One Training Game (A Thousand Lessons)

One of my favorite ways to help students is by playing a "training game". For a training game you should have a time control of at least 15 minutes. There's two ways training games can be beneficial:

1. You and your opponent are close in chess strength. When you go over this game you can see how GMs played the opening that you two played. Also it's nice to know the thought process of someone around your strength. Try to make the game less competitive and mostly just for fun and getting better. Competition is great for rated games, but these games are for improvement. 

2. One of the opponents is much stronger. In this case the stronger opponent should take on the role of instructor. Try to suggest times when the weaker opponent had interesting ideas that you might have been afraid of during the game. Critiquing your own moves will help a stronger opponent as well. Garry Kasparov said that something he did, was try even harder to find improvements in games he won. In this way he'd be prepared for when his future opponents would play the same thing, hoping he'd blindly go down the same line; little did they know that he'd found several improvement on a game he won!

Below is a 15 5 unrated training game, I hope you'll see how you can improve your chess immensly in just 30 minutes!