The Key to Your Improvement

An interesting psychology article by Charness, Tuffiash, Krampe, Reingold and Vasyukova (2005) titled "The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise" has found that the single greatest predictor variable of chess skill is the amount of hours spent in serious, solitary study.

This begs the question: How do you study chess?

[To access the aforementioned article, go to google scholar, search for: chess deliberate practice Charness, click "all 16 versions" below the first hyperlink titled "the role of deliberate practice in chess expertise", and use the third link from the top from utoronto.ca]

I repeat the question of interest: How do you study chess?

If you wouldn't mind, please respond by posting your current chess.com live chess ranking, so that readers might see the difference in study style between the 1000 rated player, for example, and the study style of the 1600 rated player (etc).

Since solitary study (as compared to live play) is the biggest predictor of chess skill, determining how the great players study should help the rest of us improve our chess skill more than endless raw game experience alone.

Once again, How do you study chess?

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You must be a vulcan right?

Chess is a game of solitude. The more of a socially rejected recluse the chessplayer is, the better his results will be.

Play over your own games is always said, but underestimated. Seems that some are positional types, tactical types, provocative types, most players will find themselves classical players, all will leads to different type of a studies.  I think that the rule applies little of the opening, middle and endgame.   Being able to look games up on a data-base takes away the opening study, most think its not that important anyway.  When playing OTB the opening study plays more of a roll.   Still .......Study tactics. Study tactics. and more tactics, seems give the quickest results for the time spent.    Tactics will win most of the games anyway.

My current "standard rating" here is 2073, I rarely play live chess here or anyplace else online or in person

 

study is for masters and experts just play the stupid game I disagree with this 100%

Study tactics. Study tactics. and more tactics, seems give the quickest results for the time spent.    I agree with this about 75% or so but I'd also recommend studying basic endgames along with tactics

I rarely find the time and ambition to study nowadays as by the time I'm done with my 24 or so CC games I'm usually burned out on chess. However when I do study chess I usually just read a chess book (currently reading Euwe's Judgement and Planning in Chess) or do 25 of the Tactics Trainer puzzles here, or a bunch of daily and weekly puzzles at shredderchess.com.

I occasionally study endings that apply to my own games. I'm more likely to study endings because as a CC player I can look openings up in my books & DBs. 

I've watched several training videos here and if I had the time (and dough) I'd watch a lot more, but you gotta be a diamond member to have unlimited access to them.  

I have Fritz 12 analyze all of my finished games and mostly look over the losses to see where I went wrong, although Fritz has surprised me occasionally by pointing out how lucky some of my wins were with analysis my opponent and I both overlooked.

PS: Next time just give us the dam link, (cut and paste it into your question)  isn't that faster than typing in a paragraph of instructions on how to get to it?

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I would phrase it as "chess, being the last refuge of a failed intellect" (Now that last part was in quotes in case I stole it from somewhere), but yeah, right on!

My USCF OTB is 1525 but I have finally started to beat players rated 200 points higher than me relatively often (I just started playing again four months ago after a 19 year layoff). I study every day. I typically play over 2-3 high level annotated games each day. I also spend at least 15-20 minutes solving tactical puzzles. Additionally I go over my own games and annotate them. Mostly just the losses...I tend to ignore wins and draws. I don't spend much time on openings at all, unless I have a tournament game coming up against a known opponent. I do spend at least an hour or two a week on endgames. Lastly, I watch a ton of videos on chess fm. Specifically Attack with Larry C, GOTW with Joel Benjamin, and Dan Heisman's Improve Your Chess.

This is very interesting. What is Fritz 12? How is it used?

i don't study anything other then look at game of the day, opening of the day etc etc... hence my rating is only 1130 :L

Chess Mentor on this Web site is an excellent tool. Also, watching videos on this Web site is very instructive.

I have used various methods to get a FIDE rating of 1674 after sudying chess theory(I had been playing casually before that) at 51 a couple of years ago.Will share 1 technique ver effective-use your imagination to use visualization technique entire games not just to go through a chess game but even to solve problems and everything you do in chess sometimes but not always because tdoing it always will be too stressful.

Has anyone else any tips to maximize time spent practicing chess?

I'm currently around 1590, but frankly its based on relatively few games so I suppose my real rating is somewhere between 1400 and 1700. Back to your question... I try and balance playing and studying. Both are fun, but playing is more so. I usually have 3-4 games (2 or 3 day per turn) and also daily spend roughly 30 mins on tactics. I have a copy of Silman's Reassess your chess 4th Ed and am slowly working thru that. Playing back thru losses is also valuable but time consuming. Let us know what you decide. You may find the article or book "400 points in 400 days" interesting and helpful.

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 MAgnus Carlsen being the prime example of that

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Interesting, I'll google it some time.

How do you play back through your losses? I'm assuming you go move by move again and see where you missed opportunities, but do you use anything in particular to help you? I've always wondered if there was a program that, given a certain board position, could spit out the best possible move. Seems like that would be incredibly useful.

Actually there are a number of them. Chess.com has an analyze option available, although I'm not certain which groups can take advantage. Fritz 13 is a cheap PC based program with connections to a large database that does analysis. It's hard though to get a great deal out of it. I posted a thread a week or so ago about how to use it most effectively. The best response is here

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/what-is-the-right-way-to-use-fritzenginesdatabases-to-look-at-your-games

Hi AYoung12,

 

I have struggled with this question myself, and have researched it quite deeply. Here are some of the reccomendations I have found.

1. Work on your chess consistently. At least 30 mins every day is ideal.

2. Study tactics. While I don't incline to the theory that chess is 99% tactics, I do believe that tactics are probably the most important thing to study consistently. Try doing a few tactical problems every day, either out of a book or on a free online site. With a little research, you should be able to find both in abundance.

3. Learn basic endgames. This is extremely important. A decent knowledge of the endgame will yield rich results, especially because very few players (even at expert level) really know their endgames. Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess Endgames might be a good place to start. In fact, I would highly reccomend Seirawan's entire Winning Chess series.

4. Go over you own games. You can learn a lot from simply looking back through your games and finding out where you went wrong. Look back at least once through all your games, wins, losses, and draws. No matter what the result of the game, you can learn something from it. If you lost, where could you have played better? If you won, where did your opponent go wrong, and how could you have won more effeciently? Even draws can be instructive.

5. Learn the basic elements of strategy. This will really improve your skills in all areas of the game. There are many resources for this, though I would personally reccomend Seirawan's Winning Chess Strategies.

6. Study the basics of the opening. This isn't absolutely necessary (not just at first, anyway), but it REALLY helps. If you don't establish a good position at the start of the game, it simply makes things more difficult for you. Here, I would again reccomend Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess Openings.

7. Study the games of the masters. This is also something that isn't essential early on, but becomes more necessary the more you improve. Try to get a book that has annotated master games. Something like Logical Chess Move by Move by Irving Chernev might be a good start.

I have tried to put these reccomendations roughly in order of how essential I consider them to be. Note that this list is focused on the beginner-intermediate chess player. For a more advanced chess player, the list might be somewhat different. Also, this list is by no means exhaustive, but it should serve as a decent basis. Finally, don't underestimate the power of practice. It is essential to play games with other people in order to apply the things one has learned in solitary study.

All these things might seem a bit overwhelming just at first, but don't despair! The most important thing is to work consistently. Don't try to do everything in one day. Work on strategy one day, endgames another day, and so on. As for tactics, try to work on those a little bit every way, along with whatever else you decide to study.

I don't play much live chess these days, and mostly focus on correspondance, but my rating hovers between 1400 and 1500. In any event, please keep in mind that the reccomendations I have given are based on the reccomendations of many master-level chess players.

Best of luck, and I hope you succeed in you chess endevors!

-hankm

Awesome reply Hank, thanks for your advice! I'll try to incorporate them and see where they take me.

I've noticed that this post has been a bit inactive for around a year now, but anyway, I'll still reply here.

I rarely play rated games here, so I'd post my FICS (where I always play rated games) rating, which is 1643. I'd have to agree that studying solitarily (better with a chess buddy) definitely gives more benefit than, say, a ton of orderless games. However, there must be a balance between study and play.

Interestingly, just last year, my rating was just around 800. No matter how much I played, it just stayed there. At my age, it was a bit embarrassing, and I partially gave up on the idea of excelling in chess.

Then, 9 months ago, appendicitis struck me, and I was hospitalized for weeks and bed-ridden for about a month. I had to keep my mind active to fight the effects the painkillers had on my brain, so I had to keep thinking...and the only simple yet flexible object I could think of was a chess game...I mean, come on, my Master's Thesis is not as exciting as a chess game, you know.

But, with an ~800 rating, how complicated could my mental game be? I didn't even know the correct basic opening moves. 1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 d6 3. Qf3 with the hopes of a four-move checkmate, then after ... Nf6, my dreams were crushed... 4. Qh5?? Nxh5!! ... and my rating then becomes pretty obvious.

So, with the help of a friend (an International FIDE Arbiter) I dedicated my bed-ridden days to the study of the basics of chess, then playing games OTB when my bestfriend came to visit or in FICS and Chess.com to apply whatever I learned. From openings, planning, positional understanding, calculation, to board visualization, it basically was just study-play-study-play and from time to time I save a copy of my game and analyze it, seeing how I lost or how my opponent simply lost. 

Now that I've recovered (and will be defending my thesis soon), I've still kept the same study-play habit, but this time with the help of chess engines, chess videos, solving tactical problems, dual n-back training, etc...but still in the basic study-play pattern. In addition to that, I've been offering free chess lessons (to lower-rated players, of course) as an alternative to playing games to apply what I've learned to further deepen my chess understanding.

To cut everything short, study-play as compared to play-play brought me significant improvements in chess, actually doubling my rating in less than a year. It is useful to analyze your own games to find the holes in your chess playing method, but we must not forget the abundance of resources around us that would give us more information about our game. The improvements in the quality of your games would come naturally with the increase in the quality of your study. 

Study, play, and live chess!

it is really and awesome post, thanks for bring up the topic, truely motivational