How to Improve At Chess - Part 1

The Beginning

Like many people, I learned how to play chess from my parents at a young age.  I was probably 6 or 7 when my father taught me how the pieces move and I would have nightly games with my mother and father.  My parents enjoyed the game, but never really studied it.  Looking back, they were probably equivalent to an 800-rated player in terms of strength.  They knew some basic tactics and a couple quick checkmates, but they played to have fun, not to improve.  When my younger brother and I got to the point where we were beating them consistently, the nightly games were replaced by games of Rummy.

My brother and I would swing by the chess club at our middle school and high school from time to time, but we were not frequent attendees.  For the next 20 years, we only played chess occasionally and never really tried to improve.

In my mid-30s, the chess bug finally bit me.  My brother and I had found chess.com and were playing daily games with each other regularly.  After a while, I found out there was a chess club in my local area and decided to check it out.  It was then that things were about to change.

The First Rated Games

When I went to the club, they were in the middle of a 5-week tournament (1 game per week).  I joined late just to get in a couple games.  After filling out the paperwork to join USCF, I was paired with an 800-rated adult.  I thought, "Okay, I'm rated about 1800 on chess.com, so this should be an easy game."  I was correct, up to a point.  We reached an endgame where I had a pawn, bishop, and rook and she had two pawns and an opposite colored bishop.  Realizing I should be completely winning, I stopped thinking about my moves and ended up blundering my rook resulting in an opposite colored bishop endgame where both bishops and pawns were locked up in the middle of the board.  It was a dead draw.  That was disappointing, but it was my first competitive game, so I didn't sweat it too much.

In the next game, I was paired with a 900-rated adult.  Once again, I got into a completely winning position.  This time material was equal, but I had a strong attack against his king that would result in material gain.  I saw the attack, but did not take the time to calculate if I needed to stop any of his moves, and surprise!  There was an intermezzo he had available to that resulted in a perpetual check.  From winning to drawing simply because I did not take a moment to make a prophylactic move to ensure victory.  Still, 2 draws in my first 2 games was not terrible.  My first provisional rating after those 2 games was 850.

The next event was a 2-week Swiss (2 games each week).  The time control was a little faster, but with as fast as I was playing at the time (my time management was atrocious!) the difference between G/65 and G/40 was irrelevant.  In the first game of this event, I was paired with another 800-rated opponent, and won quickly.  In the second round, I was paired with a 1900-rated opponent - my first Class A opponent.  In that game, he played the Grob, which despite knowing next to nothing at the time, I instinctively knew was a bad opening.  I followed general opening principles and ended up with a complicated, but winning position.  In fact, at one point I had mate-in-2 on the board, but did not see it (it required Qa1-a8+ followed by Qe4# - not an easy move to see with all the chaos on the board).  Having missed the instant win, my opponent quickly simplified the position and went on to outplay me in the endgame.

As an aside, I've played him several times since - this game is the one and only time he has beaten me using the Grob.  In fact, despite being a Grob specialist, he will no longer play it against me in a classical game.

After that event, my new provisional rating was just over 1100.  Over the next couple months, there were a few more events and my provisional rating jumped around between 1100 and 1200, but I felt there was something missing.  When looking at other people's games, I could see exactly what they needed to do, but I failed to get into those types of positions in my own games.  After beating my head against the wall for a month or so, I decided it was time to get some help.

Finding a Coach

If you look around YouTube or Twitch, it doesn't take long to see guys advertising for coaching.  At the time, IM John Bartholomew was quite popular on YouTube and I had hoped to get some of his time to help me assess my weaknesses, but unfortunately his hourly rate was way out of my price range.  I kept looking and reached out to a few other coaches (even reached out to Danny Rensch at one point - he was kind enough to respond saying he was not taking on any new students at the time).  After talking with a few that responded to my inquiries, I settled on a Romanian IM I found on ICC.  He was a little older than me, but was a professional outside the chess space and had a son who was about the same age as my daughter.  He also had a similar sense of humor, and his teaching style worked well with how I learn.  It also didn't hurt that his hourly rate was significantly lower than even the NMs in the US!

I'll pause the story here for a second to provide a little checklist of sorts for those that are looking for a coach.

1. If you are a beginner, the coach for you does not need to be a master in order to help you.  They simply need to be significantly stronger than you.  At the same time, you want a coach to be at least 1500 FIDE/USCF, even for beginners so that they are able to teach the basic tactics and identify them in your games.  If you are an 800 and the coach is only 1200, you both are going to be missing a lot.  That said, if you can find an IM who is patient enough to deal with a complete beginner and is not insanely expensive, you can avoid having to correct things down the road.
2. A coach should not try to cram their opening repertoire on you.  I ran into quite a few coaches who would say things along the lines of "I play the Grand Prix Attack, so that is what you will play".  That is not a helpful way to teach.
3. A coach should be able to help you identify your big weaknesses and come up with exercises to help you improve in those areas.  It is good for a coach to have a curriculum, but if they are teaching you things you've already mastered to just follow their curriculum, it is going to be a waste of time.
4. A coach needs to have a teaching style that is conducive to your learning style.  This is perhaps the most important point that people should pay attention to.  One of the most important things you'll find in a good coach is the ability to teach - and this is not an ability that is prevalent in all strong players.  To give you a popular example:  Magnus famously fired Kasparov as his coach because his teaching style and Magnus' learning style were not a good match.

Before my first lesson, my new coach asked me to email him some of my recent games along with some questions he had.  One of the questions was to self-assess what I thought my weaknesses were (an important question as you'll see in a moment).  Even before looking for a coach, I was still analyzing every game I played and had entered them all into ChessBase.  I exported my 10 most recent games and sent them over.  I answered all of his questions.  Perhaps the most important one was the self-assessment.  I told him I felt I was good tactically but weak positionally.  This would come up again at the end of the first lesson.

In the first lesson, we went through each of the games I had sent him where he pointed out where I went wrong (even in my post-game analysis) and asked what I was thinking during the game (which I started including in my analysis - this is extremely helpful!).  Many times, he would ask how long I thought about a certain move (another key question!).  As I had mostly been playing blitz online, many times I would end up simply playing the first move that came to mind - even in classical games!  Despite me not recording the timestamps for these games (something I now do to help manage my time better), he was able to see that was a problem simply because of the moves I was making.  At the end of the first lesson came the wake up call:  my entire self-assessment was wrong (not surprising as most people are poor at judging themselves!).  I was actually fairly strong in my positional knowledge for my level, but my tactics were very weak and my time management was terrible.

The Real Work

Over the next few months, I had weekly 1-hour lessons with my coach.  We would quickly review any recent game I played and then move into his curriculum.  At this point, he recognized there was a bunch of gaps in my knowledge.  I was like someone who knew how to compute a derivative, but struggled with basic addition at times.  While we were able to fly through some of the basics quickly, it was helpful to build this foundation before moving forward.  He gave me a ton of articles from Dan Heisman to read on my own time.  There were a ton of good nuggets in those that helped me correct my thinking process.

Once I had mastered the basic tactical patterns, it was time to address one of the big problems I had:  my thinking process.  If you've ever read Kotov's "How to Think Like a Grandmaster", he devotes a good amount of time to developing an organized thinking process.  At the time, my process was chaotic.  I would look for moves that felt right, but I had nothing to justify that feeling.  One of my favorite lessons was the one where he laid out the threat priorities (which I had never seen, and to this day I do not see taught as well by others in either books nor video!).  Many times, you will hear commentators define "threats" as "checks, captures, threats".  The circular definition aside, it also is not all that useful!  The way my coach laid them out was far more descriptive and helpful:

1. Level 1 - Checks.  These are the most forcing moves as the opponent must either block the check, move the king, or capture the checking piece.  The elegant definition of checkmate is a "Level 1 threat that cannot be met".
2. Level 2 - Checkmate Threats.  These are moves that threaten checkmate on the next move.  The opponent must either deal with the threat or make a higher priority threat (a level 1 threat).  Even the most silly check is a higher priority threat than a level 2 threat because a check must always be dealt with!
3. Level 3 - Captures.  This threat wins material if the opponent does not respond by either recapturing or making a bigger threat (level 1 or 2).
4. Level 4 - Capture Threats.  These are moves that do not capture material, but threaten to on the next move.  That is, if the opponent does not do something about the threatened piece, you will capture it on the next move to win material.
5. Level 5 - Positional Threats.  These are moves that gain some positional advantage.  Things like threatening to weaken the pawn structure, trading a passive piece for an active one, or threatening to plant a piece on a nice outpost.
6. Level 6 - Non-threatening moves.  These are moves that do not threaten anything.  Developing, defending, consolidating, and prophylactic moves fall here.

Note that most tactics puzzles can be solved by looking at the first 4 levels.

As we continued lessons over the next few months, he would have me label each move I made in my analysis with the level.  This was tedious at first, but after a while it was simply instinctual.

Then we moved on to what he called "straticals".  These were types of tactics that came from proper piece placement.  Things like attacks along the long diagonals, attacks up the center files, attacks along the a- and h-files, etc.  These lessons were useful in helping me to understand why you want to move certain pieces to certain areas in specific conditions.  As a side note, it also reinforced the notion of "knights before bishops" is important, and when to violate that guideline.

For those wondering, the reason you generally want to develop your knights before your bishops is that your knights only have 1 active square and 1 semi-active square to go to from their starting location.  This means that the most likely good square for the b1-knight is c3, and the most likely good square for the g1-knight is f3.  However, during the early opening, many times you have no idea where the best place to develop your bishops is, yet.  Should the c1-bishop go to e3?  How about f4?  Would g5 be better?  Or would it be better on b2?  Many times, you need more information from your opponent before you can make that determination, but most of the time you do not need much from your opponent to determine where your knights should go!

As we finished that section of lessons, the US Open was about to happen in a town near me.  I was not going to pass up a chance to play in that (and had arranged it with my wife 6-months ahead of time - "Sorry honey, for about 10 days, you won't see much of me ...")

First Major Tournament

About 8 months after I started with my coach, the US Open happened to be in a city near me and I was not going to pass up a chance to play in it.  I scheduled time off work months in advance, worked it out with my wife, and began preparing.  In addition to my weekly lessons, I was also practicing tactics constantly (I had purchased several tactics books and would work through them repeatedly), reading up on some openings I was interested in to get the idea of how to play them, learning about positional concepts, and studying some basic endgames.  If it sounds like a lot, it was!

A quick note on the opening discussion:  Often you will see questions on the forums like "Which opening should I play as a beginner?", or "I'm rated XXXX, should I study openings now?"  My suggestion, and the one I've seen from many coaches, is that you only really need to study openings at the master level.  Below that, the opening is not likely to decide your game.  So why was I reading up on openings?  I was not studying opening theory here, but rather going through complete, annotated, GM games in the openings I was interested in playing.  I was looking for how they organized their pieces, tactics they were looking out for, the types of endgames they were reaching, etc.  I picked the openings I wanted to play the same way I tell other people to do it:  find the players whose games you enjoy studying, and use their openings.  Now, back to the story ...

My first round opponent at the US Open was an older gentleman who was sitting at his rating floor of 1900 (meaning at some point in the past he had been over 2100).  I was White, he played a Taimanov Sicilian and around move 20 I had trapped my own queen and was forced to give it up for a knight.  Completely busted position.  He followed standard practice when up material:  simplify the position to a winning endgame.  It was torture and I resigned as soon as there was no chance for me to generate any threats around move 40.  I went home, analyzed that game, and slept for the night.

The experience at the US Open is probably worthy of its own blog post, but suffice it to say it was eye opening.  Seeing GMs play in the same hall and watching how they systematically take their opponents apart was an educational experience you do not get from watching them online.  Being able to listen in when they have a post-mortem with another master after the game and hear what they were thinking about is more than worth the entry fee.  One interesting note regarding all the side events at these big tournaments:  there was a blitz tournament before Round 6 of the main event, yet none of the GMs who were anywhere close to the lead bothered to play in it!  GM Joel Benjamin was asked by an FM if he planned to play in it and his response is interesting for those people who are found of speed chess:  "None of the GMs competing for the top spot would waste their time and energy on blitz right now." (paraphrased).

My goal for the event was 4.5/9.  I finished at 3.5/9 and missed out on first in the U1200 prize pool by someone who had a forced bye in round 1 and took a half-point bye in round 9.  A little frustrating, but that is the way a Swiss tournament goes.

After that event, my rating had risen to 1375.  There was another local event a couple months later where I jumped up to 1392.  In the first year of playing competitive chess, I went from an ~800 rating to almost 1400.  Still, I had a ways to go.

Conclusions (Part 1)

To close out this first year, there are a few conclusions that I think will help many beginners:

1. If you are under 1500, I can almost guarantee one of your biggest weaknesses is your tactical vision.  By drilling tactics deliberately, you will improve your strength.  This does not mean the random tactics trainers, but drilling them by theme.  If you want to use software for that, CT-ART is a very good way to go as it has puzzles organized by theme and difficulty.
2. Your self-assessment of your weaknesses is likely wrong.  Mine was a bit different from what I see on the forums, but still wrong nonetheless.  If you are a low rated player and you are asserting that you are getting beaten because your opponents know the opening better than you (which is what you see a lot on the forums), listen carefully:  you are wrong.  Go back and reread #1.
3. You do not need a coach to improve, but having one will greatly speed up the learning process.  A good coach will cut through all the noise and help you focus on the things that will be the most meaningful to you.
4. If you want to get better at chess, you should limit how much you play speed chess.  You can get better at blitz/bullet without getting better at chess.  You can see that by looking at the leaderboards and seeing players who play 10s chess and just shuffle pieces around constantly to win on time.  That isn't chess (nor is that really fun, but if that is what you want to do, go for it).  If you want to get better at chess, you must play slower time controls to help build the good thinking habits.  Once you've developed those habits, you can start working on making them faster, but it is much harder to unlearn bad habits you've reinforced repeatedly than it is to get faster at good habits.  You must learn to walk before you can run.