Chess for Beginners

Category: Studying

  • Psychology of Chess Weaknesses

    The path to chess improvement lies in finding your weakest area of knowledge and placing all of your effort into converting it into a strength. My greatest weakness is an apprehension, bordering on fear, of delving into deep calculations and analysis. This analytical deficiency affects both my combinational and analysis in over the board play , and unless I work to improve these skills, any future chess improvement will be difficult. You tend to avoid or procrastinate working on your weakest area and this is part of the reason why you lack proficiency, since you do not exert the necessary effort in mastering the material that gives you trouble.

    Strengthening Your Weaknesses

    Whatever your weaknesses may be, you must identify them and apply great effort and patient focus to turn them into strengths. Here are some ideas in converting your weaknesses into strengths:

    • Focus – Give all of your attention to your training, and eliminate distractions when studying.
    • Practice – Practice daily, but create a varied training schedule that provides you with a fresh perspective every time you train. Your practice should revolve around material that address your weakest area.
    • Effortful Study –  Always give 100% during every training session, and do not hesitate to cross your comfort zone during each training session. Each session should build upon the last either in intensity or difficulty.
    • Play – Playing allows you to transfer the knowledge and skills picked up in your training environment to real over the board play.
    • Integrate thought process into your practice.

    Discovering Your Weaknesses

    If you are unsure as to which areas you need to work on the most the following tips might help you  to identify the weaknesses in your game:

    • Review your games with a teacher or a stronger player.
    • Perform the Khmelnitsky Chess Exam to find your weak areas.
    • If you are unable to find a stronger player or a teacher, go over a minimum of 10 of your long games. Do a first pass of the game on your own, and then have a chess engine review it. Determine why you lost each of these games, and create a training plan to address the top 1-2 weaknesses you discover.

    My Training Modifications

    • Spend 80% of my study time working on analytical positions that require both analysis and calculation.
    • Continue my tactics study program.
    • Play long games that allow the time necessary to work on my thought process as well as the training of analysis and combinational skills.
    • Play over annotated master games using “Guess the Move” method.
    • Use a physical board for the majority of my training.

  • 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.

  • Simple Chess Training

    Making it Difficult

    After several years of working on my chess improvement and from talking to both amateurs and masters it appears that adult amateurs tend to complicate their chess improvement by reading books and tackling concepts that are far too advanced for their level.

    So, here is my attempt to simplify my chess training and bring it back to basics. This program is targeted for players under 1700 USCF.


    Study, Play, Review

    The study portion of the plan will consist of doing tactical puzzles at the Chess Tempo site every day for a minimum of 30 minutes. You will also spend a minimum of 1 hour studying  any areas dictated by reviews of our standard games which we will label focused study.

    Play will consist of a minimum of 2 standard games per week of either OTB play or on ICC / chess.com. The two take aways from this is that your rating will serve as a progress report, and that the games should be 15 minutes or longer (the longer the better). The content of these games will serve as the material for the focused study portion of the plan.

    Every standard game has to be reviewed afterwards. Go over the game without the use of an engine, and annotate what you were thinking. After having reviewed it on your own, have the engine analyze the game and then compare your notes with the engines analysis. Take this opportunity to review the opening phase, and what you could have done to improve that phase of the game by consulting opening books if necessary. Take note of mistakes made and in which phase of the game they were made. You will then focus your next study day on reviewing any content that will help prevent the mistakes made.

    Here’s an example of what a week would look like when following the plan:

    Monday

    Play G/15 or >
    Study tactics 30m

    Tuesday

    Review Monday’s game (annotate and identify weaknesses in play)
    Study tactics 30m

    Wednesday

    Focus Study 1h (Study is based on weaknesses from reviewed game, for example K&P endgame review if game lost in the endgame, or extra tactics study if game was lost due to a tactical oversight)

    Thursday
    Play G/15 or >
    Study tactics 30m

    Friday

    Review Monday’s game (annotate and identify weaknesses in play)
    Study tactics 30m

    Saturday

    Focus Study 1h (Study is based on weaknesses from reviewed game, for example K&P endgame review if game lost in the endgame, or extra tactics study if game was lost due to a tactical oversight)

    Sunday

    Rest day or you can use this day to catch up on your studying, do extra tactics or play blitz games, etc.

  • Overcoming Chess Training Plateaus

    Plateaus and You

    Chess MenThe brain needs time to assimilate and integrate new information as knowledge and to resolve conflicts with previously learned concepts and plateaus equate to slower progress while we assimilate new ideas. Not until we internalize these new ideas as knowledge are we able to move on to the next phase in our learning. Plateaus are a normal phase of the learning process. The goal is to minimize the amount of time spent in a plateau, and to identify if our plateau is part of the normal learning curve or if it is a result of a deficiency in our learning process.

    Sometimes we plateau for reasons that fall outside the normal learning curve. You might plateau if you are missing fundamental knowledge which would have served as a building block to move on to the next level. Or perhaps the information you are learning is too advanced for your level, and you cannot internalize the concept.

    Another common cause for prolonged plateaus is overtraining. If you find that you do not look forward to practicing, or are finding less and less time to devote to chess, these are common symptoms of overtraining and a break from chess might be in order.

    Less, Different, Harder

    As we mentioned before plateaus are normal, and the slow and steady progress made during this phase is critical to a healthy learning process. The length of time spent in a plateau differs between people and even between learning curve phases. As a result, it is very difficult to diagnose if a plateau has overstayed its welcome. The only way around this, is to be proactive in your training program and to build it in such a way where you are constantly challenging yourself and feeding yourself the right amount of content at the right time in your development and you have the appropriate feedback mechanisms in place to detect weaknesses.  

    • Study your own games so you don’t make the same mistakes over and over again.
    • Have a coachevaluate your weaknesses, and focus your work on your weakest areas .
    • Are you overtraining? If so, it might be a good idea to take a 1-2 week break from chess. You will find that you will return refreshed and invigorated.
    • Change your training program periodically. This allows you to be a better rounded chess player, and by keeping your training sessions new and exciting it doubles as a cure to overtraining.
    • Don’t be discouraged by plateaus, remember you are still improving at a slow pace and that this is part of the normal learning process.
    • Increase the intensity of your training. A good method of increasing your training intensity is to cycle intense training session that last 1-2 weeks to help jar yourself free of a plateau. You need to be careful that you do not over train yourself during these intense study cycles. An example of cycling intense training cycles might go something like this: 2 weeks of intense training followed by 4 weeks of normal training activity.
    • Enjoy the practice, these things take time.

    By working hard and enjoying the practice improvement will come sooner or later (I hope so).

  • How I am Studying My System

    I have been going over My System for the past few weeks as part of the study strategy portion of my study schedule. I think the best way to go over the content of the book is to go over The Elements section  going over each example carefully. Luckily I have a Chessbase file with all of the diagrams setup which saves me a lot of time. I am annotating the diagrams while reading the book notes. Once I go over The Elements section, I plan on going over it a second time before I begin on Part 2: Positional Play. This will ensure that I have a good understanding of the foundations of Nimzowitsch’s System before I get into the more advanced content. I am also going over the illustrative games whenever Nimzowitsch calls for it.

    In addition, it is helpful to have a copy of Chess Praxis, which has additional illustrative games, as well as a more condensed and modern explanation of key concepts.