Practicing During Corona

Hello chess players,

Times are tough right now with the stay at home order having kept us locked down for what I believe is coming on 2 months. I wanted to share with everyone what I have been doing during the shutdown. As some of you know, I work 2 jobs, one of which is teaching after school chess clubs at various schools in Bellingham, which discontinued after the schools were ordered to close on March 16th. My second job was forced to close down soon after. Since then I have had a lot of free time, especially since I recently finished school at WCC. I have spent a lot of this free time studying and practicing chess online. Over the last few weeks I have gotten a pretty good system going. I wanted to share some things that I learned with you.

Tactics

I think tactics are probably the most crucial part of chess, they allow for games to turn in an instant and offer a really high skill ceiling. Meaning that you can infinitely improve. To practice tactics, it is very efficient to use tactics puzzles. The best places to practice these are on chess.com and lichess.org. Chess.com in my opinion has a better library of puzzles, though I say this having no evidence to support it. Chess.com will require you to have a paid membership to do more than a few puzzles every day however, so if you are on a budget, I would recommend Lichess.org.

Studying

I have not spent as much time studying chess in my life as I should have. Specifically the opening of the game. This is not because I did not want to, I did. But I had trouble remembering lines, and recovering when sidelines left me unprepared and confused. Paper books like "Modern Chess Openings" were not efficient, because you had to setup every move on the board and then go back and forth from book to board, book to board, book to board...It was exhausting. 

in the last month, I found an incredible website that every serious chess player needs to know about, that is chessable.com. Chessable uses electronic books created by titled players that have you play the lines on a virtual board. You can learn different lines, and then the website will have you review those lines after a few hours or days. This is called spaced repetition, and it is a highly effective and efficient way to learn a magnitude of lines for every popular opening.

Chessable is free to use, but like many websites it does require you to purchase "books" if you want the more useful content. Though some books can get pretty expensive (especially if you purchase accompanying videos), they are worth it. There is simply no other learning site that can compare to chessable IMO, the content is extremely high quality and worth the higher price tag.

Chess.com and Lichess.org also offer studying material. Lichess.org uses "studies" which can be created by any player and posted for others to see. Studies actually do allow you to play opening lines, similar to chessable. However not all creators of studies set them this way, and instead you have to watch the line without being able to play it yourself. Studies are also free, so you cannot expect high quality or multiple lines to be explored. Chess.com has "lessons" which can take you through openings, tactics, endgames, etc. You do get to practice playing through the position, which is nice. But it cannot assess where you need to improve very well and has no simple review function such as chessable. Chess.com lessons are still very good and worth checking out.

Playing

Playing chess once again comes down to 2 main sites, chess.com and lichess.org. Both sites are FREE to play on. They also both include tournaments, bullet, blitz, rapid, classical, and correspondence. As far as just playing chess online goes, there is really no huge differences here. Chess.com has a "focus mode" which clears everything off the screen except for the board, this removes distractions. Lichess.org has an identical feature, but it is called "zen mode".

I hope you can take something out of this, and maybe if you haven't spent as much time practicing chess online, you have decided that it is feasible and very worth it. Keep your minds busy until we all can meet again!

-Tanner Feemster