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.