games and other chess subjects. As with opponents, you can often learn something valuable even from your peers. 8. Don't worry about your rating or try to protect it with artificial and short term actions. In the long run your rating will just follow your playing strength. You often learn a lot more when you lose and your rating goes down, than you do when you win and your rating goes up. In the long run, be concerned about not making the same mistakes repeatedly, and not what the result of an individual event or game might have on your rating. For the same reason, never offer a draw in a good position against a stronger player just to gain rating points. Think of a draw offer as an offer to remain ignorant of what you would have learned if the game had continued. Corollary: don't worry about your opponent's age or rating: try your best against everyone and you not only won't get upset as much but you will pull off more upsets (see number nineteen below). 9. Practice good time management: try to use almost all your time every game. For the many who play too fast, the first step in getting better is to learn to consistently identify, analyze, evaluate, and differentiate candidate moves. No sense playing slow time controls games and playing quickly – never start a game without the intention of using almost all your time. If you want to play faster, then play a faster time control, but always practice looking at the clock and adjusting your speed to use almost all your time. Allocate most of your time to your critical moves. Improving is about choosing better moves, so if you don't take your time and learn how to analyze and choose better moves among various candidates, then all your other study will yield diminishing returns. For those who move too slow: losing on time when you are not otherwise lost is worse than getting checkmated, although it is sufficient to realize that all losses count the same, by time or not. 10. Avoid Hope Chess and Hand-Waving, two common thought process errors. Hope Chess is when you make a move without considering whether your opponent has a check, capture, or threat in reply that cannot be safely met. Hand-Waving is when you don't analyze an analytical position but instead make a move based on principle. Other common thought process errors to avoid: Not asking "Is that move safe?," Quiescence errors, and not asking "What are all the things my opponent's move does?," and thus thinking he made the move only for reason "A" but missing that it does "B" also, where allowing "B" is fatal. 11. Pick your opponent's brain after the game in a postmortem. Learn how players of all levels think and approach the problem of finding their candidates, analyzing, and comparing them. Even opponents equal or somewhat weaker can likely teach you something. 12. Don't mask your weaknesses – learn about them and minimize them. Many amateur players who desperately want to improve tell me "I chose the Caro-Kann because I am a positional player" (or they want to avoid tactics). This logic makes a lot of sense if your improvement has peaked and you have no desire to get better or it is the final round of the World Open and you are playing for a potentially big cash prize, but makes no sense if your goal is long term improvement. If you are a positional player and rated 1500 you won't get to 1800 by avoiding tactics; these critical positions are going to decide games so you may as well confront them head on. And if you are a decent tactical player rated 1500 you won't get to 2000 by avoiding positions where you have to play strategically or win with careful technique. A chain is

only as strong as its weakest link, and your chess strength is upwardly bound by the weak points in your play, so work on them. Another example: Can't visualize well? Play long time control games slowly trying to visualize sequences carefully and do visualization exercises. 13. Read many annotated games, master or otherwise – when you begin, the best source is instructive anthologies like Logical Chess Move by Move, The Art of Logical Chess Thinking, and Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur. Games annotated for instruction and improvement should be read before ones that are not (the latter are the vast majority). Read them fairly quickly or you will never have time to read enough to be meaningful. You can't learn too much from thirty or forty games, but you can learn a lot from 300-400 games and a ton from 3,000-4,000 games! If you occasionally want to read a game really slowly (or quickly) and guess each move and give it to the computer, that's very helpful, but to do it every game is just too slow. You shouldn't have to read all the side "lines" – understanding the author's text vs. the position and placing that information into your memory is the most important part. The goal is to create a chess "conscience" where you see a position and many authors' advice gets triggered (e.g., "after controlling this open file I want to penetrate to the seventh or eighth rank with my rooks"). Skip any side analysis that is not fun (see number seventeen below). 14. Just because you find a chess book that is well-written, understandable, and contains considerable information, it does not mean it is appropriate for what you need to learn next. Many weaker players think that reading the excellent How to Reassess Your Chess by Silman will be their key to improvement, but if they are not tactically sound, play too fast, and/or play Hope Chess, reading advanced material, no matter how understandable, will not help very much and at worst can be counterproductive. In other words, if you can't consistently and correctly figure out if a move is safe, then its strategic value is less important. Try to find material or activities that make you a better analyst and evaluator based on your current needs. If possible, seek help from very strong players or experienced instructors to determine what material may be appropriate. 15. Improve your chess vision: including board vision, visualization, and tactical vision; these are base skills that make other chess skills better, too. The main ways to improve each is through regular slow play and special exercises designed to improve that skill. You Can't Play What You Don't See! Most good players improve their chess visions by playing long time-control games slowly and moving the pieces around in their head for several minutes at a time. If you are not good at this, avoiding it won't solve your problem: practice may not make perfect, but it will make you much better. Many students would analyze better and have more fun while doing so if they could visualize the position quickly and more accurately. 16. To improve your tactical vision, start by mastering the 2,000 or so basic tactical ideas upside down, inside out, backwards and forwards. Treat them like learning the multiplication tables. Most intermediate players don't know these patterns nearly as well as they should, and they believe that just because they can "solve" them all fairly easily that they are not worth studying any more. In most cases, this is a big mistake; solving is not the issue; recognition is. And remember that most difficult problems contain one, or more likely more than one, basic idea within, so mastering the easy ones will make it much easier to solve the hard ones. This activity, along with the work in number thirteen above, will help enhance your key criticality assessment skill, which is the ability to recognize critical positions. That in turn should trigger better time management, so you can spend more time on the critical decisions. 17. Do everything you can to make your work fun. Keep statistics, have a study partner, do whatever you can to make it interesting. I read many annotated master games, not because it would make me good at chess, but because I found it fascinating reading: How would Lasker overcome his cramped position or Fischer play the Poisoned Pawn? It was like reading thousands of mysteries on my little pocket set. If the work is not fun, try to make it fun. If you can't, I would skip that activity and stick to ones that are fun.

18. Don't worry about your opponent (online or otherwise) cheating. If he is using a computer on each move, he can beat any world champion and his rating would be 3000+, so what is he doing with a 1400 rating? If he is really 800 and using a computer just to get up to 1400, then you are basically playing a 1400 player anyway. Of course, if it is a money round at the World Open, see the tournament director immediately! 19. Play with consistency. Many players tell me that they played very well (e. g., avoided Hope Chess – see number ten above) for a while, but then "lost concentration," let up their guard, and lost to a simple tactic. Good players know that it only takes one bad move to lose a game, so treat each move like it might be the one. Chess is not a game where you can "turn it on" and "turn it off" at will; play practice games like they are important and are going to be published. For the most part, good players only have two gears: try your best or resign! If you don't feel like thinking hard that day, that's OK: play a shorter time control, but always try to use almost all your time if the game goes a normal number of moves (see number nine above). If you get tired near the end of multi-hour games, consider eating nutritious food during the game to keep your blood sugar under control, and keep in good shape to promote stamina. 20. Have perseverance. Determination is good but not sufficient; everyone who comes to me for lessons has determination, but a much smaller percentage have perseverance. Like any difficult subject, chess requires years of proper play and study to get proficient. If you shrivel up at any setback, you will never reach difficult goals, as the chess world presents many potential setbacks. One of my early, stronger opponents called me an idiot after my tough loss to a weaker player cost him tiebreak. My reaction: just wait until I get stronger and I play you again! 21. Don't put up barriers, such as not wanting to read descriptive notation, humans are too arrogant to play, or you can't find anyone to play slow games with you on the Internet. Once you put up these barriers (most of which can easily be overcome, and are by more determined players) you are setting yourself up on the road to failure. 22. Believing before a game that you will lose is usually a self-fulfilling prophecy, so concern yourself with making consistently good moves. If you are going to become a good player, you will lose thousands of games. But your ability to learn from your losses (and even wins and draws) and not make the same mistakes is a key to improvement. 23. Learn generic ideas before specifics. For example, understanding that both defending and attacking rooks belong behind passed pawns is much more helpful than learning to win the Lucena position. Similarly, in openings, first learning how to activate all your pieces consistently with ideas like break moves is far more effective than studying the main lines of the Caro-Kann and Grünfeld. 24. Don't perceive your chess abilities as "I have this one but I don't have that one." Abilities such as visualization, tactical awareness, and criticality assessment don't exist as either 0 or 1 (knowledge doesn't work this way either, but that is another story). Instead, you have innate talents that have to be nurtured and practiced over years to reach their full potential. If you want to use a mental model, think instead that everything is 0 to 100 and, though you may be an 18 now and no amount of practice will get you to 100, you can become a 73 if you work hard at it. Sticking near 18 in your abilities will keep your current playing strength down, but it would soar if you do exercises and maintain the kind of good practice which will get them toward 73. If you have read many Novice Nooks, you not only already know all the above, but you also likely understand why I believe most of these suggestions are helpful. Of course, no one does exactly all of the above (I don't have a rigid "program" my students must follow), but if you omit key parts of this advice: don't consistently look for better moves in long time control games, play only computers, play fast in long time control games, refuse to play speed games or look up the openings after you do, play Hope Chess, or won't review hundreds of annotated instructional games, then don't be surprised if

you are "doing lots of work, but not getting much better."

Question In many areas of life it is said that to be effective you should focus on using your strengths for the task at hand and pay little distraction to your weaknesses (unless the weakness hinder the strength). And further that focusing too much on improving on your weaknesses makes you mediocre at best. Do you think that this applies at all to chess? Answer Not at the start of your career. When you are trying to improve you should work on your weaknesses (and your strengths, too, since you are trying to improve everything). In chess you are often not much stronger than your weakest link. Once you are at your peak and trying to maximize performance then yes, relying on your strengths and masking your weaknesses makes more sense. Question Can you recommend any book, article, or software that specifically addresses the following: 1. How to solve a tactics puzzle. 2. A step-by-step algorithm for solving tactics problems. 3. A flow-sheet methodology for solving tactics puzzles. Thanks in advance. Answer I don't know anyone that uses a flow sheet. I do have a Novice Nook with detail on thought process: A Generic Thought Process and a simplified one, Making Chess Simple. There is a new book Power Chess For Kids by Hertan, which is quite good at explaining how to spot tactics. Don't be put off by the "kids" title – many "kids" books are good for players of all ages. I also have two NNs on how to spot the potential for tactics in real games: The Seeds of Tactical Destruction and Revisiting the Seeds of Tactical Destruction. Also important is "The Two Things Necessary to Satisfy a Safety Issue." I address this near the end of Speeding Up. Many weaker players don't do these consistently and thus miss safety issues in their games. Similarly, the The Most Common and Important Use of Tactics is a key explanation of use of tactics during games.

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