My First Six Months in Chess: The Adult Beginner Diary

Hello fellow chess players, today I want to share with you the journey I have taken as an adult beginner in my first six months of chess, in this time my rating has increased by almost 300 points from 800 to 1100. I want to share my insights from this period in the hopes it helps other adult beginners improve too.

I began playing in December after being inspired by The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Before signing up here on the website I had played chess before, I knew how the pieces moved although I may have struggled to set the board up right if I wasn’t playing online - I had played only a handful of games before this and they had come between the ages of 9 and 12. So I wasn’t starting from scratch but the full extent of my previous chess experience was playing on a giant chess board on a beach on a Greek island where I was taught the rules by a friendly stranger. I can’t remember his name. My father bought me a wooden chess set from a market in Greece on that holiday and over the next three years I played my father and a friend a handful of times. And that was all before signing up on chess.com in December. 

For the first month playing on the website I did not improve at all. My entry rating was a touch over 800 and a month later on January 10th my rating was still 816. In that first month I fell in love with the game and wanted to improve. I watched a John Bartholomew’s chess fundamentals series and some other YouTubers. I grew frustrated. I wanted to get better. I loved the game and I set myself the rather hilarious goal of becoming a master (2200 fide) before, you know, the end of my life. This speaks to my personality quite a bit. I am not capable of doing anything by half. I am all or nothing. I needed that goal (and I still need that goal) to continue to play chess. Without it I don’t know if I could enjoy the game purely for the love of playing.

As for my life circumstances, I have a baby, we moved countries recently, we just bought a ‘farm’ that was more a field of brambles until recently. That farm has a ruin on it that will become our house and we are currently living in a tent, trying our best to work towards self sufficiency. In short life has been crazy in the last six months with the baby, the move and everything in between. I actually took a month away from chess during the move, but also for psychological chess reasons - more on that later. 

I am a firm believer that nobody doesn’t have the time to do something. You just don’t want to find the time. Despite everything me and my partner are trying to achieve right now I find time for chess by getting up early and studying for one hour. In the evening I study for a further one to two hours depending on whether or not I have the energy to play a rated game here on chess.com. It means I don’t have free time. In the morning I work on the farm, in the afternoon I care for my son (whilst my wife works) and the rest of the time I am cooking, cutting firewood, baking, and doing all the stuff in between. If The Queen’s Gambit came out after I started chess I don’t think I would’ve had time to watch it. I will say one thing for this schedule. When I was single and childless I would’ve probably (in my obsession) played and worked on chess for many more hours a day, but the quality wouldn’t have been there and I would surely have burned out and given up chess for something else, such was the story of my life with other such hobbies. Obsession, reasonable level of success, burnout, give up, move on. So the lack of time has focused my study and kept my interest high. I use my time well. This is my first tip. If you are studying, better to get one quality hour in than three distracted hours of flicking through a book thoughtlessly or passively watching YouTube videos.

An Overview of my Study

I have tried a lot of different study methods, I have studied books with a board, tactics trainers, chessable, YouTube videos and everything in between. It took me a long time to find out what worked for me. I am happy to say I now have a pretty set schedule. For me personally I gained a lot from building daily habits and sticking to them. Through the hardest parts of the move, the one thing I clung to was my daily 30 minutes of tactics on chessable. I still do this daily as a warm up before my evening game. Now I also have the habit and routine of studying my hour in the morning in which I analyse my previous evenings game. I try to take a break from the farm work in the morning to study from a book for around 45 minutes.  With that out of the way I want to go over each facet of my training, how I go about them and what mistakes you can avoid that I wish I didn’t have to learn the hard way.

Tactical Tactical Training

Often on beginner forum posts, the answer to the generic how do I improve and what should I study question is tactics. At the beginning of my chess journey I did a mountain of tactical puzzles here on chess.com but didn’t feel it was really helping me. I think there were two main reasons for this, firstly I was approaching the puzzles wrong, secondly I think they were too difficult for my level. 

So to the first point, what was I doing wrong? When I started I was looking at the position and trying to guess the first move. I would make the move, reassess the position and think about the next move, I’d get that one right again and think about the next move. This is all wrong. I learned that (and I am sure this is obvious to many people) that a major point of these puzzles is to improve your calculation and visualization and by taking the puzzles one move at a time I wasn’t training for that. So now when I sit down to do my thirty minutes of tactics training (which I now do on chessable) I make sure I calculate the sequence all the way to the end. If it is mate in three, I find the checkmate before I make my first move. This might sound obvious but it wasn’t to me at the beginning. Another point of tactics training is to learn to recognise patterns. I heard on The Perpetual Chess Podcast that a good way to sink these patterns into your mind was to use what is called The Woodpecker Method. In this method you pick a set of tactics (for me I choose a book from chessable) you then work through the book for 28 days. After you are finished you repeat the same puzzles trying to complete them in 14 days. Then you start again attempting to half your time again, doing the same set in 7 days. You continue this until you can complete all the puzzles in a single day. And so I began. On the first cycle you have never seen the puzzles before and thus are training your calculation, on subsequent cycles you are enhancing your pattern recognition. I am still on my first book and second cycle of this method. I have to say I have not managed to complete the puzzles any quicker the second time round, but my accuracy is much higher and I have seen a huge improvement in my ability to calculate. I first noticed that I wasn’t getting into time trouble so much and deduced that I must be calculating faster. I also think the accuracy of my calculation is better.

The second mistake I was making to begin with was in my choice of puzzles. Before using the book I am using now (Common Chess Patterns) I bought ‘The Checkmate Pattern Manual’ on chessable - a tactics book far too difficult for me as my first tactics book. I grew frustrated. I find tactics are actually really fun and rewarding if you find a set you can get 75% right on the first time through. My initial dislike of tactics was more to do with the constant failure! Don’t torture yourself, get something level appropriate. I can only recommend from experience Common Chess Patterns as being level appropriate however I have a list of other books I have researched which I plan to do next. These include: Back to Basics: Tactics by Dan Heisman and Mastering Mates 1 & 2 by Jon Edwards. I’m sure there are many others but these I believe are level appropriate <1200.

Play a Long Time Control

So the evening game. I take this game very seriously, I get nervous before I play. I play 30 minutes rapid, a slower time control, on the advice of almost every higher rated player on the internet. I find the time control allows me to calculate and think about my moves. It still leaves me in time trouble sometimes but not so often as to force me into the bad habits that come from rushed moves made without thought, which I am pretty sure is the point of the advice: stick to longer time controls, avoid bullet and blitz at all costs. During my first month of stagnation at just above 800 I was playing almost exclusively 10 minute games. This time control was not long enough for me. I couldn’t calculate, I was making choices without thinking and I was forming bad habits. I am considering switching to 45/45 and playing every two days instead of daily just to give me more time and an increment. Ultimately I want to play classical over the board chess so increasing the time control probably makes sense for me. 

The Don’t Study Openings Myth

Okay so this subheading is a little misleading. It does seem to me that everytime a beginner posts a question on the chess openings forum or on reddit or anywhere else on the internet, the overwhelming response is: LEAVE NOW AND RETURN WHEN 1800+. That may be an exaggeration. However the advice seems to be, don’t learn an opening, learn opening principles. And whilst this advice has value, I took it a little too literally. What changed for me was when I picked an opening for white, and two openings for black (one against e4 and one against d4/c4/whatever else) and learned the first few moves. Note I did not study opening lines, but I learned the first few moves and the ideas and plans for my openings. This helped me enormously. Why? Firstly it removed enormous blunders from my game in the first five moves. It’s not fun to be in a terrible and losing position so quickly. Secondly I started to see the same moves, the same positions over and over. Mistakes I made in one position were not repeated when the same position occurred again. So my advice is don’t study openings, but learn two as black, one against e4 and one against d4 and choose an opening as white. As white I play e4 and a lot of the times that leads to the italian but frequently the petrov or the philidor. It is not illegal to have a look at some videos or read about these openings. No higher rated player will come and hunt you down. Learn the ideas of the openings you have picked and then learn by playing them again and again and again.

Self Analysis

Not repeating previous mistakes in the opening didn’t just come from me remembering those errors and trying new moves. As stated, I play my game in the evening then I analyse the game in the morning. I do this without the engine. I find the critical moves where I feel I made a mistake and I try to think about the best move I could’ve made in the position. I then write down the move and why I think it is a good move, sometimes going into the sequence after the move a few lines deep. I also go over the variations I calculated and rejected during the game and write down what I was thinking when. Once I have done this for the whole game I turn on the engine and check my answers. I would say I get about three quarters correct. If I get one wrong I try to understand why that was a bad move as well. I found this has helped me enormously and continues to help. I have also been very fortunate in having made a few friends here on chess.com including nlkristic who as well as having some excellent articles on his chess.com blog for beginners, has also been kind enough to help me analyse a few of my games. It is great to find a stronger player to help you understand your mistakes if you are having trouble understanding why the computer doesn’t like your move! 

Mostly though the analysis has helped me to see patterns in my thought process. One thing in particular is my seeing what I think is a brilliant move (normally it is a two or three move tactic) I then get so excited I play the move immediately. Often I oversee things in these moments on other parts of the board. One time even being checkmated outright! So now I try to slow down when I think I see a win and consider my opponents threats before continuing with my sequence. 

Final note on this process - if I have a position I made a bad move in that I feel is important or instructive (and this idea must be credited to Stacia Pugh) I take a screenshot and make a tactics card out of it. I haven’t made enough to review but I plan to be more dedicated to making these as I continue on my chess journey.

The Useless Endgame Study

I felt early on that the endgame was like a secret that no beginners knew about. If none of my opponents know their theoretical endgames and I did, then all my equal positions will turn into wins, I thought. Genius! So I studied endgames hard. At the point of writing this I know by heart the endings from Silman’s Complete Endgame Course up to and including Class B, ridiculous I know. I used this book in conjunction with Jesus de la Villa’s 100 Endgames You Need to Know. I have also drilled a lot of endgames here on chess.com. For a while I tried to learn one new endgame per day or review all my moves (or as many as I could in 30 minutes) from 100 Endgames on Chessable. So far I can say this knowledge has been utterly useless. I figure it can’t hurt to know this stuff for the future but I would say this is the one mistake I made in my study. I’m sure it will turn out to not have been a waste of time if I continue to grow my rating but I think my time would have been better spent on more cycles of tactics using The Woodpecker Method. I would also note I abandoned this endgame study and I have for sure forgotten or will forget the majority of what I memorised from the above two books probably because I don’t understand all of the moves, I just memorised most of them.

The Counter Attack Conundrum

Another lesson I want to share with you came as a major breakthrough in chess thinking for me. I found as I lay awake at night thinking about a game that a problem in my play popped out at me. I had a lightbulb moment as the cause of the same bad situation I kept landing in suddenly occurred to me. I often found a piece attacked, often the piece in question was defended but more often than not it wasn’t. So when a piece is attacked you can sometimes trade, for example if your bishop is attacked by another bishop, or you can defend the piece being attacked. What I often found myself thinking in these moments my pieces were threatened was, “You want my knight? Fine I will threaten your queen!” Then what would happen is my opponent would move their queen (shocker) and not only move it but move it to attack another one of my damn pieces! Now two of my pieces were under attack and I had to choose which one to lose. 

The lesson for me moving forward then was to simplify my chess. If a piece is under attack, either defend it, move it, or if the attacked piece can take the attacker, take it, whichever seems best to you in the position. Ultimately even if you make the wrong decision the material is still even and you haven’t blundered. Weird lesson I know but I don’t think I can be the only person to have fallen into this trap.

Note a better explanation on this can be found in the book Weapons of Chess by Bruce Pandolfini which I have subsequently read. The section is called ‘Don’t Ignore Enemy Threats’ in the chapter titled ‘Analysis’. As a side note this is an excellent book for players in my rating bracket. I found it easy to understand and you don’t need a board to read it. 

Ego and Loss

This was a hard one to admit to, but when I lost early on in my journey I often found myself thinking: “How can I lose to this IDIOT! Look at them! They needed a third queen and 89 moves to finish the job and I’m pretty sure that checkmate was an accident!” I’ll admit I struggled a lot with loss at the beginning. I wanted to win every game. I felt entitled to win every game. I was better than my opponent. And when I lost I wanted to launch my laptop out the window, curl up in a ball and die. I am 29 years old.

So how did I overcome this? The truth is it took a long time. I actually took a break from chess for most of March because it was such an issue for me. But chess was always in the back of my head. I wanted to come back to it but I didn’t want it to have the effect it did on me when I lost. It was too crushing. Too destructive for my mental health. 

During my break something really clicked for me as I was listening to an episode of The Perpetual Chess Podcast. The episode was with guest Dr Jana Krivec. I recognised myself in that podcast and found my issue. I was treating my elo like a gambler treats money. When I lost I knew I should stop for the night, sleep and analyse in the morning. But I would often fire up a new game immediately, robbing myself of the chance to learn from my last game and instead hoping to regain my lost points. I would be at risk of tilting in these runs of games. Even if I won back my rating, it would have been more beneficial for me to lose and learn than finish the day on the same rating as I started. This is probably the best lesson I have learned.

I have let go of my rating goals. I used to want to hit 1200 in 2021, 1400 in 2022… and so on. Going forward I have study goals not rating goals. I have written down habits I want to form and practise every day, and a list of books I want to read. My goals for 2021 are now a list of books I want to read, a set of habits I want to stick to (like doing 30 minutes of tactics everyday) and my rating will go where it will go in that time. 

This mindset shift alone helped me to stop losing my temper when I lost. It's still not nice to lose. I still don’t enjoy it, but I no longer feel the need to put physical space between myself and my laptop when I do! Instead I look forward to the analysis process and improving as a player from the lessons I learn. 

A Healthy Mind and Body

I don’t know how much it really helps, but as I mentioned I work my farm in the morning for about five hours. The work is very physical and keeps me in good shape. There is also something nice about sitting down to a mental task with the body feeling relaxed from the exertion of physical labour. 

Another great positive change I have made in my life that has extended out of chess is in my alcohol consumption. I stopped drinking because I felt like firstly I played worse after a drink, and secondly I couldn’t remember the things I was learning as well. So I haven’t had a drink in a long time. Not that it was ever a problem for me but I feel better for it. 

Finally I practise the Wim Hof method, doing the breathing exercises every morning and having a dip in the icy river after my morning analysis. Again no idea how relevant this is to chess, but it’s something I do. 

Conclusion and The Future

All in all I am pretty pleased I sat down to watch The Queen’s Gambit. I have found a real love in chess and a challenge that will hopefully last me a lifetime. I have enjoyed enormously learning about this community (mostly through The Perpetual Chess Podcast) and look forward to diving into the games rich history too. 

In the next six months I am looking forward to reading the next few books on my list which are Winning Chess Strategies by Yasser Sierawan and Simple Chess by Michael Stean and formulating an idea I have for combining my love of farming with chess which is hopefully not as weird as it sounds!

I hope you found this in some way helpful or inspirational to read. I will leave you with the bullet points of my study regiment and a list of resources that I found most helpful in my first six months of chess.

• 1 Hour Book Study focusing on Endgame, Strategy and Positional Understanding.

• 30 Minutes solving Tactical Puzzles to improve my Calculation, Visualization and Pattern Recognition.
• 1 ½ Hour Game and Analysis to improve my Openings and to find Weaknesses in my Play and Thought Process.

Books (in the order read them):

Play Winning Chess

Logical Chess: Move by Move

Weapons of Chess

Tactics Sets (studied woodpecker style on chessable.com):

Common Chess Patterns

Other Media

Hanging Pawns YouTube Channel (for the ideas and plans behind my openings)

Perpetual Chess Podcast (for best study methods and a sense of belonging)