Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months

Pedantry alert: As ELO ratings follow a logarithmic curve, &quot;gaining 600 points&quot; is a dimensionless metric.<p>These are good tips for beginner to intermediate growth. The things that definitely help the most are:<p>* Pattern recognition - the best courses for this level are things like &quot;Common traps in &lt;some random opening&gt;&quot;, applied with Woodpecker method. Once you&#x27;ve memorized all the mistakes in the Scandi or London system, you can really crush a lot of people who play haphazardly.<p>* Study your own games and games of people at or just above your level. Four simple methods:<p>1) during the game, write down (Lichess has a notes section on the left) 3 candidate moves for every move in the middle and endgame, why you&#x27;re making a particular move, and what you think the opponent&#x27;s response will be<p>2) use the &quot;Learn from your mistakes&quot; button after each game during analysis<p>3) check the most common moves in the opening that are different than yours, play through a couple of masters&#x27; games to see why those positions are preferred.<p>And my last tip which helped me a lot just with the &quot;meta&quot; of playing chess ...<p>* Use more time. Be okay with losing games because you run out of time thinking. Always, always, always try to play the best move, even if it means spending a lot of time.

&quot;The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.&quot; - Paul Morphy.<p>I started playing anonymous games on LiChess, and playing without ELO anxiety is way, way more fun. It&#x27;s a game, this is all I need out of it.

I think by far the biggest improvement newbies can make is just not hanging pieces and blundering, honestly. Literally the majority of games at &lt;1600 lichess level will be decided by mistakes. But apart from that, it&#x27;s openings and tactics. I largely agree with the blog post.<p>I used to be quite good as a kid, winning championships and whatnot, and I&#x27;m actually glad my grandfather didn&#x27;t teach me opening theory so much, so I could be trained to think more than memorize. Sadly at the highest level, you do just have to memorize the best opening lines which makes it a lot less fun so I&#x27;m not too bothered about not being the best I could be. I think games like Fischer random go some way to addressing this and it&#x27;s a shame they&#x27;re not more popular.<p>Some really entertaining Chess youtube channels I like are:<p>GothamChess: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;gothamchess&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;gothamchess&#x2F;about</a> I think the number 1 on YouTube these days. He explains games in a high level, really entertaining way. He also has other playlists like guess the elo, etc. He&#x27;s a really entertaining guy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;agadmator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;agadmator</a> I think he number 2 and used to be number 1 most subscribed until very recently. He explains lines in more detail than Gotham, and has quite a few funny meme-able phrases like &quot;captures, captures, captures&quot;, &quot;hello everyone!&quot;, &quot;bishop pair fully operational&quot;, etc. I enjoy his playlists about e.g. the Morphy Saga, AlphaZero, very much.<p>ChessBrah: Kind of broey funny with house music, challenges and whatnot, and actually very high quality chess from GMs too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCvXxdkt1d8Uu08NAQP2IUTw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCvXxdkt1d8Uu08NAQP2IUTw</a><p>There&#x27;s some others I don&#x27;t watch so much but which are also liked by many too, like the Botez sisters, GM Hikaru, Eric Rosen, etc. It&#x27;s quite a nice community (barring the usual drama all such communities have).

Note that going from 1200 ELO to 1800 ELO is going from 18th percentile to 74th percentile. Pretty much any form of study over 6 months will get you that progress, because you&#x27;ll have spent more time on chess than ~74% of players.<p>Going from 1800 ELO to 2400 ELO (74th percentile to 99th percentile) in 6 months would be a lot more interesting, because clearly your study habits are helping you progress faster than others.<p>A lot of being better than X% of people at something is just about spending more time doing it than X% of participants... Most professional video game players have 5,000 to 10,000 hours of experience in their game.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;stat&#x2F;rating&#x2F;distribution&#x2F;rapid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;stat&#x2F;rating&#x2F;distribution&#x2F;rapid</a>

I gained 200 point when I started practicing blindfolded, also great visualization training! A good way to start this is have someone call out squares on the board and you respond with the color. Next start naming the diagonals. Then start moving around a knight, bishop, and then slowly build up your ability to hold a game in your head. Highly recommend!<p>Thanks for this article. The woodpecker method seems like a nice opportunity for a slack bot.

I&#x27;d say that chess fundamentals is three things: Endgames, tactics, and positional strategy. OP&#x27;s strategy of studying openings and tactics is a very fun and accessible improvement path for intelligent new players, but it is very fragile, as you become vulnerable the second the opponent gets you out of your opening theory. Studying endgames and positional motifs gives you important decision-making tools in unfamiliar positions. Hiring a chess coach is probably the easiest way to systematically improve in these areas, if you&#x27;re not a robot immune to the tedium of working through Dvoretsky&#x27;s endgame manual and Silman&#x27;s Reassess your Chess.<p>After getting a handle on the fundamentals, the next step is just the accumulation of <i>ideas</i>. GMs use this word all the time in lectures and their post-mortem interviews. Some are common and obvious -- pressuring f2&#x2F;f7, or yoloing a pawn storm in oppositely castled positions, or outposting an &quot;octopus knight&quot; on the sixth rank, for example. Other ideas require so much genius to see they become famous -- Fischer&#x27;s Nh4!! at age 13, or Short&#x27;s king walk, or Shirov&#x27;s bishop sacrifice, for example.<p>Accumulating ideas is why studying openings can be helpful in the beginning -- you will learn common plans as well as the most dangerous ideas and traps by brute force just by looking at enough theory. But rather than this inefficient approach -- since you&#x27;ll never remember every single possible move -- I would recommend studying books and lectures that cover common ideas in the setups you prefer. Specifically, work through the pawn structures you like from GM Mauricio Flores Rios&#x27;s Chess Structures book, and then study grandmasters who match your style or otherwise inspires you in some way -- e.g. Fischer&#x2F;Tal for tactical wizards, Karpov&#x2F;Kramnik for positional specialists, Carlsen&#x2F;Capablanca for endgame grinders, or Rapport&#x2F;Jobava&#x2F;Larsen if you are a weirdo -- and watch Youtube videos analyzing their games and&#x2F;or buy a book with GM commentary of their best hits.

Shameless plug: In case you want to track your chess progress and see more statistics on your openings (win rates, etc.), I&#x27;m developing a website where you can link your accounts to view stats for all of your games. It&#x27;s free and currently in Beta: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessmonitor.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessmonitor.com&#x2F;</a><p>Here is an example for the current world champion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessmonitor.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;kcc58R9eeGY09ey5Rmoj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessmonitor.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;kcc58R9eeGY09ey5Rmoj</a>

I’ve been watching this YouTube “speed run” by a GM who is a great teacher and have gone from 1000 to 1300 so far. He does a great job explaining some basic theory and giving advice for newcomers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ytkf3qZTj74" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ytkf3qZTj74</a>

Surprised you didn&#x27;t mention &quot;analyzing games I played to find viable alternatives or understand opponent blunders.&quot; The greatest improvements to my score came from reviewing every game and using the &quot;Computer Analysis&quot; feature on Lichess to see other, stronger moves. This helped a lot in breaking out of old patterns and not making the same mistakes twice.<p>There is a famous series of chess textbooks they use to teach kids in Russia, and two of the important &quot;commandments of chess&quot; if you will, are: be able to visualize the board (seems crazy to me, still) and review&#x2F;learn from your games.

Interesting article. Wish I had time to try even some of those. I&#x27;m nowadays quite casual but still serious player. Have been grinding in Lichess since 2019 but played consistently since highschool (so 15 years now!). I&#x27;m bit over 1800 in rapid and around 1700 in blitz. I don&#x27;t care that much about my rating but it sure feels nice to break my records every now and then. I think my biggest problem is that my work (coding) exhausts my thinking energy and I&#x27;m quite tired most of times I play so I make stupid blunders which makes me lose many many winning positions. I don&#x27;t know what would help here? Lately I&#x27;ve just played mostly 3 minute games. It&#x27;s not so serious to lose a knight or bishop there because the time factor is there always. I&#x27;m dreaming of attending the local chess club once my kids are older but until them, see you on Lichess! Boy I love chess :)

you can play &quot;sound&quot; chess using general rules and get to about master level on lichess :<p><pre><code> * trade a piece (bishop for knight and vice versa) when it&#x27;s being less effective than the opponent&#x27;s piece * block opponents bishops * block opponents pawns * don&#x27;t give opponent&#x27;s knights a perch (supported by a pawn) on your side of the board, especially near the middle * try to promote edge pawns to the middle or clear the path out of the way of your pawns </code></pre> ..there are many other rules, but you can apply these much more quickly (esp in speed chess) thinking &quot;statistically&quot; to improve your position. The end game is where it gets hard for humans and you actually have to think, especially if there are knights still jumping around, rooks and bishops are easier to visualize and block.

I have a genuine question. My long time peeve has been that I suck at Chess and every time I play against anyone&#x2F;anything, I just lose. It demoralizes me and then after sometime I try again, only to have the experience repeat. I have had decent grades, I code for a living and have been told that the quality of my work isn&#x27;t bad so I guess I&#x27;ll risk coming across as arrogant when I think that I&#x27;m not absolutely dumb.<p>So the question is, is there anyone who has had the same experience? If so, what did you do to improve? Mind you, I&#x27;m not asking folks who put in moderate effort and got results. I&#x27;m talking to the ones that keep failing and failing spectacularly but eventually improved. Is it even possible to have anyone like that? If so, what did you do? Is it about just keeping at it?

A bit of an aside, I love chess because it forces you to think several moves ahead including game-theorizing what your opponent will do. I want to teach it to my kid for this reason.<p>I never got into timed chess but I can see it be valuable because it forces you to trade off between over-thinking and running out of time and under-thinking and making bad moves. This is also a real life skill.<p>But I know that my personal game will always stay amateur because once you&#x27;re in the timed game space, you can&#x27;t get too far without memorizing opening and to me that crosses the line from &quot;fun and overall developmental&quot; to &quot;work.&quot;

I wish the author had discussed a bit about what worked and didn&#x27;t at a higher level. I don&#x27;t have the time to get into chess, but I&#x27;m quite curious about how I could translate his learning into other games and domains.<p>One that was mentioned as a breakthrough was in learning to think like the opponent. That&#x27;s quite interesting.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what I can takeaway from the puzzle stuff without knowing more about chess. It seemed like some of the puzzles worked better than others, for whatever reason. I&#x27;d definitely like to know more.

Anyone have any tips for someone who&#x27;s a bit interested in chess but is a <i>complete</i> beginner? As in, I know how the pieces move but I couldn&#x27;t win a game against a blindfolded dachshund puppy. My ELO would be negative (I&#x27;d be so improbably bad that it breaks mathematics). It&#x27;s just not clear where to start.

I&#x27;m surprised how smooth the curve is, the author never has streaks where he loses a few hundred rating points. In fact I&#x27;m struggling to see he ever dips more than 50.<p>I&#x27;ve been on a similar journey over the past year, where I&#x27;m now around 1500 rapid on chess.com but in that time I&#x27;ve had streaks where I&#x27;ve been down 250 rating from my peak.<p>I don&#x27;t know if I tilt super hard or if the author is remarkably resilient to tilt. It might also be a difference in how the different sites do match-making or adjust ratings and k-values.<p>I&#x27;d echo the benefit in learning some basic opening theory. It&#x27;s not worth rote learning theory but it is worth having a consistent approach to games so you learn from the same patterns and can avoid opening traps.<p>If you play the same opening moves then over time you build up a memory of moves that you like in those positions and which will get deeper as you get more experience.

One piece of advice I hear a lot is &quot;review your games&quot;, but how do you actually do that without a stronger player? I&#x27;d sometimes use an engine and it&#x27;ll point out moves I hadn&#x27;t considered before, but without understanding the plan or positional ideas behind them, I often find this pretty opaque.

I&#x27;m quite good at puzzles now, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to affect my ranking in actual play.<p>I might be asking for the impossible here, but is there a way to get better without turning this into a part-time job, where I have to read a lot of books, study and memorize openings, and so on?

At 1700-1800 I hit a point where I had to study more seriously in order to improve so I lost interest and pretty much stopped playing. Up to that point I could improve just by playing more (with the occasional youtube video but that was more for entertaintment).

I would meet with a chess tutor every week for 6 months some years ago. The biggest thing that contributed to my games getting better (which the author didn’t mention as a method they tried) was analyzing my own game.<p>Thinking back on the moves you made, why you made them (ie gaining material, tempo, position), opportunities missed, and blunders made. It did help to have a coach go over my games with me, helps identify what to work on, what to think about when playing and focus on.<p>The biggest thing I wasn’t thinking about is how the moves I made moved the board into the position I wanted to checkmate in — I was too worried about losing the pieces themselves.

Another apporach would be to focus on correspondence matches, where people make fewer blunders. May be some of the habits learned there will transfer over to shorter time controls.

I think the author is underappreciating end game. Understanding how drive winning pawn promotions informs much of the other strategy. This sort of thing informs when to make a trade or a sacrifice. If you don&#x27;t understand it you aren&#x27;t likely making good trades. The other simple idea is control of the center and evaluating your play to ask yourself how much control did you have?

600 points in 6 months is an impressive achievement.

Related shameless self plug: I went from 600 to ~1100 thanks to my own training method, which I&#x27;m transforming into an online service aimed at chess amateurs that want to improve.<p>It&#x27;s currently being developed, who wants to check out the free beta can sign up here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yousuckatchess.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yousuckatchess.com</a>

I failed at chess because instead of thinking about my next move I&#x27;d be designing a program to pick the next move for me.

Some great tips in there. Will definitely try some of these, I find I&#x27;m the best the moment I wake up, I will solve several puzzles quickly and grind a win streak but as the day goes along I get gradually worse, I actually started plotting it to find the best time to play. Any time after 9PM is out tho that doesn&#x27;t deter me sometimes.<p>I try to focus on classical then go lower and end my sessions with some blitz. What I hate the most about classical is I will be dominating the game and a silly blunder cost me half hour or more so I&#x27;ve taken the sit on my hands method and absolutely no premoving. I also found the best method to improve for me personally was not to shy away from playing higher rated players, it forces you to take the game very seriously as compared to someone with a ?. I used to sit in the lobby and scan for weak looking players and abort games to try and get white but now I will intentionally find someone 100 points higher than me and go black and see how I do. I also actively try to play moves in my head, hard as hell but it&#x27;s a good exercise to wind down the day in bed. The daily arenas are a great help as well.<p>The final trick I did to improve was &quot;master&quot; two openings for each color and learn the traps and tactics they come with. Good old london. Every variant I immediately dropped to my true rating and I really struggled cracking 1300 - 1400 but using the cues above I easily went from 1600 to 1700 in rapid just the other day. Catch me here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;@&#x2F;llazlo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lichess.org&#x2F;@&#x2F;llazlo</a>

Visualization is best learned via Chess Vision for iOS <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;chess-vision&#x2F;id1547932501" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;chess-vision&#x2F;id1547932501</a>

Great writeup! I just jumped from 900 to 1200 in rapid within two months.<p>I&#x27;ll definitely try what he proposed to hopefully get the same rating gain.

I read this as &quot;Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 pounds in 6 months.&quot;<p>Thought it was the only activity they had left!

What&#x27;s the equivalent of Puzzle Storm -- rapid drills to improve pattern recognition -- in other domains, e.g. coding?

going from 2100 to &gt;2250 on lichess in a year, I can confirm woodpeckering is the way to go for me.

Unpopular opinion: Chess needs an update with more moves or randomized pieces (position, etc).

lichess.org has really been a game-changer (sorry) for my chess playing. I know some people love chess.com but I think lichess has such a great interface and there is always a large number of players online for games.

When I play online chess I load up a grandmaster AI and input my opponents moves

Does anyone have a similar collection of guides on learning Go?

I keep seeing &quot;after gaining 600 pounds in 6 months&quot;

Does learning chess improve other facets of cognition?

Not every meaningless achievement needs a retrospective blog post. The article starts out:<p>&quot;For some background: I played chess briefly with my friends in high school,&quot;<p>No one knows who you are or cares. What kind of person has the time to read that?