Chess for Beginners

Category: Improvement

  • My Chess Comeback

    My Chess Comeback

    Below is my new chess improvement plan after having decided to dust off my chess board after watching the Queen’s Gambit. 

    • Focus on tactics, the middlegame, and the endgame
    • No direct opening study, any opening study comes from analyzing my games.
    • Study time is broken down between theory (studying) and practice (solving).
    • Feedback loop consists of going over played games, and creating a database of missed positions. Plan on returning to these problematic positions using  spaced repetition.
    Day Topic Study/ Solve
    Monday Tactics Test Your Chess IQ – First Challenge
    ChessTempo
    Tuesday Middlegame Modern Chess Strategy 

    300 Most Instructive Positions
    Wednesday Endgame 100 Endgames You Must Know
    Endgame Challenge / 200 Brilliant Endgames
    Thursday Tactics Test Your Chess IQ – First Challenge
    ChessTempo
    Friday Middlegame Mastering Chess Middlegames

    Masters of the Chessboard
    Saturday Endgame 100 Endgames You Must Know
    Endgame Challenge / 200 Brilliant Endgames
    Sunday Play / Analyze Play Magnus starting at age 10 (~1800)

    Will reassess in 30 days and adjust the plan accordingly based on OTB results.

  • Steal Like a Grandmaster

    Steal Like a Grandmaster

    two_knights_o

    I have been reading the book Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon, and I have found that many of his suggestions apply to chess.

    Chess is as much a creative endeavor as it is a mathematical one. So a book about making you more creative, has implications for chess improvement.

    Nothing is Original

    All good artists understand that nothing is original. All creative work builds on what has come before.

    Modern chess began when Steinitz built upon Morphy, Lasker built upon Steinitz. In chess, there are further examples of Alekhine learning from Capablanca, Kasparov from Botvinnik.

    Every new idea is a combination of one or more previous ideas.

    Choose a Mentor

    To become a better chess player, you need to surround yourself with mentors (past chess greats) whose ideas are worth “stealing”. Learn from the best, and some of it will rub off on your gameplay. Chose a master as a mentor, their lesson plans are the games they left behind and the ideas they made their own.

    School Yourself
    You have to be curious, look things up that are unclear, chase down every reference. Look up all the games where Rubinstein played a rook and pawn endgame. Create an opening repertoire based on the openings that Botvinnik played. When you find a move you don’t understand, try to figure out why they played that move. If you can’t figure it out on your own then ask a stronger player. If you go through this process, you will either find an answer or your will come up with a better question.

    Good Theft Bad Theft
    Honor Degrade
    Study Skim
    Steal from many Steal from one
    Credit Plagiarize
    Transform Imitate
    Remix Ripoff

    Use Your Board

    In his book, Kleon mentions that the computer prevents the artist from being creative. He recommends starting the creative process using analog tools. Only turn to digital tools at the end of the process.

    In chess, most of your work should be over the board. Go over a master game by playing the moves on your board. Learn a new opening by reviewing master games that used that opening, but play them over the board. Using your hands will only make you more creative, but the act of moving the pieces will help record the ideas and moves into your subconscious.

    Unlock Your Creativity

    Learn from the past masters, deep dive into their games and ideas and stick to analog tools when doing so, and your chess will improve.

     

  • 10 Steps to Chess Improvement

    10 Steps to Chess Improvement

    The road to chess improvement is a long and winding one, but with these 10 tips will help you survive the journey and increase your chess level.

    Chess Improvement Tips

    1. Eliminate blunders.

    2. Become proficient at finding offensive and defensive tactics.

    3. Stop playing “hope chess“. Analyze at least 4 ply deep, and make sure that your move improves your position and does not lead to #1 & 2 above.

    4. Be aware of your opponents tactical and positional threats.

    5. Become proficient in basic endgames (king and pawn and rook endgames in particular).

    6. Learn the basic positional themes.

    7. Work on improving your thought process.

    8. Create a basic opening repertoire that fits your style of play, and does not rely on too much theory.

    9. Play stronger opponents and review your games afterwards.

    10. Play over annotated master games.

    What chess improvement tips would you like to add?

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  • The (Long) Road to Chess Mastery

    According to experts it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field. So the following is my attempt to gauge my chess progress based on the 10,000 hour rule.

    Assumptions

    • 10,000 hours of practice = expert
    • A chess expert is a player with a 2000 USCF rating.
    • Your starting chess rating is approximately 1000 USCF.
    • Halfway through your training or 5,000 hours of practice later you should be rated approximately 1500.
    • Average chess level in ELO is about 1400.
    Variables
    • I have been playing chess for approximately 6 years.
    • I spend an average of 2 hours per day on chess which comes out to 730 hours of chess practice per year.
    Calculations
    • 6 years * 730 hours / year = 4,380 hours of study so far, so I am 43% on my road to chess mastery.
    • I still need 5,620 hours to become an expert.
    • At the current rate of 2 hours, I will reach a 2000 USCF rating in approximately 7.7 years.
    Results
    • Since I have completed 44% of the 10,000 hours my rating should be at around 1440* ( I am currently FICS standard 1684 – 250 (USCF adjustment) =  1434 USCF equivalent)
    • If I increase my study time to 3 hours per day, I will decrease the time required to reach 200 from 7.7 to 5.1 years.
    • Increasing study time to 4 hours / day I will reach 2000 in 3.8 more years.
    • Increasing study time to 5 hours / day I will reach 2000 in 3 years (huge drop off and not worth it).

    It seems that the optimal number of hours to spend on practicing / studying chess per day is 3 hours.

    * I figured 1440 by multiplying 1000 * 44% (which is the total gain required from 1000 – 2000).


  • Finding the Master Within Pt. 2

    I have finished the exercise I proposed in Pt. 1 of Finding the Master Within, and below are my results:

    1. I played over 3 random games from each of the masters on the list.

    2. I gave myself a 0 for needs work, 1 for average, 2 for good, 3 for very good and 4 for outstanding.

    3. I averaged the scores for the three games, and gave myself an overall score.

    4. I will now begin reviewing  in detail, the games of the master with which I have the most affinity.

     

    Master Exercise Results

    In my case I scored an average of 2.67 when playing over Tarrasch’s games, and the second runner up was Karpov with a score of 2.0. I observed that I did better with the more positional / classical style players than with the more modern / dynamic styles.

    I will continue to go over master games strictly focusing on Tarrasch’s games using Guess the Move, and then compare my annotations with his annotated games collection( Three Hundred Chess Games ).

  • Finding the Master Within

    There is no doubt that reviewing master games is one of the best methods to improve your chess. The question for me has always been which master’s games do I study first? There are schools of thought that answer this by stating that you should review master games starting in chronological order, since this maps to the way a beginner learns chess. Using this method you would begin with Steinitz, and work your way up to modern day masters like Kasparov and Kramnik. While this is a logical approach, the problem I find with it is that it might take a long time before you reach the games of some of the more modern day masters, and these might be the players with whom you have the most affinity in your playing style.

    What I am planning to do, is to review one or two games from a list of masters in chronological order so that I might find the master whose games I would like to delve deeper into. I will be looking for games where the play is clearest and the outcome is artistic.

    Master list:

    1. Paul Morphy
    2. Wilhelm Steinitz
    3. Tarrasch
    4. Emanuel Lasker
    5. Akiba Rubinstein
    6. Jose Raul Capablanca
    7. Alexander Alekhine
    8. Mikhail Botvinnik
    9. Mikhail Tal
    10. Tigran Petrosian
    11. Bobby Fischer
    12. Anatoly Karpov
    13. Garry Kasparov

    I will chose games based on the following criteria:

    1. Won games

    2. Preferrably annotated

    3. In chronological order

    4. Plays my openings

  • Threats in Chess Pt. 2

    I wasn’t planning on making this a series of posts on threats, but I feel I’m on to something. My chess has improved since I have restructured my thought process to incorporate threat analysis .

    Threat Based Evaluation Process

    1. What are my opponent’s threats?
        a. Is there a mate threat?
        b. Is there a threat of material loss?
        c. Is there a tactical threat?
        d. Is there a positional threat?

    2. Do I have any threats I can execute?
        a. Is there a mate threat?
        b. Is there a threat of material loss?
        c. Is there a tactical threat?
        d. Is there a positional threat?

    3. Based on my threat analysis I need to compare both my threats versus my opponent’s and come up with a plan based on:
        a. ignoring opponent’s threat
        b. creating a counter threat
        c. stopping opponent’s threat

    4. If neither I or my opponent have any threats, then I proceed to a positional evaluation of the position which can be based on either Silman’s imbalances or Karpov’s method.

    [The evaluation method for sub 1800 players  might be simplified to focus on piece activity and harmony…but I need to look into this further.]

    Threats in Chess Pt. 1

  • Threats in Chess

    I have been away for a few months, in which time I have been through a long plateau and a bout of chess related self-doubt. The reason for the self-doubt is that I feel that I should be at a different playing level than that which I am (1300 USCF), and I am a bit frustrated that my chess improvement efforts have reaped little fruit in the past few years. In a way, this self-doubt has caused me to rethink the way I play and study chess, and hopefully these changes will cause real improvement in my playing strength. I have several posts that I have been working on that address some of my doubts and how I plan on addressing them, this post is the first of a series.

    We make a mistake when we think of bishop pair advantages or of knight outposts before we consider all of our opponent’s threats. The result is our knight getting to a wonderful central outpost, but on the next move our opponent forks our Queen and King and we lose yet another game. While positional knowledge is important and required, particularly at the +1800 level, recognizing threats and having good tactical vision is more important to winning games at the <1800 rating level.

    This does not mean that you need to spend your entire game reacting to your opponent’s threats, this will only cause you to play a dull defensive game dictated by your opponent’s moves. What this means is that on every move you need to ask yourself, “What is my opponent threatening?” and “What is the consequence of my opponent’s last move?”. Once you identify your opponent’s threats and plans you need to decide how you are going to react to your opponent’s plan and how it relates to your own plans.

    According to Dan Heisman, there are three things one can do against a threat:
    1. Ignore it
    2. Create a bigger counter-threat (counterattack), or
    3. Stop it.

    The point is not to play your game based on your opponent’s moves, but to always be very aware of what your opponent is trying to do, and to either prevent it or continue with a more threatening response of your own. What you cannot do is not consider the threats your opponent is making, and then end up playing a positional move or a rule of thumb move which causes you to lose the game. Hopefully, by simplifying our thought process we can play better chess.

  • Training Insights

    Update: 8/7/2010:
    I have been following my own advice for the past two weeks, and I have to say that my training is more focused than ever, and I am beginning to see tangible improvements over the board. If you are interested, I am continuing to post my weekly training schedule at my Chess Notebook site.

    Original Post 7/27/2010

    I have slightly modified my training in the last week to include a new way of training tactics and a method to focus my training time.

    A New Way of Training Tactics

    I came across a forum post by IM David Pruess where he gives excellent advice on truly learning patterns when training tactics. Below is his advice:
    The original post is titled Chess Advice Most Chess Player’s Don’t Like to Hear and it’s a must read.

    or when i give players in the 1000-1800 range advice on improving their tactics, viz: 10-15 min per day of solving simple tactical puzzles. the goal is to increase your store of basic patterns, not to work on your visualization, deep calculation. remember that is your goal. you are not trying to prove that you can solve every problem. if you don’t solve a problem within 1 minute, stop. it’s probably a new pattern or you would have gotten it by now. (with private students i’ll take the time to demonstrate this to them: show them through examples that they can find a 3-4 move problem in 10 seconds if they know the pattern, and that they can fail to find a mate in 2 for 10 minutes if they don’t know the pattern). look at the answer, and now go over the answer 3 more times in your head to help the pattern take hold. your brain can probably take on 2-3 new patterns between sleeping, so you should stop once you’ve been stumped by 2 or 3 problems (usually will take about 10-15 min). there is no point in doing more than that in one day. and any day you miss, you can’t make up for. a semi-random estimate on my part is that you need about 2000 of these patterns to become a master. so you need to do this for 2 years or more.

    i would guess that less than 1 in 100 of the people i have given this advice to have followed it to the letter. if they enjoy it, they’ll waste their time doing it for 1.5 hours in a day, choosing to ignore that it’s not helping them [after 15 min]. or some with ego issues will insist on trying to solve every single position (if only they linked their ego to their self-discipline Tongue out).

    – IM David Pruess

    A Specific CurriculumWhile I am disciplined in spending a minimum of 30 minutes per day doing chess studies, I am usually jumping from book to book and topic to topic which ends up losing valuable time. In the past I have tried to work from a training schedule, but the problem has been that the schedule has been too general. What I started doing is creating a specific training curriculum, where I create a schedule 2 weeks into the future, with the exact content I should cover everyday (an example can be seen here).  The schedule is created on a Sunday, and it takes no more than 15 minutes to create.

  • 200 ELO Points in 6 Months

    USChess.org has a great article on how Christian Galwe  increased 200 rating points in 6 months!

    Here are a few of the recommendations from the article:

    * Study your own games with an instructor

    * Don’t study openings…study structures and plans instead.

    * If you play blitz, play with a 5 second increment and always try to find the best move

    * Review your blitz games just like if it were a standard game.

    * Do tactical exercises everyday for at least 30-40 minutes.

    * Keep physically fit.

    Read the full article at the USChess.org site.