How to Improve At Chess - Part 2
In part 1, I stopped a couple events after my first major tournament: https://www.chess.com/blog/PawnTsunami/how-to-improve-at-chess-part-1
That portion covered things in chronological fashion, but like most things in life, improvement in chess is not linear. Over the next couple years my improvement followed a pattern resembling the long term Dow Jones Industrial graph.
Lessons
Following my first couple major events, I continued with my coach. Obviously, we spent time going over all my OTB games. What I found extremely helpful was during these reviews, he would provide recommendations for how I could improve my opening. Specifically, if I made a dubious decision, he would explain why and even provide a couple GM games that involved the same choice and how they went. Then he would provide the current theory and how these recent games are progressing. The point was not to memorize 40 moves of theory in any opening, but to continuously refine my opening choices.
After a few months, we finished his "straticals" lessons and began going through "basic" endgames. I use the word basic very loosely here. It started simple enough: KPvK. But that was just to lay the foundation for the broader lessons where there were a lot of pawns still on the board and one side had to figure out how to convert or draw the position. The lessons progressed to rook and pawns, opposite colored bishops, same colored bishops, and knight endgames. These endgames racked my brain, but they also have been some of the more useful lessons in my recent events (more on that later).
After a few months of these endgame lessons, we decided to take a break from them and move onto something a bit more fun. Over the years, he had crafted an 8-part test, of 8 games each, of guess the move. Following the opening, I had to guess the next move and provide the rationale for my ideas. Sometimes, the move played in the game was the best choice, sometimes it wasn't. At the end of the tests (which took a few months to complete), he was able to give me an estimate as to where my current playing strength was. A couple interesting things I found during this. In the first test (i.e. the first 8 games), it was mostly games I knew very well. My score was almost 2500 for that section. A couple sections later, it was games I had never seen before, and my score was much lower (in the 1800-2000 range). In a way, it reinforced the idea that reviewing a ton of master games is a great way to improve.
Studying Outside of Lessons
In addition to my weekly lessons, I was also studying and practicing on my own. Specifically, I was drilling the tactics in "The Checkmate Manual" and "Improve Your Chess Tactics" on Chessable. I was using a modified version of the Woodpecker Method. I picked a set of 20-50 puzzles and would drill them every day (sometimes multiple times a day) for a week. Then I would pause those and move on to the next set. I did this for months until I had finished both courses and then unpaused all of the puzzles and would drill them over the course of a couple weeks every few months (between the 2 courses, that is ~1800 puzzles). Additionally, I also downloaded CT-ART on my phone along with the 6.0 package. I began working through those theme by theme. To this day (almost 2 years later), I've only completed 75% of the 10,000 puzzles, but I still pull it up every so often and do another 10-20 puzzles. This was the bulk of my training over the last 3 years and has greatly helped my tactical vision. I'm still not as quick as some of these young kids, but I'd rather take a couple more seconds and get it right than rush and miss something!
Opening Repertoire
There are many different philosophies on this, but one thing that most people agree on is that there is no need to memorize opening lines at the club level. You will often see kids switch from opening to opening like they are changing underwear. As an adult, I do not have the time, nor the energy, to do that. So, I quickly settled on an opening repertoire that would allow me to accomplish a few things:
- I wanted a diverse set of positions so that I would gain exposure to many different structures and middlegame plans.
- I wanted the openings to be "good" - I was not looking for dubious lines or one-trick ponies. Those would require me to pick up something else later, which was not what I was looking for.
- I wanted to understand the ideas behind the openings so I didn't have to memorize moves but rather key ideas. This meant that I had to limit how many highly theoretical openings I selected.
- Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to enjoy studying games played in these openings.
I started by looking over the games of the strong players I enjoyed watching: Fischer, Kasparov, MVL, Alekhine, Lasker, Hikaru, Grishuck, etc. This gave me a list of openings to choose from. Then it was just determining which ones I was able to understand the ideas. For example, I toyed around with the Grunfeld and the KID for a bit, but the positions always seemed like I was trying to speak Greek in a Japanese literature class. I won't list out my opening choices (you can see what I play in the Opening Explorer if you really want to), but the key takeaways here are the following:
- Find a strong player whose games you enjoy studying and pick one of their favorite openings as your own. Since you enjoy studying their games, you are more likely to do the work!
- Pick a solid opening. The offbeat stuff like the Grob or Orangutan will just force you to learn something new later on.
- If you are not understanding the ideas in an opening and are not getting good positions, do not be afraid to swap it out.
- Do not memorize moves, but rather focus on the key ideas and continuously improve how you play it as you analyze your games.
Performance
Over the course of the 2 years following my initial exposure to a major chess tournament, my rating continued on a slow and steady incline. Just like the stock market, it would dip here and there, and then bounce. As an adult, specifically one with a job, wife, and kids, I couldn't take every weekend to play in tournaments the way a lot of the young kids were doing. I would see these kids shoot up from 1100-1600 in the matter of 5-6 months by playing in 4 or 5 round Swiss events every weekend. For me, I was limited to mostly playing the events at the club every week and maybe 1-2 semi-major events a year. This meant the kids could go out there and drop a few games here and there and still have a large rating increase, whereas if I dropped a game, I would see a dip. However, during those 2 years, I had climbed slowly up to 1599, and the club had a calendar for 2020 that included 70 classical games. That would be as many games in 1 year as I had been able to play in the last 3! To say I was excited would be an understatement.
The Setback
The first event started in January 2020. However, at the time, I had just started a new job and was working some very long hours to get things going. In my first round, I was playing an 800-rated adult that I should beat 999 times out of a 1000. I was so tired I played seemingly common tactic (Knight takes pawn on e4, knight recaptures, d5 forks knight and bishop to win a pawn). The only problem was I had not played the move I usually play before that (Nc6) which left her with the option of Bb5+ to get out of the pin. Now I'm down a piece for nothing. But, she is an 800 so she is going to blunder at some point, right? Yeah, well, that is what I thought as well. She didn't. So I started that tournament with a horrible first round loss. I fought back in the next couple rounds and would have been able to avoid losing too many points if I won my last round game. In that game, I played a young girl who was rated ~1200 at the time, but she had been improving quickly. The game was a roller coaster. I misplayed the opening, missed a chance to win, went into a drawn endgame, and then misplayed the endgame to end up losing. I lost almost 150 rating points in that event. But, we still had about 65 more games planned for the year, so I felt I could recover quickly. Then COVID hit ....
Part 2 Conclusions
- Playing tired will significantly reduce your strength. If you aren't in shape to play, it would probably be better to just not play instead of playing a suboptimal game!
- Find an opening you enjoy playing and stick to it so you can continuously improve it.
- Tactics, Tactics, Tactics!
