Knowledge versus Skill

I wrote this post for reddit, and despite it getting little attention, I still really like the content so I will re-post it here. 

The inspiration for this post comes from these sources: 

Kostya Kavutskiy's chess.com blogpost

His video about the article  

and this Dan Heisman video  (mostly just the introduction)

Sidenote: Dan Heisman's videos lack the flash and production quality of most current streamers but he has a ton of very useful information and over 100 videos. They are very under-watched in my opinion.

Most aspects of chess improvement are either knowledge-based or skill-based

Chess knowledge would generally be things you learn from books and lectures. You might be able to pick up a lot of these things through passive learning. Skills are, as Kostya puts it, "simply your ability to actually play chess." This includes anything you do over the board that requires analytical thinking or concrete decision-making. Heisman says these take up a bigger percentage of how good you are and what it takes to improve.

Examples of Chess Knowledge:

• pattern recognition
• openings 
• book endgames (lucena position for example)
• principles, be it opening (control center and develop), middlegame (rooks like open files), or endgame (activate your king)
• general chess terms (definitions and practical applications of chess terms such as doubled pawns, minor exchange, bad bishops, initiative, etc)
• general chess wisdom (if you find a good move look for a better one)

Examples of Skills and Abilities:

• analytical ability
• visualization
• calculation
• evaluation abilities (includes some knowledge but it's also a skill)
• perseverance
• ability to learn from losses
• stamina
• determination
• focus
• handling your nerves
• time management

Heisman thinks skills and abilities are about two-thirds of "what you are" as a chess player and knowledge is about one-third. I think most will agree there is a partnership between skills and knowledge when making the thousands of considerations and decisions one might have to make during the course of a chess game. Your knowledge is correlated to your rating but so is your skill and Heisman says the correlation is more tilted towards your skills and abilities. They very often work together but it seems like his theory is that skill and ability is overall more important.

Game Report Cards

At risk of sounding arrogant, I think my knowledge is solid, or rather good enough for my level such that I can improve at a consistent rate towards my goal of a 2000 rating in certain time controls. More broadly--and with some arrogance filtered out--I feel confident in saying my knowledge outweighs my skill. I've done enough passive reading and lecture-watching to understand on a surface level a lot of chess ideas and knowledge (apart from opening theory which I do not know well). My skills to put that knowledge to practical use needs work. Imagine someone who can understand and explain the ins and outs of American Football strategies within each play. They can comfortably explain, using the right terms, all the movements of the eleven position-players and what the goal is. Now imagine the same person trying to be the offensive coordinator of that team. Without practice and skill to draw up and call the correct plays in the best situations, they'll probably fail miserably. I think I'd fall more in that category than I want to. 

As I said, my skills in applying my knowledge need work and for that I think that analysis of those skill attributes is required to get better. The following are skills of chess that I think I need to improve the most:

• Calculate fully. Don't stop calculating when I think I've gone to the end of the critical line.
• Manage my time better in the opening. In a 15+15 game for example, I'm often using 5 or 10 minutes in the first ten moves which is absurd. Try for an advantage in the middlegame without killing your clock and save time for the conversion in the late middlegame and endgame. Trust that I can tell when a move-choice is critical and when playing solid-looking and principled moves is good enough. Don't let the perfect move be the enemy of the good move.
• Develop a killer instinct and trust it. Use analytical ability more than lazy assumptions that my opponent's move was a killer. Sometimes they're garbage and it's okay to call them garbage. I think many times, they play a move I didn't consider and my first instinct is that it's winning, or it lets them squeak out a draw. That's the reactive and scared-puppy-dog-instinct taking over. The killer instinct says, "I didn't see that move and it's probably garbage. Why is it garbage?" Analyze moves as they are, not as if my opponent is a god and their moves always have merit.
• Keep Calculating in the late middlegame and endgame. Don't just stop when you have a won endgame.
• CCT Automation: Checks, Captures, Threats. I need to automate this thinking so every move I have I'm looking for checks, captures, and threats I can give my opponent as well as safety-checks for the move I want to make: making sure I'm not giving my opponent valuable CCT. As many tactics as I've done, I still don't have this thinking process automated in my games, especially in time pressure.
• Strategic Move Automation. Once I identify a position as non-critical (no tactics available), I need to have Aagard's three questions automatically appear in my mind: 1) Where are the weaknesses? 2) What is my opponent's plan? 3) What is the worse placed piece? 
• Simple Strategic Analysis after exchanges, such as after takes-takes-takes-takes, being able to picture what the board looks like and that there might be a simple strategic imbalance I or my opponent could take advantage of. Example: in a recent game I was up a pawn and I didn't consider an idea of sacrificing the pawn back and in return I'd get the semi-open a- and b-files for both my rooks that would come with tempo on opponent's queen. A lot of imbalances would have been in my favor.
• Applying nuggets of chess wisdom. Think "when facing a flank attack, counter-attack in the center" for example. I can recite tons of these nuggets or pass a fill-in-the-blank quiz, but they don't naturally come to me when I'm in the middle of an intense game. 

Using these categorizations in a game analysis setting would mean to analyze how effectively I used my "knowledge" as well as how effectively I used my "skills." A fabricated example of applying this in post-game analysis might be: 

• "At move 20, I was doing a good job of applying my knowledge of the minority attack, pushing my queenside pawns forward to create a weakness, but I did not appropriately use my tactical skills to see that my opponent had set up a battery and was about to skewer my queen on c2 to my rook on b1."
• Pros: Good use of knowledge of minority attack I had studied in master games.
• Cons: Poor use of skills in A) asking myself what my opponent's ideas are, and B) missing the simple skewer tactic.

Conclusion

Overall, I think a lot of my problems come with trust and confidence in my abilities and assuming far too much strength in the moves of my opponent. Lately, videos of IM Andras Toth's private lessons with his students has taught me to criticize this part of my chess game more. It's really criticizing my psyche which I had never thought about!

I really like the new framework this can give me as I analyze my games. As opposed to missing a backward knight move and then telling myself, "oh I need to see backward knight moves better," I would categorize the type of mistake I made whether it's knowledge-based or skills-based and go deeper from there. I think it can be beneficial since it would be an evaluation of myself as a chess player instead of regular game analysis which primarily focuses on whether I made the right moves or not. 

Edit:

Here is another great explanation of these ideas from GM R.B. Ramesh talking with Kostya in a Chess Dojo video.

Chess Improvement - General Advice

There are a lot of players looking for the right way to study, the best methods, book recommendations, the correct ratio of game-play to study-time, the perfect schedule, etc. They want to be told how to improve. I've always loved trying to find the best ways that I can maximize my improvement. I'm not always successful but I've found a few things that work for me. In this post, I'll try to outline some general aspects of chess improvement that I think have helped me stick with my study plans the best. Of course, everybody loves talking about how they improved so much. Well, it may have worked for them but it doesn't mean it'll necessarily work for everyone else! So keep that in mind!

Customize your training methods

This is the biggest one. I think the realization hit me when I decided to memorize 200 lichess puzzles. I don't know why I thought that was a good idea a few years ago, but I pulled up a puzzle, copied the URL to a document and then tried to solve it. After I got a chunk of 25 URLs in the document, I'd load them all again and go back over them. I made up some repetition schedule where I'd get a new chunk of 25 URLs some nights and other nights I'd review old chunks. Eventually I had a document with 200 URLs and after enough review, I solved them all in one evening with nearly 100% accuracy. 

I had read about spaced repetition and the woodpecker method but was too cheap to buy a book at the time so I just made something up myself. I wouldn't say it drastically helped me the way a better book would have, but it certainly ingrained some patterns in my mind. Was that the perfect way to boost my rating? Absolutely not. However, it certainly did change my outlook on how to go about improving in a larger sense. The point is that I developed a study routine that was enjoyable for me to come back to night after night. Another example is when I did 30 games in a month and carefully analyzed them all, and kept the analysis in a journal. People told me to analyze my games so I devised a way to do that in a way that would keep me consistently playing and analyzing.

Yet another is when I completed the entire 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners book in one day. I read about de la Maza's 7 Circles of Hell method so I did that with that book but of course I altered it some. Instead of doing the entire book, then re-doing the entire book faster, then re-doing the entire book yet again, I broke the book down into sections so I could get some quicker feedback and see the spaced repetition process in action. Seeing the results for these smaller sections gave me more encouragement to continue doing the next section and then half the book, and eventually the entire book. I customized de la Maza's method for myself.

The major takeaway here is not "Make a chess journal" or "Memorize 200 puzzles." The takeaway should be, if some chess-related improvement plan crosses your mind and you think it'll help, give it a go and try to make it work for you by customizing and changing the methods as you go! Part of the effort should be making it work for you.

Track your progress (not your rating!)

This is the other big one for me. Some of my biggest achievements are directly linked to whether I found a good way to track progress. I've grown to really like using spreadsheets as I work through a task. Seeing the progress as I inch closer and closer towards finishing a big tactics book and seeing my accuracy and speed increase is encouraging. It holds me accountable, too. And remember, it's okay if it doesn't work out. Many times I've started spreadsheets with a big plan to finish something (such as the woodpecker intermediate problems most recently) and determined it was not quite what I was looking for. It's okay. And I should note that I'm sure there are apps that do something similar but I'm pretty quick with excel and I'll always maintain that having control over what data you're recording and how it is presented is preferred, at least for myself. Even if it takes a little more work, it will always keep me more on track and accountable than an automatic app.

Here's an example of a spreadsheet I just began for 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players: 

I make the top rows always visible as I scroll so I have that constant reminder of progress. The top rows keep a running accuracy percentage, problems/day, and goals for the day. I really like this because it turns it into a game to some degree and helps me immediately see if my goals are being reached. You might be amazed how something like that "accuracy" stat will turn into your new "rating" that you obsess about. Any spreadsheet for any book or improvement task I'm tracking will look different depending on what I feel like tracking and what the content might allow. This fits in with the Customize aspect. You should customize your tracking methods based on the material and your own preferences! As I go, I'll add in new metrics such as the problems/day and the "# of problems needed to maintain 10 per day average" in this example. I added those metrics in after a few days of working through the book after I got a better idea of things I wanted to track. This gives me more motivation as I work towards completing the goal.

Be flexible

I mean this in the sense that you shouldn't be afraid to change your mid-term improvement goals if it will help you accomplish the bigger goal. A recent example (from the above image actually) is that I was trying to do exactly 20 tactics from a book every day while at work. After one session that took way longer than I anticipated to do 20, I only did 10 the next day, then 6 the day after. In response, I've now altered the goal such that I try to solve an average of 10 problems per session until I reach the end of the section in the book which is 120 problems. This is absolutely do-able and I have now got into a groove (massively important) where I can see that I should finish by next Friday as long as I keep it up. This is a far better solution than failing at my initial idea of 20 problems/session and giving up completely. 

Another recent example is my attempt to work through the Intermediate Tactics problems in The Woodpecker Method. After giving it a decent effort and trying to adjust and customize things, I decided to stop since my speed and accuracy were not where I wanted if I was going to try to complete a hefty chunk of the section before cycling through again. And you need to tell yourself that's okay, exercise some flexibility, and do something else that's similar. So I purchased 1001 Chess Tactics for Club Players and I am much more happy with my progress in that book. The puzzles are much closer to the level of difficulty I felt I needed for this method. I was flexible and I found a way that is working much better now.

Finish it

Whatever your mid-term improvement goal, be it "do 30 chess.com tactics a day for a month" or "read a chapter in this book every week", the important part is that you determine if it's helpful to your improvement and something you're ready to work through and YOU FINISH IT. Morale is important and getting bogged down in negative thoughts like "I have all these books that I've never finished" won't help anything. Finishing things and accomplishing goals, even if they might not be the absolute best thing for your chess improvement (see my 200 memorized lichess tactics as a perfect example), can do wonders for your attitude towards improvement.

Try something new 

...Until it sticks or you learn something. This could be a new book, a new opening, a new training method, etc. You don't need to pick up EVERYTHING from one book. People will say don't study openings until X rating or it's pointless to memorize the knight and bishop mating technique. Probably mostly true, but fuck it. It can't hurt too bad. It's still chess. I can't tell you how many times I started an opening repertoire spreadsheet, made notes in a huge word document on a huge playlist of ChessExplained videos on d4 repertoire, created tons of lines in studyopenings.com, and downloaded an opening rep app to help me memorize. It's a lot. And I still don't have a deep opening repertoire. I can say, however, that I probably learned at least a handful of things from each time I tried working on my openings. There is no single perfect way to get better at chess and most likely no book or program will lay out the absolute best course of study for you. You'll try some things and it will be a waste of time. You must accept that some ways will work out and some won't so you should try many and find what works best for you. Don't post on reddit or chess.com forums asking how to get better or what is the best schedule for improvement. That's lazy. Try something and customize how you study and practice it so it works for you. If that fails, keep trying other things!

Use your local library

Nearly everybody has bought books, read a half a chapter and for whatever reason, they realized it's not for them. Take advantage of your library if you are lucky enough to have a good one nearby. If the book doesn't speak to you and solve all your chess-problems as you'd hope, you return it at no cost. If it's a great book, even better. It's much preferred over buying a $25 book, not finishing it, then adding it to a towering stack of forgotten books whose formidable height only grows to taunt you more. Damn, that got dark. 

;)

Alternatively, buy used books on amazon or at your local book store. Pretty easily you can find books in perfectly good condition for a few bucks and if using amazon, the biggest cost is often the $3.99 shipping fee that smaller bookstores or previous owners might charge.

Take games seriously

I get nerves before I begin a game. Any game. I'm generally as nervous playing a casual 5+3 blitz game as I am playing a G/70 OTB game at the (da) club or a 45+45 lichess league game with 10 spectators. It doesn't matter to me. I put pressure on myself to play the best chess moves in any game. This is a natural thing so I can't direct you to "get nervous or amped up before your games" but you should most definitely be playing all your games with 100% effort! Do not hunt down a blitz game against a low-rated player just to fix the tilt you're dealing with. Don't play a 15+15 game and blitz out 25 moves, ending your game with 22 minutes on your clock. Take your time and put effort in everything.

Conclusion

I can combine all these tips into a cohesive thesis statement that could describe my chess improvement outlook:

Try new study techniques until you find something you like, customize the methods to your preferences, be flexible in altering your goals if necessary, remind yourself it's okay to try something new if you've exhausted customization, be creative in ways to track your progress, and work towards finding ways to finish what you started and accomplish the goals to give yourself encouragement and boost your morale.

It's a very do-it-yourself approach and it takes much more work than simply asking /r/chess strangers "How do I improve?" However, I'll always maintain it can be a very strong and enduring way to continually get better if you find the ways that work best for you!

P.S. - Develop a healthy attitude towards improvement

I keep thinking of more things before I publish, but I think this is an over-looked aspect of improving at chess. You need to realize you can spend a lot of time working on improvement but ultimately you will still fail once in a while. Chess is a game of mistakes, after all. And now you inevitably question all the effort you put forth, only to continue to make bad mistakes. I've fallen into this trap many times. I conclude a month-long tactics-related project that I think is going to jumpstart my rating, only to immediately play a game in which I miss the most obvious backwards knight move to capture a hanging piece. This is the definition of a rudimentary tactic. If you were to play puzzle rush, it'd be among the first two or three problems you'd see. Yet in the fog of war that is a chess game, I missed it. I'd just done hundreds and hundreds of 2-, 3-, 4-move combination tactics and I miss Nxf4?! 

Why the hell did I just spend untold hours working through a giant tactics book using spreadsheets, timers, graphs and entire Saturdays dedicated to looking at puzzles, only to miss a hanging piece tactic?!

This is going to happen to you. You need to learn how you best cope with this inevitable problem. Develop mantras you tell yourself: chess is hard, no one is perfect, training is a long-term payoff and there is no such thing as perfection, a single chess game might have hundreds of mini-tests and a backwards knight move you missed is just one failed test of many others you passed, etc. Learning how to reconcile the hard-work of study and training with the inevitable bumps in the road is crucial. As usual, when it comes to specifics, I leave it to you to determine how you can best deal with this. 

Good luck!

10/13/2020 Edit: I saw this on the coffee sub-reddit of all places but I thought it was another concise way of wording of my perspective on how to get better:

• Study one method, become a clone.
• Study two methods, become confused.
• Study ten methods, become yourself.

Chess Flashcards

Introduction

I've heard the advice from a few people now: "I made flashcards for my chess games/tactics and study them!" 

I always wondered how they did this, if they cut their chess books up and pasted positions on actual cards, if they had some software that did it automatically, if they drew pictures....

I heard Stacia Pugh on an episode of Perpetual Chess Podcast and that's when I finally decided to give it a try. Give that episode, and the podcast in general, a listen. It's great! She sold her method really well and it fits in with my "customize your training" perspective. I then saw a video on her chess.com blog of her running through a flashcard session and I began getting a picture of how it worked. After playing with Anki, which is a spaced repetition flashcard software, I settled on a system that's great for my learning style. 

If you just wanna learn how to set it up, skip to the bottom section.

Before going into the benefits I see in this training method, here's a quick example of what the setup looks like mid-session:

That should give you an idea. The board position in the flashcard is a static screenshot from a game of mine with a question--often it's a multi-part question--that I must answer before I move on. I cannot click anywhere and move any pieces even though there are anki add-ons and tools you can install to do such a thing (Side-note: They may not work on the newer version but that doesn't matter for this anyway). I wanted to stick with old school static images with an "essay question"-style prompt. When I click "Show Answer", the solution I provide usually consists of several sentences of text with the answer and other things to consider along with a link to the game for further analysis if I want. That comes in handy a lot.

I started off a deck of cards with all kinds of positions: opening mistakes, tactics, endgame technique, and middlegame strategy. After doing that for a week, I decided to focus on just openings so I made a deck just for that. You might want to consider grouping yours as well. Just note that the rest of my post will be regarding my Openings deck. 

Reasons I Think it's a Good Method

• It forces you to see games as opportunities to learn. After a loss, my morale might be a little down but once I start working on collecting a screenshot or two, the loss is less painful and I get excited about figuring out the reasons why my bad moves were bad and what I can change.
• The system requires you to analyze your games. If you want more flashcards, you have to go back through the game. If you often find yourself quickly going to the next game, this system slows you down if you are committed to making flashcards from the game that just happened. Alternatively, if you have ladder anxiety and have an urge to preserve your precious rating points or whatever, this system can help you frame games as an opportunity for a flashcard harvest: "Fuck I just lost three in a row...welp at least I got some fresh-ass positions to learn"
• If you play the same openings, you'll be surprised how often the positions from your flashcards make appearances in your games.
• It uses positions from your own personal games so it's going to be full of positions in openings you like to play featuring common moves that players at your level play!
• Customized learning methods work much better for me and I'm more likely to stick with them compared with downloading an app and using it for two days then forgetting about it. Although this method requires slightly more work and time investment, you'll learn to get pretty fast at it (see the section later where I briefly walk through making a deck)
• Explaining moves and concepts in your own words shows better understanding than simply making moves in an app. I'm interested in being able to explain the reasons why a move is good or bad in the opening and point out other key aspects in the position besides. For me, this is far better than: "What move do you play here?" that is prevalent in apps. 
• It's flexible. I can have questions about tactical tricks, common early queen moves, why a move is sub-optimal, common moves I play that are wrong and I have to answer why, etc. I can customize it to problems I see in my own games.
• It's adjustable. If I'm working through my deck and I notice something I didn't before, I can quickly edit the card or solution to reflect what I just noticed. Sometimes I make an entirely new card from the same position with a new prompt. This often involves adding in a visualization exercise: If I'm looking at an old card and I see a tricky tactic if black plays sub-optimally, I find that position in my image directory, copy it and replace the prompt with "Visualization exercise: What does black play if 1. Nc3 Nf6 2. Qa4+ Nbd7 3. Bg5?"

Reasons It's Not a Great Method

• It is time consuming. Let's say I'm going back over the game and you start a stopwatch from the time I notice a position I want to turn into a flashcard, I would guess that it takes 3 to 5 minutes to turn that into a final card imported into my Anki deck ready for study. So if I make three cards from a game, it might be 15 minutes of "paperwork" but in my opinion that is worth it for what I get in return. For others, that's not worth the time so that's to be considered. I want to add that you might be surprised how fast you develop a system of making cards, however.
• It's simply not for everyone. Some players might require or do better with dynamic boards where you can see engine evaluations, see the moves played on the board, and immediately see best-move continuations. Or they try it once and decide they're not gonna fuck with making these damn cards! Totally fair.
• . . .
• SHOCKING: there's only two items here for something I've invested a fair amount of time and effort in ;) I'll just say that if this method interests you, give it a shot and see what you think of it. 

Brief Tutorial on Setup (for Windows, but probably similar for Macs?)

Anki is awesome free software that a lot of college and grad students use to memorize things using a spaced repetition structure. It is widely used as a text-based study aid but there are ways to import images and even sound. I've found a simple method to import chess positions with a small amount of effort. I've lately wondered if, perhaps for someone with more time on their hands, they could work with the chessvision bot from /r/chess to automate more of this but my screenshot system is fine for me.

Essentially you screenshot the board position, crop it and add a prompt, save it to a particular directory, and finally set up an import file with the image pathname and a solution to the position. A few clicks in Anki and it'll be there for you!

I'll briefly outline how to do that but if any reader wants more specific information, I can try to help in comments or on reddit!

1. Take screenshot of position of interest.

2. Paste in MSPaint. Crop off any border and then add some whitespace at the bottom where you'll type in a question about the position that you want to test yourself on when you are studying.

3. Save the image in a folder called collection.media that Anki made during install. On my machine, the folder is located at C:\Users\_____\AppData\Roaming\Anki2\User 1\collection.media

4. I use a numbered system to save image, starting with 001.png. You'll want something easy to remember and put in order.

5. In collection.media, make a text file and call it importer.txt. Open importer.txt with notepad. This .txt is going to have paths to chess images and then answers that accompany each. In the import step, you'll direct Anki to this file.

6. In importer.txt, type out a line as below that points to your image and then type out an answer that you want displayed. For my image titled 001.png which has a solution of "White should play Bxe7" (my solutions are typically much more verbose), I would put the following in the importer.txt:

    "<img src=""/openings/001.png"">"; White should play Bxe7

--Notice the semi-colon. That's your separator/delimiter. That will tell Anki that after the semi-colon it is the beginning of a second field, i.e. your solution field that will display when you click "Show Answer" in the program. Make sure to not use semi-colons anywhere in your importer.txt except to separate fields. You can really use most any character I think. I tried commas for a while but that doesn't work well if you are a fan of using commas in your answer fields.

--And I believe the double quotes are necessary otherwise it won't import properly. 

7. Save the importer.txt.

8. In Anki, you should now be able to click File > Import > Select your importer.txt. Choose Fields separated by Semi-Colon (or whichever character you used). And check Allow HTML in fields. I wasn't doing that step at first and that's what got me. Make sure you have a front and back assigned properly and try importing it!

9. Study your deck and see if it works!

--To Troubleshoot where things might be going wrong, try things like importing simple text so instead of image pathnames, just trying a simple "What is your name?" and put in an answer and see if it imports. Also do what I did and google it ;) 

You obviously can and should put many images in your folder and your importer.txt will grow as you play more games and accumulate more flashcards. Presumably you can import a very large number of images, my current one has nearly fifty and I'm hoping for hundreds eventually. Simply beginning a new line with the next image pathname + solution is all you need. To help organize, I put my flashcards in a folder called "openings" within the collections.media folder.  Here's a basic example of importer.txt with three images in it:

    "<img src=""/openings/001.png"">"; White should play Bxe7

    "<img src=""/openings/002.png"">"; Long-winded solution

    "<img src=""/openings/003.png"">"; Blah-blah, yet another long-winded solution

Good luck!