The Open File - How to Improve Your Game

The Open File

by Life Master Mike Petersen (Zug)

How to Improve Your Game

I am going to give some rules for you to follow on how to improve your over-the-board chess.  If you are rated under 1800 and want to get better, read on.

Rule 1.  Study one opening system with White and one with Black.  Buy a book on each and learn the main lines.

Rule 2.  Play in tournaments and play the lines you studied.

Rule 3.  Take your scoresheets and compare them to the book lines.  Note where you or your opponent differed from the book.  Try to figure out why you or your opponent lost the game.

Rule 4.  Try to find copies of master games where they used the lines you play.  This means, of course, that the lines you play must be in the mainstream of current chess theory.  Don't play the Vienna Game, for example, and expect to find many current master games with it.

Rule 5.  Play lots of speed chess using the lines you are studying.  So what if people figure out what you play?  If it is sound, it doesn't matter. Besides, after one or two games in tournaments, they'll know anyway. Make sure you try to retain how you followed the main plans of the opening. Immediately afterwards, while the games are fresh in your mind, grab the book on the opening you’re playing and recall if you played it correctly.  Without this part, playing speed chess is simply a mental exercise, with no purpose except fun.

Rule 6.  Don't expect to find much in the way of help by studying a collection of your favorite player's games.  Unless he (or she) is playing the lines you are studying, it won't help too much.

Rule 7.  Study the endings.  This means not only studying the usual Rook and Pawn endings and so forth, but also taking those same scoresheets and looking up the endings you played in the book and learning the right way to go about playing it.

Rule 8.  Play, play, play, play, play, play, play, etc.

You may already be doing some of what you see above.  If you're not doing all of it, the odds are you will not reach your chess potential as fast as you are capable.  By the way, if you find that you’re tired of playing that same old Queen Pawn game over and over, switch openings and study a new one.  Just be aware that your work will basically start all over on the new opening. However, since your overall strength will have improved, the time to get up to speed on the new opening will be correspondingly less.  Follow these rules above, and you'll find your over-the-board rating will go up at least a class interval the first year.  And if it doesn't? 

Take up golf.

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