A Week in the Life of an Adult Chess Improver

Every time I read or type "Adult Chess Improver", I impulsively want to initialize it and say ACI and then I almost immediately hate it. ACI sounds like a part of my leg I don't wanna f*** up or some kind of insurance I'm supposed to get when I buy a house. I'll stick with adult chess improver.

I thought it'd be interesting to track how much time I spend on chess in a week, rounded off to fifteen minute increments. The week started off a bit lighter than usual because I haven't had quite the same motivation as I'd had on average over the last year but overall it's a pretty good spread and representative of what I'd consider a typical week. 

Some Definitions

I think I've been over this before, but I usually put chess work into one of two categories: active or passive. Examples of active chess study for this week included playing chess over-the-board (casual rapid games in a park), working through Yusupov's second book, working on memorizing my opening repertoire, and doing checkmate problems from Polgar's giant book. Passive "study" time included watching the FIDE Candidates Tournament, reading the introduction to a Hellsten book on Amazon's sneak peak page, and browsing /r/chess or twitter. It's still chess technically, but I'm not really stretching any muscles, if you will.

The Numbers

Here are my estimated times per day:

The week started on Sunday April 25th and ended at 11:59pm on the night of Saturday May 1. In this time span, I was able to spend 20.25 hours on chess. About 13.75 of that time was active chess study. Again, this was a relatively light week compared to some of the weeks I was working on the first book in Yusupov's series, for example. I'm able to get in chess study time while at work most weekdays and that's actually where most of my chess time is accumulated. On an average weekday, I'm able to spend 3.3 hours on chess--although some of that time is browsing online chess communities, or passively watching some chess content on youtube. (The 2.89 average hours per day in the chart below is taking into account the entire seven-day week, 3.3 hr/day is my average for Monday through Friday.) When I'm home, I'm doing fiancé stuff like planning a wedding, making dinner, and watching after our senior dog so I do not have quite as much time to get in as many chess games as I'd like.

Conclusion

I ended up with a touch over twenty hours:

For a rather light week, I think this is pretty good! I wish I included some more numbers in the summary chart. For instance, 13.75 hours of active study comes out to an average of almost 2 hours per day of performing active chess work (playing/analyzing games, calculating tactics, solving positions from books). And I multiplied my total weekly hours by 52 to conclude that I might spend around 1053 hours a year on chess. Which I think is great, and in a decade, I'd surpass the Gladwellian 10,000 hour mark (see Malcolm Gladwell, among others), whatever that might mean. However, I should probably only calculate my active chess hours for that metric. So 13.75 * 52 = 715 hours per year of active chess work. At that pace, It'd take me about 14 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark. Or, if you want to reach ~1000 hours of active chess work every year, then that would require about 19.25 hours a week. Well, this past week I spent 20.25 hours on chess so if I simply transform some passive chess "work" like youtube videos into harder chess study, I'd be very close! I hope this was interesting for some of you and it might inspire you to track your own chess habits. 

Best of luck.

Why I Use Tactics Books

I've gone through a few tactics books in my years of chess study. I've also put plenty of hours in various tactics trainers. If I had to choose between 1) A never-ending supply of tactics books or 2) Every online tactics trainer ever, I'd have to choose the first option. There's a wide range of online tactics resources: chess tempo, chess.com tactics trainer, lichess, CT-ART, blitztactics.com... I could go on and on. They're actually pretty friggin great and I'll discuss some very important PROS at the end, but first...

Here's why I think tactics books are better in general, in order of importance:

(Throughout the article, I'll refer to any online tactics trainers as 'apps.')

No "Click-And-Hope"

With apps, there often is a tendency to struggle with a puzzle and think, "It's been ten minutes, I'll just make a f***ing move." In other words, click-and-hope you've seen everything. Determining if your candidate move is right or wrong is always one touch or click away. I argue that for some, this can develop a sort of arcade-game experience with apps because you know if you make the right first move, the computer will play its best move and you can continue on to the next move, or the "next level." Consider a tactic that requires three moves to fully secure the advantage. If you're not diligent in finding all the lines the opponent might play, you might just play the first move and "figure out the rest after that if it's right" and tell yourself "oh I woulda seen that move in a real game." This is pretty clearly detrimental to your calculation and visualization skills. With books, I can much more easily sink my teeth into puzzles without feeling pressured to try out my first move and see if it's right. I'd write down all three moves of the solution and any variations in parentheses. Writing things down (let's be honest, 'typing it in a spreadsheet') sets it in stone before I check the back of the book. It also gives me opportunities to note any more important variations and jot those down as well. I feel like I get extra credit if one of my variations was noted in the back of the book. A good tactics book with comprehensive solutions will reward extra efforts like these, an app probably won't.

Good books don't have errors

Neither do good apps. Of course. What I mean is that the solutions section of a good tactics book will cover all important variations and other common moves you may have considered along with the refutation. So if you see a solution and you don't understand something, it is a learning moment. See this reddit thread 

• Using an App: "Oh okay, back-rank mate and my rooks are doubled, so I can take twice on d8 and it's mate." ~ ~ You play the first move and the app engine responds with ...Nxd8 ~ ~ "Oh shit, he has Nxd8... oh well, okay yeah so I can play Qe8 and that'll be mate, yeah I woulda seen that."
• Same tactic, but in a book (BUT using the book lazily): "Oh okay, back-rank mate and my rooks are doubled, so I can take twice on d8 and it's mate." ~ ~ Now, ideally you aren't lazy, you take more time, you check everything you can, and you write down all the variations you see including Nxd8 BUT in the event you quickly check the solution... ~ ~ "Ohhh, Nxd8...duh, shit I missed that move completely, and now I see that I still have Qe8# but I need to be more careful." 

You should view moments like this as a failure of visualization and I argue that this is easier to do when you're using a good book and writing down your solutions before checking. Comparatively, if you came across this puzzle in an app and messed it up, you might be inclined to gloss over the mistake as a "whoopsy-daisy" since you saw the mate right after the Nxd8 move anyway so who cares? IM Andras Toth discusses this in his Perpetual Chess podcast episode. Listen around the 49 minute mark of the episode. And then listen to the entire episode. Toth is a motherlode of improvement advice.

Themes

Books often group tactics by motif or theme. For instance a skewer chapter might have five different common skewer ideas, including several puzzles in a row that utilize a decoy sacrifice to line up pieces, then several puzzles that use a fork which, after re-captures, gets pieces into a skewering line, etc. They all rely on skewering patterns at the fundamental level and you get introduced to multiple variations on the theme. This is surely a blessing and a curse as the solver is essentially getting major hints for each position. So the positive is that it can be great to drill similar tactical patterns in a row, but you should understand how "100 Fork Tactics" is going to be a lot easier than solving "100 Randomized Tactics."

More than just tactical positions

There are amazing books such as Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises that combine both tactical AND positional puzzles with zero hints--thus, negating the 'con' of the previous bullet point :). This is tremendously helpful and you'll be hard-pressed to find an app that offers something similar that also gives clear explanations in the solutions.

Repeatable

They are easily repeatable if you'd like to try spaced repetition on a set of problems. I've spent a lot of my tactics training work reviewing problems from books I'd already done many times over. I also plan to re-visit books I've completed a year ago. All of these things are harder to do with any given app.

Morale

They are finite. You can complete books and that boosts morale. I feel that this is greatly under-appreciated. Books also often have an impressive-sounding number of puzzles. The numbers 1001 and 5334 will always be seared into my mind. Apps are usually endless. You'll always immediately be fed another puzzle and you'll never accomplish something in quite the same way you would with a book.

Chess Culture

You can start to absorb some chess history and culture because books often use real-game examples and famous puzzles. They will usually give the context: the player's names, the tournament and year. The Woodpecker Method sources all their puzzles from games of the world champions. It's how I began learning the names of the champions and their respective time periods, and it's how I first learned about the split titles in the 90s and 00s. You might also learn famous games or moves like the Opera game, Anderssen's Evergreen game, Nigel Shorts' King Walk, and Carlsen's tactic to beat Karjakin to retain the WCC title. That Carlsen tactic is among the last in the Easy section of Woodpecker. I recall seeing the names and year underneath the puzzle in the book, and so I googled that game and I was able to find video footage of the exact tactic being played in the World Championship! Very cool to see a piece of chess history, however recent, being played out on my screen and the same tactic is in the book I was holding.

Notation

Books help practice with notation. Writing down your solutions and reading the solutions back is a great way to get comfortable with chess notation for the beginner player.

Pros of tactics trainers

Clearly there is a lot of benefit to tactics trainers so it should be obvious that a combination of apps and very good tactics books is probably the best approach. I'll list a few important positive aspects of apps since I can't just bash on them the whole time. They are, after all, better than books in many ways. 

• If the app/online trainer allows you to filter tactics by difficulty or type/theme then that can be hugely beneficial for the beginner player for targeted practice. You'll probably never find a book titled 500 Removing the Defender Puzzles at the 1500-2000 Rating but a similar problem set can be made with a chess.com or chesstempo membership and a few clicks.
• Puzzle Rush Survival Mode is great. I'll never stop saying that. There's something to be said about the simplicity of climbing the tactics-rating ladder in a matter of twenty or thirty minutes, going from simple hanging pieces and mate-in-ones all the way to advanced tactics.
• The classic (obvious) reasons: apps are often free, they're always with you assuming you have your phone, they automatically track some of your progress as you solve.

It's my move, what do I do?

Do I have a check? Can I mate? Wait, there's nothing to do, do I push a pawn? Is that weakening? What if I'm allowing a tactic? WAIT! Is there really nothing to do? Do I have a threat? Oh shit I have 14 seconds...oh GOD now I'm doing PIPI in my pampers!!! 

There's almost always a lot to consider when you're deciding on a move in a chess position. I'm going to try to lay out a guideline on things to consider in a position. Needless to say, it's not a checklist that you will have the luxury to step through for every move. My goal is to automate these processes into my candidate move selection process. I briefly talk about this in my knowledge vs skills blog entry. Anyway the point of this post will be to provide a guide to approach choosing the type of move you should be calculating in a game. I won't go into specific calculating-techniques, instead this will give an order for deciding which moves to consider.

What do I do?

Basically, I think you must think tactically first since that can swing the game the most drastically in the immediate future. If you think you have a forced mate-in-two, finding and calculating that is going to take precedence over a strategic maneuver to get your knight to a better square, for example. Thinking tactically comes more naturally to most of us since we are most likely studying tactical positions a lot more. An obvious knight-fork is probably going to jump out at most people much more clearly than an equally "obvious" pawn sac or rook lift. You must also think about your opponent's plans too, say if you have a fork to win the exchange but you see your opponent will have a mating threat if you play that, then you need to consider that. When you think you've exhausted tactic possibilities, you should do the same with strategic moves for both you and your opponent. For these reasons, I break this order down into 1) offensive tactical considerations, 2) defensive tactical considerations, and 3) strategic considerations. Of course, any of these will have to be weighed differently based on seriousness but that's the order I think is best to begin your considerations. 

1) Offensive tactical considerations

CC&T = Checks, Captures, and Threats. See if you have any valuable checks, and then scan the board for captures that can lead somewhere. Lastly look at your threats. For threats, I often find myself checking over all the tactical elements I can find in the position to help identify the critical parts of the board. If you see anything of potential value, start calculating but always remember that the board is changing as you're calculating so you must remember the other things in my list: tactics that your opponent might have in the course of your calculated lines, and strategic goals you might accomplish or strategic concessions you might have to give up in the lines you're considering.

2) Opponent's tactical considerations

Remember tactics are a two-way street so you should always be thinking what forcing moves your opponent might have. So this section is simply checking for CC&T that they might have available.

You can go a long way if you have these two steps automated: constantly surveying the board for CC&T both you and your opponent might have available. 

3) Strategic considerations

This is where it gets far more broad and less concrete. Overall, the pertinent questions I'm trying to get automated into my thinking process are from Aagard: 1) Where are the weaknesses? 2) What is my opponent's plan? 3) What is the worse placed piece? 

It's harder to break these down into specific offensive and defensive as they all run together but anyway it's best if you can always be thinking of these three things from both your perspective and your opponent's: Where are the weaknesses of both my position and my opponent's? What should the plans be from both sides? What are the worst placed pieces?

Conclusion

Short and sweet, but that's it. And even strategic principles come into play when you're thinking tactically! So essentially it's 1) Do I have any CC&T? 2) Does my opponent have any CC&T I need to defend against? then 3) What are the important strategic concepts in the position? (i.e. there's nothing immediate to take advantage of that you've seen, so you start asking Aagard's three questions regarding weaknesses, plans, and worst place pieces). As you look at all these factors, you should be constantly weighing which one takes precedence based on danger.

This is a lot and not something you can do on every move. My goal is to try to build these into my sub-conscious as I've tried to do with basic pattern recognition by studying very simple tactics books. For the ideas in this post, the book I'm using is Ray Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises: 600 lessons from Tactics to Strategy. As the subtitle says, there are a lot of tactics in that book but also a good amount of strategic and defensive moves. I've worked through 100 exercises and I really like it so far. I've been trying to approach each exercise using the thinking process outlined in this post. As usual, I'm using some spaced repetition methods so I can hopefully automate a way for my mind to quickly find the most pressing issue relatively quickly in the position.

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!

General Chess Inspiration

This will be an ongoing post I'll continually add to as I come across chess quotes and inspiring advice that I like. Some are well-known, some are less popular, and some are from redditors.

"Chess lives from the constant succession of certainty and error."

--Bernd Rosen. My favorite chess quote of all time.

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried." 

"None of us are going to be the next Carlsen, so an ego-centred approach won't lead to any sort of true enjoyment. We may get the occasional impressive win and feel good about ourselves (or shall I say, our ego feels good), but we will always face stronger and stronger opponents and spend most of the time suffering. There are Buddhist analogies here. I think the key is to focus on learning. To play a game as a test of your understanding of chess, not an exercise in anxiously trying to play to a level that you have pre-determined you should play at.

Every game is fundamentally a test of hundreds of small decisions, some more important than others, and whoever has the better understanding will make more correct decisions, and win the game. Sometimes we come out on top and sometimes we don't. Then we go back and look at which decisions were right and which were wrong, and how they can be adjusted for future."

 --Redditor /u/tomlit


"Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe"

"The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man."
lol --H.G. Wells


"Time spent on any challenging chess work is far better than time spent planning the "perfect" chess study schedule."
--John Bartholomew


"The most powerful weapon in Chess is to have the next move."
--David Bronstein

"It's also really important to play. There are some aspects of chess that aren't necessarily knowledge-based or skill-based but can only come through actual playing and practical experience. So if you're someone who's doing a lot of reading and studying and you're solving a lot of puzzles and challenging yourself, you're definitely going to become a stronger player and a very balanced player overall but if you're not playing it's going to be very hard to gauge whether you're actually making progress and whether you're going to utilize what you've been working on."

--Kostya Kavutskiy

"Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning."

--Benjamin Disraeli (quoted by J. Tisdall at the beginning of Improve Your Chess Now

"Anyway if you ask me, there is one and only one ideal sort of chess training: The one that you are enthusiastic about. If it turns into "work", then - unless you have a hyper concrete goal in mind (prepare a specific opening in 1 hr for a specific opponent, get a title by next year, type thing) - you basically just won't do it, and when/if you start at all, are spending more time on thinking "when am I done" than on "wow cool, chess!" Some people can sit down with 10 random GM games and then spend a day fully in the zone, just trying to learn everything there is to learn about the games, assimilating 10 different openings and their ideas, recognising middlegame patterns and storing them somewhere, going through them in guess-the-move style to improve their own practical play, and using them as endgame lessons on top. Those people will then tell you, full GM game study, best thing ever invented. Other people will sit down with 10 GM games, then go "man i don't even play this opening", skip to the middlegame, go "well  I would play X.. but they played Y. seem equal to me, just different paths. eh. skip to some critical moment, miscalculate somewhere, go eh whatever again, go to the endgame, then laugh and say "yeah I'm totally gonna reach a Bpppp vs RN endgame ever in my life.. ok this is all pointless" and not feel like looking at the 9 other games. That's perfectly fine. If you aren't enthusiastic about analyzing GM game collections, just don't do it. Find something that you actually love about chess, and just do that! Maybe it's not 100% the best path to increasing rating the quickest if you were to be an unfeeling robot or w/e, but 100hrs of enjoyable work will always reap better rewards than 100hrs of slog."

--From IsaVulpes on Lichess4545 General Slack Channel

"On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite."

--Lasker

"You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods...The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results."

--Lasker

"He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess...the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to standstill or to anarchy."

--Lasker

Find a Win

I heard Stjepan Tomic (from popular youtube channel "Hanging Pawns") on an episode of the Perpetual Chess Podcast describing how he analyzed his losses. He said one of the stages is to always try to find a win--a critical point where if you played the right moves, you would have won the game or a decisive advantage. I thought that was a great idea and it certainly makes losses a little easier to accept when you can take very specific lessons from them. From analyzing my fourth OTB game in the monthly tournament at my club, I got a great lesson in pawn endgames. I made a big reddit post about it but I'll paste the majority of that here with some minor edits.

The starting position:

I'm playing white and I'm moving my pawns upwards. Black just played Kc4 and he's made it very clear he's going over to capture my queenside pawns. I played Ke3?? in this position. This was the critical moment to take some time and work out my plan. Instead, I allowed black to dictate play and just follow him to the queenside in hopes that I could figure out a way to leave him with a rook-pawn and get a zugzwang or stalemate trick or that he misplays something. I got lucky because he did misplay and I got a draw but the point is that I did not find the winning idea--so I'll do that now.

It's a pretty common endgame: I'm up a pawn but there are a lot on the board so there are many options of what push, there are decisions on when and how to get active with the king, how to make a passed pawn before my opponent, how fast my opponent really is, if there are tactics, etc. I was up something like +2.0 in the engine evaluation until I played Ke3. I capitulated and followed his king around when I should have taken some time and counted out a pawn race. How am I supposed to figure that out in the game with the clock ticking down? Here's how:

Black's plan is to capture my queenside pawns and then push his own. Do I have enough time to let him freely do that while I try to push my kingside majority and make a passer there? It sure looks like I have a lot more steps to accomplish my plan compared to him but we don't know unless we count.

Look at the starting position again. If left alone, Black can queen with these eight moves:

Kb3, Kxb2, Kxa3, b5, b4, b3, b2, b1=Q

So eight is a number we should keep in mind.

Can white make a passed pawn on the kingside in that time? White must either get his king in to help his pawn advance or advance the pawns on their own. White should see that his king will take three moves to get into an active square (like g5) so that seems painfully slow. Regardless, three advanced connected pawns should be able to queen against two isolated pawns without the king's help--which is the situation on the kingside. That is one of the main principles at play. We must calculate if we have time to do a pawn storm. Remember you have eight moves before black queens but white is on move. Soooo start counting:

(The first move is very nice as it freezes blacks' kingside pawns, a nice trick in pawn endgames)

g5!, f4, h4, f5, h5, g6!

The breakthrough! You should STOP HERE since you got to a critical point now that you see some forcing situations--like pawn captures or decisive pushes. This is white's sixth move, so I find it helpful to check in on where black's king and pawns would be at this stage. So again, white just played his sixth move, and since white is on move in the starting position, we can play six moves and black would be on his fifth. Here's what you should be able to visualize:

This should be a sort of "checkpoint" you can keep going back to when you're calculating the upcoming critical moves. We got to this checkpoint by a simple count of pawn moves. You can see that black can either ignore the g6 move and push b4-b3 or capture it with one of his pawns. Importantly, you must see that white has his choice of queening square regardless:

If black completely ignores and plays b3 then white has his choice of how to promote: either g8 via a simple g6-g7-g8=Q, or white can promote on f8 or h8 via a capture onto either of those files. This is when you might notice that you can queen with check if you do it correctly, since black's king is exposed on a diagonal! Of course, if black captures on g6, white can still work it out to promote with check or with enough time to check the black king before black gets his pawn close enough. And know that if black ever took a move to get his king off the a3-f8 diagonal like moving his king to a4, that's a waste of a tempo and white will win that way too.

When you start to see these dynamics at play, you should start seeing some hope and a path forward and then re-calculate all various options black has.

So from the beginning, one such example would be:

1. g5!  Kb3
2. f4  Kxb2
3. h4  Kxa3
4. f5  b5
5. h5  b4

That concludes the first part of the simple race calculation (call it a checkpoint if you'd like) which should be the basis of your critical calculations. Remember the shortcut to do that is to count the number of moves each side has to get to a position in your head. An inner dialogue I might have up to this point is:

"So after five moves I can visualize white with all three kingside pawns on the fifth rank while black has gobbled up my queenside with his king, which sits on a3 and his pawn on b4. It's my move."

I use that shortcut to easily visualize the board after the "forced" race-like moves, which would help me find the critical breakthrough move:

6. g6!  hxg6
7. hxg6  fxg6 (f6 8. g7  b3  9. g8=Q  b2  10. Qf8+)
8. f6  b3
9. f7  b2
10. f8=Q+

A queen vs king and pawn on the 7th rank (second rank technically) is almost always winning for white (rook- and bishop-pawns are exceptions). Make sure you know the technique! I do and that would have been a lovely way to end this game but alas I didn't take the time to calculate the pawn races and breakthrough leading up to it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

I hope you can follow all that. On the reddit thread, someone posted a link to a nice Ben Finegold lecture about breakthroughs and I found this position illustrative--Sorry about the youtube bar at the bottom ;). White to move:

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XFCp5XDwuM

White wins thank to the more advanced position of his pawns. His pawns are on the 4th and 5th ranks while black's are on the 2nd and 3rd ranks (relative to each player's perspective) and that makes the difference. The idea is that white will give up some pawns to get a very valuable passed pawn that will promote before any of black's pawns. It's really just a slightly different version of the most popular breakthrough position seen below:

You should know that position. The idea is the same: with best play, both sides will have passed pawns but white's will be more valuable because it's more advanced and thus will promote first with enough time to gobble up any of black's pawns. If I saw these ideas of advanced pawn majorities and breakthroughs, I would have won my game. Live and learn!

My First Ever USCF Rating!

Well I finally played a rated over-the-board game. Four in fact. They were my first real-life, big-boy chess games with actual meaning, although I'd been to the local club many times for the Sinquefield Cup and the U.S. Championship--as a spectator, I should add ;).

That's right, my local club is in St Louis. I'm lucky and also a bit surprised it took me so long to get up the nerve to play in person there. I found out that they run a month-long tournament with games every Tuesday evening. I believe the tournament designation is 4SS, meaning four rounds of a Swiss System tournament. After four weeks, they determine the winner of each section and I think they pay out some cash prizes! After getting registered with the USCF on the night I showed up, they stuck me in the U1600 section. These games were G70; D5. Did I do that right? I'm still getting used to some of the terminology and customs. Online you just click buttons and you're playing and everything is automated. So yeah, G70; D5 meaning the game is in 70 minutes and there is a five second delay. I'd never played with a delay (or a physical clock) but with over an hour for the game, it doesn't matter that much to me. I won't use this space for deep analysis of the games so I will just provide some general observations and I hope readers can derive something from it.

Game 1 - Tuesday February 4, 2020
Soooo, it's true what they say: you're gonna play a lot of children.

In the U1600 section, there were a lot of elementary-school aged kids. Perhaps fifteen. Then maybe a few teenagers, a few guys my age (30s) and an older gentleman. I'd say something like twenty players. The 1600+ section had six or eight total. In the first round, I was black and paired with a 12xx rated player. In my entire life, I've played three casual OTB games with someone that is somewhat serious about chess (has an account at chess.com so that's something I guess). Beyond that, I've played once with my great-uncle when I was in high school and then a handful of less-serious ones more recently against friends that "just know the rules." It was helpful that I have played through games with a real board so at least I knew what it was going to be like viewing the three-dimensional pieces. Still it is something to consider and to get used to when playing your first OTB games.

When playing in person, there's a lot more going on in regards to stimulants, figuring out order of moving and recording the move, board vision, etc compared to loading up a game on your phone or laptop.

Where do I set the pieces when I capture?

Why didn't my opponent adjust his pieces BEFORE the game?

Move the piece-->Tap the clock-->Record the move ... Move the piece-->Tap the clock-->Record the move ...Move the clock-->Tap the piece--...aw shiiiit. Wait, I went to the bathroom, where the hell did he move? Fuck how did I get blood on the scoresheet?!? Do we hand these in at the end? Why is my pen in my hand while I'm trying to capture with my queen? That's awkward. Wow kids are restless. They play a move and if I don't immediately play, they're up and walking about. .... Holy shit is someone crying?!

So all that is happening but please don't read them as excuses. I actually found I was able to concentrate just fine. I don't think focus is a problem. But it's a warning to everyone else that you should prepare yourself for the unknown--I mean, I knew I'd be recording moves but didn't quite imagine the learning curve with actually doing it, getting into a groove, and remembering to hit the clock. I'd say I missed it about three times which isn't so bad for an 18-move game. Oh yeah, the game....

I lost in a Giuoco Piano Four Knights Variation--I think that's what it was at least. I basically wanted to castle as early as possible and stay simple and solid since I wanted the game to keep under control while I figured out all the little things I mentioned above. I played some slow moves to fianchetto my queenside bishop while my opponent wasn't even castled, yet he was able to get some pieces in on the kingside and sac on h6. I was going down a piece with no king safety so I resigned.

Brutal.

From the pairings list, I knew my opponent's rating was in the low 1200s. Who knows if that affected anything on my end. I know my inflated-as-fuck 1700 lichess classical rating is meaningless here but I really thought I could handle a 1200. The weeks ahead proved otherwise.

Pros - Hey I made it! I drove myself to the club, signed up, and played a game! You learn so much doing things you're not used to. I found it helpful to look at the positive things I learned from this experience to improve for next time. I liked that I took my time, unlike many of the other players. Maybe they have better opening knowledge than me, or just don't analyze so much, or don't need to, or they're bored and were forced by their parents to play so they want to get out of there in thirty minutes. I like that I could now plan ahead and develop a small routine for moving, hitting my clock, scoring the move, etc. Sometimes it's the little things. I should add that my opponent was incredibly respectful at the end. He whispered that it was a good game and that I "played very well." I didn't. Haha, anyway I'm sure it was a canned line but it really doesn't matter. It was refreshing to hear that and overall, losing a game over-the-board is far easier to digest than losing to a faceless internet stranger.

Cons - Woulda been nice to win. I put my game in a lichess study so I'll have it for later. I did for all games actually. I will analyze them further.


Game 2 - Tuesday February 11, 2020
I played somebody more my age and I was white. I think my opponent was around 1100 rating. There isn't much to talk about since I covered so much in the summary of my first week. I won a piece (thanks to a blunder) and safely consolidated down and got checkmate on the board. That actually made me wonder if most of these games at this level are played to checkmate? No idea at that point. I think that I'll try to test my opponents even if I'm in a losing position, just until I'm not having fun or I can judge that they'll be able to mate and it's pointless to play on.

Pros - I won. That's always nice. It was still stressful because even getting a knight before move ten doesn't mean that much in chess. I had to remain vigilant and I still took maybe too much time in some positions but you really don't want to give up counter-play.

Cons - None. It always helps to win. I was ready to think about playing in the 1600+ section soon to really gain experience......(riiiiight)

Game 3 - Tuesday February 18, 2020
I guessed I would be black and so I was prepping the caro-kann beforehand. More or less just cramming some ideas in my head 30 minutes prior. Naturally, she played 1. d4. I tried the King's Indian and it was actually my type of game, lotsa positional moves, few captures. Anyway I dropped a pawn and was inactive. We analyzed afterwards which was fun but not comprehensive.

Pros - Another game under my belt I guess.

Cons - Second loss, I'm guessing my provisional rating will be bad.

Game 4 - Tuesday February 25, 2020
This game was last night so it's fresh in my memory. I played a 600-rated player as white and I played my normal, comfortable opening. He seemed to want to trade material and I tried to find clever ways to do this, eventually allowing lotsa trades then I won a center pawn. I didn't see incredibly far ahead and missed a check but it was innocuous and I remained up a pawn with two active rooks on the 7th. I was for sure winning but for a few reasons, I went ahead and traded way down into a pawn ending. The reasons were I was low-ish on time--I had about 20 minutes left while my opponent had over an hour on their clock. That's right. I don't think they took more than thirty seconds for any move. That's a bit crushing to your ego though, when you can't find completely winning moves in an hour of chess while your opponent is just blitzing out moves. That's chess though. I was cracking my brain figuring out advantages and he played simple moves that I couldn't find anything wrong with. The other reason for heading to a simple pawn ending is that I've been studying endgames a great deal lately so I figured I could go into a 5 vs 4 pawn endgame and figure it out. Anyway it was probably a +1 ending but he had a slightly better king and was able to gobble up some pawns where I had to use some tricks to defend. He queened while I had a pawn on the 7th with my king on the promotion square. He really should have taken 55 of his minutes if he needed it to find the win but he played quickly and let me promote then we traded. Blah blah, I was at least able to use my endgame "skills" after that to sac my rook-pawn but force the draw.

Pros - Well, I didn't lose to a 600. I sensed he wasn't incredibly serious about improvement but he played good enough moves to draw so what can I say?! I'm happy I was putting in work to calculate the last king maneuvers to ensure the draw. If it weren't for my recent endgame study, I'm almost certain I would have lost the game at the end there but I knew the technique for the draw. Drawing a 6-700 rated player instead of losing surely saved me tons of rating points so there's a direct benefit of endgame study! I'm proud that I can focus for these long games and not let my opponents speed or style of play affect my thinking too much. I'm also lucky that he didn't take some time to find his win. Probably a lot to analyze in the opening since he played some moves I hadn't seen before. I get my provisional rating after this game!


Conclusions
So I finished with a 1.5/4 score. I was getting my footing in the first one, played fine in the second, got outplayed in the third, then just had a poopy game in my fourth in which I felt I should've had better control. Fine. After four games, USCF gives you a provisional rating and I will keep that designation until 25 games. Sooooo, without further adieu.....

My rating.....

is......

973P4

(I'm pretty sure the P4 means provisional over four games. I read somewhere that sometimes it's listed as 973/4.)

10/28/2020 Update: I played two more games before the COVID-19 Pandemic cancelled OTB games for the year. I won one and lost one and my rating was finally updated again to 1096 (provisional based on 6 games). So I finally got to four digits ;)! I just wanted to add this in so people can see how much your rating can fluctuate in the lower ratings--even after going 1-1! The game I won was against a ~1200 player and my loss was against a ~1450 player, and I still gained over 100 points!

There ya go. It's way lower than I would have guessed. A fourth digit would have been nice! If you asked me four weeks ago before I played a game or saw any of my opponent's ratings, I would have said I'd be over 1200 after a month and that maybe I'd be in the 1600+ section in another month or two of playing. That's not happening. Realistically, what else could I have asked for? It's fine and actually I find plenty more to be happy about with my rating than upset. I have a rating, even if it's quite low. I'm excited that I should only go up from here. I just need more games. I hope it's true.

I'm happy that I now have a rating and a foundation on which to build. I really am excited to see how I can rise through the ranks. Moving forward, I want to shoot for at least equal scores each month, to improve my time management, to focus on game quality and analysis and not rating, and ultimately get to the 1600+ section.

Housekeeping

I'm not sure what the topic of this post will be but I'll call "housekeeping" to borrow a Sam Harris usage.

So I've been trying to play a classical 15+15 game a day and sometimes throw in a blitz or rapid here and there. I believe I am 5 games away from getting to my magical 200. I've won a few, drew one or two that I shouldn't have, and lost some to higher-rated players. Anyway I'm still focusing on analyzing and learning stuff from every game.

Beyond playing games, here's how I've been studying the "four areas" that I laid out in an earlier post.

OPENINGS

I was trying to memorize some classical lines and othe rpopular openings from that spreadsheet I made. I was doing pretty well in the open and semi-open games (not sicilian yet though) when I sorta decided to halt that some. But I was able to do a lot of it at work, for which I'm pretty grateful.

TACTICS

I'm still trying to do some of the chess.com tactics every day. My puzzle rating on that is in the mid-2000s and I'm pretty proud of that. I attribute that to my idea to spend at least 10 minutes on the puzzle if I need to. They are noticeably tougher but fun to think through, and very satisfying if I get the right answer. Beyond that, I have Polgar's 5334 Chess Problems always pulled up on my work computer and in downtime I might do a page or two of those. I'm currently on the mate-in-two section. I still have it in the back of my mind to try a spaced repetition routine on this book at some point. It's a treasure trove of pattern recognition.

I'm also going through some of Dan Heisman's videos on youtube--I strongly recommend those if you haven't checked them out--and he mentioned one of his favorite chess books is called "Winning Chess Exercises for Kids." I managed to find a copy and, well, aside from the childish delivery of the material, it is actually a pretty great book. It's more or less 100 pages of worksheets. Each worksheet has nine problems and one short question for fun. It's three rows of three positions each, the first row being three mate-in-X problems, the middle row are material tactics, and the final row is three "find the best move" positions which might be strategical or defensive and it looks like the final one in the row is always and endgame position. As usual, I have a spreadsheet going at work where I record my answers for a page then grade myself and mark in red those that I got wrong so I can review at the end. I'm finding it pretty simple yet I still miss one here and there.

MIDDLEGAME/STRATEGY

I finished the reading and note-taking for Silman's Amateur's Mind but I haven't got through all the positions in the end of the book. I still want to go through all those at least once, but he goes through the entire game so I keep thinking it'd be more beneficial to play the whole game through since he gives more notes on it. Hard to do that at work.

I'm also trying to analyze my games with the middlegame strategies in mind but I think I need to focus on pawn structures more as I've allowed worse structures for myself in many games.

Another idea is to play through annotated master games, as Dan Heisman said that's one of the main reasons he thinks he reached NM so fast.

ENDGAMES

I read through Part 4 of Silmans Endgame Course but I must go back through and take more notes. There was a LOT of good information in there and it is the longest chapter in the book. I also need to practice more pawn endgames. I fucked up one in my most recent 15+15 game and it went from winning to drawn to losing and back to drawn. I was up a pawn, and....yeah I was thinking draw the whole time. Lame. So frustrating.

I need to begin practicing basic endgames against the computer.


Things TODO

Continue going through the tests in the back of Amateur's mind (ideally I go through them a second time more thoroughly). 

Do the 4-moves-at-a-time visualization with some famous games (see "visualization practice" post).

Go through Part 4 of Silman's Endgame Course and take notes.

Start to practice endgame positions that are provided in lichess' mobile app and in Bernd Rosen's endgame book I have.

Do a few pages from "Winning Chess Exercises for Kids" a day.

Work on 5334 problems.

Continue watching Dan Heisman's videos

I recently bought his book "Most Instructive Amateur Games" (Something to that effect) and I will start working through those games on my physical board at home.

Try Heisman's "20-minute drill" where you pull up a random position from a master game, assess it, find candidate moves and decide on one. Key is to take exactly twenty minutes on the position before finding your move. I can also do this with the 25 positions in the end of amateur's mind actually.

Take a deeper look at this online book: https://archive.org/details/Simple_Chess_New_Algebraic_Edition