The Elements of Chess with Neal Bruce: Study Method of the Month Series
Welcome to my new series on chess study methods. I talk a lot about them in my Adult Beginner Diary Series, but in this series I want to take a much closer look at some of the methods of studying chess that really interest me and talk to some of the people to whom it has brought success.
As today’s interviewee is often quoted as saying - you need to trust the process. I personally find it hard to trust in my process if it hasn’t brought anyone success before me. So I like to copy what I know works. Assuming of course that it fits with my learning style. And so the idea behind this new series is to explore different training methods that have brought its practitioners success and present them to you as models to simply copy and paste into your study routine. Some months we will look at more overarching study philosophies and other months we will look at smaller scale concrete training methods.
I hope you enjoy this first article.
The Elements of Chess - with Neal Bruce
In this first article I cover the method of breaking chess down into its constituent elements and studying each completely and individually over a sustained period of time. The method doesn’t have a singular name. What came to mind for me was chunking - but that sounds ridiculous. To help me do justice to the method which we won’t be calling chunking, I interviewed the man who inspired me to take it up - Neal Bruce. During our interview Neal had some amazing things to say not just about the method but about chess improvement in general and I am so grateful to have had his insights to not just help me write this article, but as I embark on this probably decade long journey of chunking myself. See? You just can’t say chunking.
So this is more of a chess study philosophy rather than a method. But that is how I aim to start this series off - by looking at the big picture. As the series progresses I hope to zoom in and get into the details of how one might optimise ten minutes of tactics training. So this isn’t a copy/paste training technique, but a full-scale training regiment that might just change the way you study chess for the next decade. And that is exactly what it has done for me. Granted, I am only four months into the process. But I am already feeling the benefits of it.
What is it?
I asked Neal to describe the method in his own words.
“I use this metaphor of the three little pigs - first you build a house of straw and then a house of wood and then a house of bricks. At first I didn’t really have an orderly process when I was building my house of straw.
I played in my first tournament game when I was 40, I am 52 right now. For the first few years I just kind of randomly did things (like I think a lot of chess players do) and along the way I learned about those four areas. I learned a little bit about openings and strategy and tactics and endgames and I got up to 1600 USCF through tournament play from 1100, so that was a pretty good jump.”
Neal’s house of straw sounds quite familiar to me. I spent my first year in chess studying a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It’s only in the last four months now that I have been focusing mostly on one area of my chess.
“About six years ago I really started thinking about wanting to get more serious about chess, making it a daily practice, making it a serious part of my life and I came up with this idea. I am in software and in software we talk a lot about iteration and I thought it's really kind of pointless to try to be a Magnus Carlsen in endgames and be terrible at everything else because you're just gonna always be at 1100.
So you have to build up everything to a certain level and then build another level and another level and you need to do it across all four levels, what I call the walls of chess - you can’t just build up one.”
This makes sense, Neal is studying each of chess’s four main areas (tactics, strategy, endgames and openings) individually. But he isn’t studying each completely before moving on. He is getting the basics down first. Basic tactics, then basic strategy, then basic endgames, then basic openings. This is Neal’s house of wood. To his mind there’s no point in having one granite wall if the other three are still made of straw.
“When I was looking at my games I decided that I am not really good at any of the four walls of chess, I had a house of straw and I was missing tactics - I had very little understanding of strategy, I had a very weak opening repertoire and my endgames were just so-so. What I decided was that most people I played under 2000 (USCF) also had not mastered any of these things and I saw that in my own games or as I walked around the tournament hall that I would see 1800s blundering tactics, 1800s having no idea on strategy, just like me - just randomly moving pieces around, and so I decided I am going to focus on one thing and I started on tactics (which I think was a smart choice) and I'm just going to work on that, because it was clear I wasn’t very good at it and I missed a lot of opportunities. And that has turned into a ten year plan to build up my house of wood and the way the math worked out - and this wasn’t by plan, it just sort of happened this way - I spent four years on tactics. Now I am spending three years on strategy, but I am still keeping an eye on tactics. So you don’t give up the last wall, you keep practising it whilst you build up the next wall.”
So it’s probably not only a smart decision to get the basics down first, but a practical one as well. It took Neal four years to master basic tactics. To get the intermediate and advanced stuff down as well might have meant spending a decade on tactics alone - and with three more topics and possibly three more decades you can see that just isn’t a realistic time frame.
To summarise then, Neal has broken chess down into four main study areas of tactics, strategy, endgames and openings. He has further broken each of those down into basic, intermediate and advanced levels. He will study the basic level of all four areas, before moving onto further cycles covering intermediate and advanced levels too. When he considers himself done with one area, he has developed methods that allow him to retain that knowledge and continue to practise it as he moves on to the next topic. He is cycling through his famous tactics cards now despite the fact that strategy is his current area of focus. When he moves on from strategy to the endgame, he will still be reviewing and practising the tactics and strategy he learned before - again using flashcards.
It’s a Long Term Approach
It sort of dawned on me when I first had the idea for this article that I might have made an enormous mistake. When my rating isn’t going up, I have a tendency to dissolve into a puddle of psychological despair. That doesn’t pair particularly well with dedicating an entire year to studying an aspect of the game that is seldom seen. I reach a fair number of endgames. I certainly don’t avoid them - I actively embrace them. I enjoy them. However, even the endgames that I do reach rarely boil down to concrete theoretical endgames. So will I pick up enough skills that are transferable to other parts of my game to see real rating improvement? Whether the answer is yes or no. Whether I finish this year at a higher or the same rating as I began is irrelevant. Short term progress is not the aim of the training philosophy. And Neal agreed with me on this point.
“I feel that people put way too much energy around their rating, I think that the rating is a number. Jeremy Silman in how to Reassess Your Chess 3rd edition talks about a guy who has his own pet tricky openings and never really learned strategy, but through his pet tricky openings, he got himself up to expert level, which is way higher than most people, but he’ll never be a master because he has a rotten foundation.”
This is the flip side of it. You can study things that are more likely to have an immediate impact on your rating. Opening traps definitely fall into this category. Equally you can study things that won’t have much effect on your rating. But if you want to become a master (and I believe both Neal and I do) then you need to build a solid understanding across all areas of chess or you will never make it there. If you are over-attached to your rating in the short term then this method isn’t going to work for you - in fact my own issues in shaking off any attachment to my short term rating are exactly why this approach is so healthy for me.
“A lot of people, if they don’t see their rating improve for six months, will freak out. That's the wrong way to think. I think of chess as a multivariate problem. There’s a lot of things you can get good at and your rating doesn’t show it right away. And if you trust your training (and this is where a coach could really help to make sure you are on the right training path) and you keep at it, then you are eventually going to get better. But I find a lot of people feel like if they can’t see +100 points per year then I suck and I can’t be good at this thing. And that's the wrong way to think.”
It’s Not a Religion
Part of the discipline about this approach is having patience to diligently master a single topic. Of course the flip side of that is you are neglecting the parts that you haven't gotten to yet. Whilst Neal continues to practise his tactics - knowledge he acquired before studying strategy - he must accept that the topics he hasn’t gotten to yet (namely endgames and openings) will remain a weakness for him.
“I have just agreed with myself that I am just going to get crushed by gambits for eight years in a row. And the truth is, at the tournament level, junkie gambits don’t get played that much and so it doesn’t really worry me for when I get back to over-the-board play. But I will make exceptions. There was a period last year where every other game I played was a Stafford Gambit. I am not very good at chess, but I am very good at being arrogant about chess and I was thinking that this isn’t chess!”
And you reading Eric Rosen?
“The Stafford Gambit is junk.”
Eric?
“How dare you play this junk against me, and then how dare you beat me so horrifically. And so I spent a half hour with Lichess thinking I’ve got to learn how to refute this stupid gambit. And after that half hour, in every Stafford Gambit I have played against since, I have either won or at least held my own and this 'getting crushed' thing is over. So I think if you get to a point where you are just getting brutalised by a certain gambit opening, then it is worth it to take a day, or thirty minutes or whatever you need to understand why you are getting crushed and then move on so you don’t have such a huge hole in your armour.”
So although this approach is about discipline and focus on a single topic, there is no harm done by being a little bit flexible and a bit kind to yourself if there is one part of your game that you consider to be a major weakness.
The Being Human Problem
Frankly it gives me anxiety to think that I might have holes in my chess knowledge. Actually that’s not quite right. It gives me anxiety to know that I might have holes in my chess knowledge AND that I might have no idea what those holes are AND I would have no way to find out!
By systematically studying the game in the way Neal proposes, you know you haven’t missed anything. There will be no holes in my endgame theory knowledge by the end of this year unless the same hole exists across all the books and video series I have selected to study - an unlikely scenario. But if I had randomly studied the endgame whenever I felt like it, and never tracked what I had and hadn’t covered, then it is conceivable that I could hit master level without having once seen a certain theoretical knight v bishop and pawn ending. Who knows why. Maybe we just never met. Maybe in all the random books I half read and YouTube videos I partly watched, in all the online games I played, maybe this particular bit of chess knowledge simply eluded me.
And then imagine this: one day, I’ve become a professional chess player. I’m in a tournament chasing my last GM norm. The family’s not doing great - we need to pay the rent by tomorrow or we are getting evicted. My son’s feeling pretty hungry. I can hear his belly grumbling as I sit looking down at the board in front of me. I have to draw this game to hit the money. I’m up against (by then former) world champion Alireza Fourouya. By some miracle I have held up until the endgame. My wife's looking at me across the tournament hall. In her eyes I can see her say: we need this, you’ve got this. I want to give her a reassuring nod. But I look down at the board and feel my whole life slip out from under me. I look from the knight to the bishop to the pawn and wander where it all went wrong. And in that parallel universe, my family is going to starve to death, we’ll be homeless and worst of all I am never going to become a GM.
I asked Neal if he had any reassuring words to calm my irrational thoughts.
“There are a finite number of theoretical endgames and you can study them all in a year. The trick will be converting knowledge into subconscious skill where you don’t even think about it. I was playing against players stronger than me in endgames and they were making every move in two seconds. They knew exactly what to do. They weren’t even thinking. It was all subconscious.
And so I think there is this transition from feeling like I kind of know what I’m doing, I think I know what I’m doing but I need to double check it all the time, until eventually you do it hundreds of times and you don’t think.
I can make a ladder mate with a queen and a rook and never think. I’ve had plenty of times in blitz games where I think, there's probably a mate in ten but I don’t care. I’m just going to set up my rook and queen and go boom boom boom and I can’t screw that up! I can’t stalemate him that way! And so I think the trick is to have everything be as simple as a ladder mate.”
A Systematic Approach Means No Long Term Holes... Sort Of...
So did Neal really find a foolproof way to ensure I will have no holes in my theoretical endgame knowledge, for life, by the end of this year? Is the systematic breakdown infallible? Sadly not. But in my opinion it is the best way to reduce the likelihood of leaving large holes or weaknesses in your knowledge and play.
The expectation I have put on myself is that, by the end of this year, if you show me any theoretical endgame winning or drawn, then I will win it or draw it, regardless of who my opponent is. Human or android. But I am beginning to see that this simply won’t be true. Mostly because Stockfish is the wizard of confusion, but also because Super GM’s mess up seemingly simple theoretical endgames all the time. Sam Shankland famously resigned in a drawn position in the 2019 Wijk aan Zee Tournament. I even found an Aronian-Carlsen game where I got to watch the current world champion make the exact same blunder I had that very morning against my arch nemesis Stockfish. If it can happen to Sam Shakland and Magnus Carlsen then it can (and probably will) happen to me in a tournament game.
So the idea that I would be somehow different is crazy. There are days when I do my study hour, I go through an ending, and I know I just haven’t quite grasped it fully. At the end of the session Stockfish found a way to beat me despite my study. And that is hard to take. What am I to do? Do I study it again the next day? What if I still don’t get it? When do I move on?
For me there is a sense that I have just one chance to really learn this. Because the next decade is layed out. I’ll be studying other things. This is endgame theory time and it makes me feel a bit desperate when I just can’t understand an ending. It makes me feel like the clock is ticking. Like sand is running through my fingers.
Neal had some great practical advice about retaining the knowledge he gained going forward. Because let's be honest - I might remember the Philidor Position in ten years if I don’t look at it again. But Karstedt’s Draw? I doubt it.
“The way I think of getting better at chess - I think there are two fundamentally different problems. One is acquiring knowledge and the other is practising until it is a subconscious skill. I look at those as two fundamentally different problems to solve. So if you think about it from an engineering perspective it’s like building two totally different things.
Right now I am working through eight positional puzzle books. Just like tactics books there are positional puzzle books. I think it is just as important to drill positional situations as it is to drill tactical positions. And frankly I think it's good to mix them up - because that's what games are. You don’t know. I’ve built up 1500 positional flashcards and I’ve built up 8300 tactics cards. And in the mornings I’ll cycle through a few of these tactics cards. That’s what I have been doing for six years. Then once I am done creating my flashcards from positional puzzles I am going to cycle through those too. So every morning I like to do a half hour or fourty-five minutes before work of cycling through some cards. And that will be difficult for me, as this thing grows as I put up all the walls of my house. It’s going to be additive. I’ll do the same thing with endgames. I’ll build up 1500 -2000 endgame flashcards and so every morning I am going to have to do all three.”
So there is hope for me retaining my endgame knowledge. I have chosen to put my flashcards on Lichess and play those endings out against Stockfish, but as Neal alludes to, perhaps retaining the knowledge through online or physical flashcards may not be the issue here, it might be finding the time to get through them all.
Ultimately this isn’t my one and only chance to learn endgame theory. This is the year where I gather my endgame knowledge and understanding, in subsequent years I will guard that knowledge and comprehension, develop it as a skill through games and through practice. And sure it might be forgotten, but I’ll probably still be able to pay my rent and feed my family.
When To Move On
So I understand the short side defenses. My flashcards will ensure I keep ‘getting them’ forever. But what about the endings I am not getting? When do I move on this year, knowing I’ll see it again in another book or another video? As you know from my Knowledge v Skill article I struggled to wrap my head around the rook and queen endgame the first time I saw it. And the second time. Alright, so I still haven’t quite grasped it unless you throw me straight into Phildor’s Position. But getting there is a mystery. And each time I have come across this ending, attempted and failed to understand it, the same question probes me: when do I move on? I know that I will see the ending again in several other books and video courses, but I also know I am no closer to understanding it than I was when it was first introduced to me.
Funnily enough Neal pointed to this exact ending as being the reason he decided not to start with endgames. I had to laugh at that. It is a genuine ball-ache. I asked him if he had any advice or reassurance on this point.
“I purposefully will read books that overlap in content and knowledge because seeing five different authors tell me about the minority attack or a rook and queen endgame will probably help me more than reading the same explanation from the same author five times. I look at books as coaches who are very inexpensive. So I can get coached by five different authors on the same topic and that can be really helpful.”
That first tip is one I have noticed myself. Sometimes it’s not you - it’s the author. Getting a second or a third explanation from a different point of view can definitely be helpful, especially as we all learn in different ways. That’s one point for just moving on.
“I think it also depends on the thing. I say to myself: I am going to spend on average twenty minutes per annotated game - playing through it and trying to understand it. But I will for some games spend two hours because it’s just such an interesting game and it actually is in an opening that I play! Occasionally that happens.
I find that I’ll do both. Sometimes I’ll just say, forget my goal - I want to just push in on this and focus on it and if it puts me behind schedule then so be it. And there are other times where I say - I don’t really get this, but it’s okay. I can move on and I am going to cycle back around on this thing later. And I think doing that is very healthy. There are times when you should just move on. Because sometimes your subconscious will work on things whilst you are sleeping or taking a shower or whatever and the pieces will fall into place later.”
The answer for me is to stick to the plan. If I fail to get the intended result against Stockfish I take my notes, try and learn something new from my mistakes and I move on. I do put a little star next to the flashcard so when I see the ending in another book or video series I will know I didn’t quite grasp it yet. Beyond that as Neal said, letting the knowledge float around in my subconscious for some time might mean that comprehension will come easier when I do see it again.
It’s Not About Knowledge - It’s About Practice
As we meandered through our conversation an important thing came up - something that has been alluded to throughout this article, something that was a major epiphany for me recently - the concept of knowledge vs skill. Something that is at the heart of this process.
Neal talked about some techniques he has to retain the knowledge as he acquires it.
“I think that writing stuff down is critical and that writing it down in different ways is critical. Every flashcard is me writing stuff down. And then what I find is that there is a lot of what I call nodding knowledge. Where people read a book and they are nodding, thinking: 'oh okay yeah I get what a minority attack is' and then they put the book away and they think they know it.”
I laughed a lot at that. Mostly because it was so relatable. The amount of times I have looked through an ending already this year nodding, believing I am some kind of intellectual sponge. I’ll nod and nod and do a sort of serious frown face before confidently heading into my match against Stockfish. By move three I am totally bamboozled and I find my head is nodding along the wrong axis.
“There is a lot of chess nodding I find. I think the difference between chess nodding and chess skill is that you have got to write words down either on paper or on a computer. You’ve got to draw diagrams and you’ve got to practise with real games. I think that if you are not going to do all that work, then you might as well just do what seven year olds do and just play a thousand blitz games a day, because if you are not willing to convert your knowledge to skill, then you are kidding yourself.”
This is what chess players need to hear. It's tough love, but we know it is true. We have all looked at something, thought it was easy and failed to apply it correctly in our games. I am able to convince myself I have acquired full and infallible minority attack skills from a YouTube series, the reality is that I've only successfully gotten my pawn to b5 about twice this year.
An important thing to remember is that this method allows those of us who learn best in this way to acquire knowledge and retain it effectively - especially compared to a method in which we chop and change topics on a weekly or even daily basis. But it must be stressed that knowledge isn’t the defining factor in becoming a good chess player. It’s the skill part that matters. And so it’s important that throughout this process, regardless of what topic it is you are handling, that you find a way to build an element of practice into your study in order to develop skill. Because it’s not the knowledge that sets chess players apart, but their ability to apply it.
Interestingly, Neal had the exact same epiphany himself as he sat towering over his seven-year-old opponent at a tournament.
“I’m six foot seven inches tall and I’ve got this kid who's like 60 pounds and four feet tall in front of me, who is probably going to beat me, and I think to myself: I know more than this kid. I have shoes and socks older than this kid. And so it’s not knowledge. I will not lose on knowledge. So then I thought why do adults lose to kids? I am convinced that kids have more skill and adults have more knowledge, and skill matters more.
And so the whole game is how do you get skill? When I did my tactics I did two and a half years of building 8000 flashcards. That wasn’t enough for me. I then spent a year and a half cycling through those 8000 cards many, many, many times until I could go from not being able to solve them, to solving them in a minute, to solving them in 12 seconds. Chess players underestimate the importance of practice. The best way I know to practise, is to be given problems that you work on, and dozens of examples of the same theme with slight variations until you're in a real game and you think: I’ve seen this before. And your subconscious will start to want to play moves before your conscious mind even knows why.”
So one way to get the practice in is with flashcards. But the other element is of course trying out all this knowledge in practical play.
“My advice to people is: when you are trying to practise tactics - try too often. Do too much. And then you're going to learn when you’re overextending. It’s the only way I think you really know what the boundaries are of when a tactic is safe or not. If you think it’ll maybe work, then try it. The worst thing that can happen is you lose a few points. And I am doing the same thing now with positional stuff. I was very materialistic, I would never sacrifice material unless I thought I was mating a king. But now I am throwing some pawns around, sacking some exchanges, I am throwing the h-pawn up the board. I’m just trying stuff because I think by trying and failing in real games you're going to say: okay, that worked (shockingly) or it didn’t work, but now I know more about why it didn’t work. I think it is through failure we learn more than through success. So if you're not experimenting and pushing the boundaries in your games (at least in the beginning), you're never going to really understand it. There will always be a knowing-doing gap. I’m a big believer that most adults know more than children about chess, but they do less than children. And that's why seven-year-olds kick our butts. So you have got to worry less about knowing and more about doing. And doing comes from practice.”
I put a note here to myself to come back to this quote if I ever slip back into placing an over-importance on my rating. Neal has such a healthy attitude to his online games. He shows a real freedom from his rating and that freedom allows him to practice his knowledge and turn it into skill. Brilliant advice.
Is Chess Really That Compartmentalised?
Let’s step back for a minute and imagine for a second someone did what Neal is proposing, but didn’t stop at the basic level. Imagine you only studied endgames and nothing else or openings and nothing else. Forever. What would happen? I think this is a useful thought experiment to answer the question of how interconnected chess is as a skill. Presumably in three to four years time, when I round up my basic endgame study, I won't be a 1200 out of the opening, a 1200 through the middlegame and a 2000 in the endgame? Surely some of the skills I will have learned in the endgame, will somewhat filter through to the rest of my play, right? But I am not so sure. I guess I might find out.
I remember the guy Neal told me about - the guy from SIlman’s book with his tricky openings. He made it to expert level without learning much about any of the other areas of the game, but presumably by getting enough of an advantage out of the opening that he could cling onto it often enough to hold his rating up at an expert level. So perhaps when it comes down to openings and endgames we can say that chess is in actual fact quite compartmentalised. But when it comes to strategy and tactics, those are clearly elements which are present throughout the opening, middlegame and endgame phase.
With this in mind (although I am content with my decision to begin this process with the endgame), it would probably be wiser to begin with tactics and strategy, as Neal has done, given its application in all phases of play.
Having said that, I want to clarify that my own approach is a bit different and whilst the bulk of my study time is being spent on endgames, I practise basic tactics daily. Tactics will never be a block for me, it will just always be humming along in the background. That might change, but I don’t think so.
I asked Neal if he had gotten a sense of how compartmentalised chess was by studying in this way. I told him that I had considered that if someone sat me down in a relatively equal endgame position at the end of these three years of endgame study, would I be able to beat someone much higher rated than myself? Or would my underlying tactical and strategic shortcomings factor too much for me to overcome strong opponents regularly, even in the phase of the game I had dedicated three to four years of my life to?
“I do think there are players who are like GM level endgame players, but 1800 level strategists. That happens. You see that. Where people will be stronger in one area than another. I know people who are 1600s who are like 2200 opening specialists, but then if someone plays something stupid and they get out the opening, then they get crushed. So there is risk in only building up one wall.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t bear too much thought. I don’t plan on building one wall. Like Neal, I want a house of equilibrium.
Tactics, Strategy, Endgame Openings... What Else?
I don’t exactly know why, perhaps it’s because of the players I am most intrigued by, or perhaps it's because I like the idea of mastering elements of chess that the majority do not. The fact that endgames are ‘boring’ is exactly what attracted me to them. If no-one else likes them, then I will force myself to love them and destroy my endgame-avoiding opponents, I thought. The same thing entered my mind about defence. No-one likes to defend. And when you don’t like something you tend to steer away from learning it. So defence was penciled in as a chunk for me to study sometime after strategy, but before death.
I asked Neal if he had considered elements beyond those in his current outline of tactics, strategy, endgames and openings, and his answer was yes. But not right now.
“I do think there are other areas of chess that I will need to master in order to build my brick house. A brick house has things like time management, resilience after a mistake, and defensive strategies. So I think there are, what I will call, more advanced areas of chess that will make the difference. I think those are the things that separate a 2100 player from a 2500 player, but generally don’t have as big an effect when you’re under 2000.
My time management is reasonable, I feel like I’ve got a lot of practices to help me be generally resilient which helps when I blunder and when I am trying to defend. But like a lot of people, it is a lot more comfortable for me to attack than defend, it’s a lot more comfortable for me when I have lots of space to play than when I don’t have a lot of space. So I think I have a lot to learn around those areas of defence, time management and resilience. For me I look at those as being more advanced chess concepts. The psychology of chess will be something that I work on when I am trying to build my brick house."
Break Down The Breakdown
Obviously to break down chess study this way says nothing about how you should study each element of chess. I think it is interesting to explore the different ways you could study each area.
Strategic chess knowledge can be acquired from a myriad of sources. You can watch videos, take lessons with a coach, do online courses, read books - either physically or using online tools like Chessable, and so on. The possibilities are endless. And that comes down to individual learning style.
How you study each area isn’t the focus of this article, only that each area is studied individually over a sustained period of time. And although the source from which you take your study materials will ultimately come down to the individual and probably isn’t all that important, I think the breakdown is.
When I started on this journey, I carefully considered how to 'break down the breakdown' so to speak. I have thus far chosen to go book to book. But you could conceivably go topic to topic.
I have picked up one book or video course, read or watched the whole thing going through all the themes and endings, and then picked up the next one. Yet I also considered reading all of the chapters on a single theme from all of the books I own at once, and doing it that way. For example, if you were studying strategy, you could read all the chapters or watch all the videos on the minority attack, then all the chapters and videos on outposts, and so on. And rather than spend a month going through a general strategy or endgame book, you could spend a whole month doing opposite colour bishop endgames or good bishop v bad knight positions.
My personal thoughts are that going subtopic to subtopic, rather than book to book, is the best way to learn - but it might bore you to death. I am three months into endgame theory now and I’ve already experienced a bit of fatigue in a particular subtopic (like knight v pawn) by the end of a single chapter of a single book. If I had to do five knight v pawn chapters back to back... well I probably just wouldn’t. And Neal is often quoted as saying that "the best study is the study you're actually going to do". Having said that, I do want to explore the idea further and may experiment with things in this regard. I have recently found myself somewhat obsessed with rook endgames. So perhaps to do things this way, it’s just about finding a way to love the subtopic.
You might not have to go one way or the other though. Curiously Neal will basically be doing both - so a hybrid system may be possible. Once he has gone through the topic of strategy (which for Neal has meant reading a mountain of basic and intermediate strategy books) he plans to write his own.
“My plan for my three years of strategy is the following - it is by topic, but it isn’t by what I’ll call subtopic. My first batch of books are what are considered to be basic general strategy books, so things like: Simple Chess, Winning Chess Strategies, Best Lessons of a Chess Coach, The Amateur's Mind - I did them all first. And then I did intermediate strategy books. I read How to Reassess Your Chess 4th Edition, I read Modern Chess Strategy by Packman, I read Find the RIght Plan by Karpov and then Grooten’s Chess Strategy for Club Players. And then I moved to pawn books - I read 5 or 6 pawn books and now I am doing 8 puzzle books. After all of this is done, I am going to switch my studies dramatically, when I am going to be doing three things. I am going to be working and drilling my positional flashcards. I am going to be playing through game collections - which I think of as kind of a capstone course. And the third thing is I am going to pull back out of all of my books (everything but the positional puzzle books) and I’m going to basically write my own strategy book. I’ve got about ten months to do this. I’m going to pull out all my basic and intermediate strategy books and pull the best juice out of all of them. I’m going to write a page or two on the minority attack, and then I’m going to do pawn sacrifices and then exchange sacrifices and then space.”
So in writing his strategy book, Neal will get the chance to go subtopic to subtopic. He’ll study each element of strategy from the books he has already read individually. This seems to me like a great way to do things. Not only does this avoid boredom when acquiring the knowledge the first time round, but it also adds an element of spaced repetition to the study by essentially covering the material twice - once book to book, and again topic to topic.
The Narrow Road
Aside from the breakdown of study by book or topic, there is another thing worth mentioning here. Neal points out an interesting choice we all have within this method. Whilst he is studying strategy, he is studying all of it. He understands the temptation to choose to study only the sections relevant to you and the openings you play, but thinks this might be suboptimal.
“I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be that guy who has a high rating and a narrow little path that they know really well. That’s a decision that you and others, everyone has to make around middlegame strategy. I’ve decided to be a middlegame strategy generalist, and so I am reading about all kinds of openings. I don’t ever play the open sicilian, and a third of the books I read seem to be open sicilian strategies which on some levels is totally pointless for me because I don’t play that, but I am just looking at it and soaking it all in, like it is all somehow related. Other people have a very narrow view. They think I’m only going to study middlegames of my openings. And I’m sure that is much more efficient in the short run, and it might be the right way to build a house of straw, but I think if you ever want to build a house of wood or brick, you have to be a generalist.
Someone could throw me into an open sicilian and I could find my way. I would know the key pawn breaks. I never play the benoni. I didn’t even know what it was. I know the benoni structure. I know the open sicilian structures. I know lots of structures I don’t play. But I feel like it all accumulates to confidence. And lower rated players have no idea how to play. So they move their pawns everywhere. So you get all kinds of structures in lower rated play anyway.”
So Neal points out this isn’t just about studying your game completely. It’s about studying the game completely. Although my lazy mind has reservations about this and as you probably know if you are reading this - chess is mental. Some of the positions you end up in are ridiculous. And whilst that might not happen to me so often as I claw my way up the rating ladder, I will find myself in strange positions. It is in these foreign lands that being a generalist in terms of strategy might see you through. Maybe you recognise some features of the position as being similar to a structure you have studied but one that never arises from any openings you play. And frankly you never know when you will change your mind. When I was running around like a madman from website to book last year, I skipped everything I read about IQP’s because I didn’t play d4. Guess what? Now I play d4. So yeah. I’m with Neal on this one. Better to know it all than to know only what you think you’ll need.
Changing Your Openings to Maximise Your Study
I asked Neal if he had considered switching his opening choices to suit his current focus of study. For example, did he play openings that led to more open games when he was studying tactics?
Basically the answer was no, although he thought it was an interesting idea. Obviously you can’t get the queens off early, or steer every game into a positional manoeuvring game or a chaotic tactical mess, but you can increase the probability of those things happening through your opening choices so I wonder if it is worth considering.
“I do find with my e4 white play, those games tend to be more open and they are more tactical, and more about kill shots in the middlegame. If I am playing black against d4 then those games tend to be more positional and more likely to go to the endgame. I find if you play enough chess you're going to get lots of the four categories coming up in your games.”
So by the sounds of things Neal has a repertoire that has him playing a broad spectrum of games anyway. So this is another approach.
This is Only the Beginning
If you follow Neal on twitter and if you have heard him interviewed on the many wonderful chess podcasts out there, you will have heard him say he is mastering basic tactics, then basic strategy, basic endgames. He is building his house of wood but what comes after is a house of bricks and after that a house of stone.
I asked this question fearing that I already knew the answer. Once Neal has completed his ten years he spends mastering the basics, what comes next? Another decade of mastering the advanced topics?
“I think I meandered around for my first six or seven years in chess and somehow built up a straw house through that meandering without really having a plan. I think if I knew what I was doing I could have probably done it in two years, but I didn’t know what I was doing so I ended up wasting a lot of time.
Now I am very focused and I think I will have my stick house built in ten years. I think there are three levels I have yet to achieve. There’s mastering basics - and I am convinced that most people under 2000 (either USCF or FIDE) have not mastered the basics of all four things. I think that they have fundamental flaws and I see those in games. So, to me, it may sound very simple to master the basics but most people don’t do it. So think of that as getting you somewhere around 1800-2000. That's what mastering the basics - my wood house - will get me.
And then I plan to master the intermediate level in all four areas. So I’ll play this game again. Frankly I have a lot of books that are just too challenging for me that are going to become my intermediate challenges. Things like the Agaard books and maybe the Gelfand books. And some advanced tactics books, which I would define as more intermediate level stuff. And that’s going to get you from say 1900ish to maybe 22-2300ish.
Then (and I’ll probably die before this happens) but if I ever do build the brick house, there could be another decade where you are trying to go higher. And I think of IM’s and GM’s (which I’ll probably never reach - because I’ll be dead before this happens) they’re doing even more advanced stuff.
So I think of this as iterating, continuing to get better.”
I considered Neal’s answer after our interview and the implications for me if I am to continue to follow this method. It would mean I would complete this cycle at the age of 41. It makes me feel the weight of my own mortality. It gives me a sudden sense of vertigo. And I find myself considering all the things I won’t be able to do in life.
Whilst Neal may have sent me into a premature midlife crisis, the reality of this journey was not lost on me. I have a sort of aim to hit 2000 by the time I am forty. That milestone will hopefully come after having played and practised chess for ten years. And if my eventual goal is to be a master, I also know that 2000 is probably only the halfway point. So it makes sense that adding another decade (this time studying advanced versions of the same topics) will be necessary and that will take me up to the age of 51. It’s a sobering thought. And it’s the unfortunate reality facing many adult improvers. Time. It’s something we struggle to find on a daily basis with our jobs and kids and everything in between. But it’s not something we often think about long term. We don’t often consider if we have enough of it left before our minds give out on our ability to learn. Nor do we consider if we can achieve our goals before we are dead. It’s a sobering thought. And one that has me staring down the barrel of a salad for lunch and a short run afterwards.
Who is This Study Method For?
So is this long term approach of breaking down the elements of chess for you? I want to leave you with an answer to this question. If you have read this far and the idea of it appeals to you, but you don’t know why this way is better than any others then let me offer you Neal’s reasoning.
For him it’s about the way he learns. It takes time for things to sink in, but more importantly - it takes practice.
“The other thing I always say to people is do whatever works for you. I’m not saying my way is better than anyone else's way. I just know for myself, I see these people who are like: one day I am going to do endgames and then the next day I do strategy, and they are running around putting a brick on each wall and hoping it all works out.
I find that I don’t learn if I have half an hour per week or an hour a week, I might as well spend zero on it. I need to spend hours on one thing - I am working through a positional sacrifice book and I’ll put 30-40 hours into it. And that's what it takes me. It's got to be all focused. If it took me a year to read that (book) there is no way it would stick with me. But if I’m in it for a couple of hours, 2-3 hours, everyday, for several weeks, then it’s much more likely to stick.”
And I would echo what Neal says here. I am already a good bit into the writing of my next Adult Beginner Diary post in which I discuss my recent experience with rook v rook and pawn endings. I know that I would never understand these endings if I only did them on Mondays. The study needs to be focused for me too if I am really going to get the concepts to stick in my mind. Beginning this process has reiterated for me that this is the way I learn best. So this way is for me and only you will know if that is true for you as well.
To close I asked Neal if he had any advice for anyone who had read the article to this point and had decided that this was the way forward for them. And his answer wasn’t so clear cut. This method works for Neal. It is working for me so far. But according to Neal whether this method works for you or not is less important than daily study habits.
“I would say that life is a journey. It’s a long multi-year journey. Chess I look at the same way. Give yourself a lot of grace as you go through whatever training method you have and I would find something that works for you. If you can do things that motivate you to do a little bit of chess everyday then that is more important than your method. The biggest change in my life was deciding that I am going to do a little bit of chess study everyday. Once I decided that, what I did was not as important. Because if I am doing it everyday then it’s going to help me.
Don’t be disappointed with yourself if you iterate. If you think something is going to take a year and it takes two, that's okay. If you decide to change your focus - all of that is okay. I think consistency wins. And so that would be my recommendation - regardless of process.”
Conclusion
Breaking chess down into its constituent elements and studying each individually over a sustained period is an interesting way to go about things. It allows you to focus fully on one topic at a time and achieve a fuller understanding of it before moving on. The approach can make you less likely to have glaring gaps or weaknesses in your play.
The approach is a long term one. That means you need a way to retain the knowledge you have gained when you move on, because you won’t be coming back to that topic for some time. Some form of revision or practice is required to retain the knowledge and build it as skill when you move on. That could come in the form of playing games, drilling against a computer or reviewing flashcards online or offline.
A long term mindset is required to go along with this program too - your rating may not shift much depending on what you are currently studying. As Neal said there are a lot of things you can get good at in chess that won’t reflect in your rating right away.
And finally because a certain area might be years in your future, it’s not illegal to take a day or a week off from your chosen area to shore up a glaring weakness or understand something that isn’t part of your main area of focus.
You can build in as much flexibility to the method as you want. How you break down the chess elements is your choice and there are much more options than that of just tactics, strategy, endgames and openings. The key for me is that this method gets you deep into the topic itself and I know for myself that I need that to grasp something fully - and not just nod to myself thinking I do!
Whether it is for you or not, I think there is a lot to be taken from the ideas presented by the method and from the wise words of Neal Bruce that apply beyond the four walls of his training program from his attitude to rating, to his consistent daily study habits and general positive outlook.
I want to close by sharing a story Neal told towards the end of our conversation about a beautiful game he had played online. One he posted to his Twitter page with pride. He talked about how it ended in a mating attack that he didn’t need to think about. He spoke about how it all just came to him as if his subconscious was telling him where the pieces should go. Neal obviously works tremendously hard on his chess, and having the discipline and trust to continue in his process is admirable. You can see it is all worth it for him when he describes that game to me. That’s his reward. That is what it is all for.
“I posted a game recently on twitter that I was really proud of where I didn’t even think it through - I’ll put the knight there, put the queen there, sacrifice this bishop, it’s all going to work out. That’s what professionals can do, they can just play off of what they call intuition. I call it subconscious skill. It’s where you know it because of practice - pattern recognition - before your brain can fully consciously explain it to someone else - that is what I am working on right now.
I’ve played games in the last year that are more beautiful than I ever thought I could play, and it doesn’t happen everyday, it doesn’t happen every month, but occasionally it happens and it’s a hopeful sign to me that I am actually getting better at chess. That I can create a beautiful game.
When you play through these master games, you hope someday to be able to create a piece of art like that. And when I occasionally feel proud of a game like that, it pushes me to keep going.”
Thanks for reading.
To listen to the audio recording of my interview with Neal in full, sign up to my Patreon page at the Major Piece Tier. Any support there at all is greatly appreciated.
Neal is an active and founding member of the Chesspunks community on Twitter, you can follow his progress on his Twitter page.
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