Avoid these 3 mistakes when studying chess!

I recently played an OTB rapid game that really highlighted three mistakes I’ve been making when studying chess. Here are the mistakes and how to avoid making them yourself!

Mistake 1: Doing ‘lazy’ analysis

In one of the lines I play against the Sicilian, I leave my b-pawn hanging. This has worried me in the past, and after more games than I care to admit, I finally booted up Stockfish to see what would happen if my opponent did capture on b2 in the position below.

The position after 13...d6

While it turns out that I’m still winning even after 14.exd6 Rxb3 (try find the moves yourself in the puzzle below), it was quite stressful and I used up a lot of time at the board to find 14.Qc3 to keep the advantage. All of that stress and time usage could have been avoided if I’d just analysed the position after 13.Bb3 during my at-home analysis, instead of looking at one move and assuming I understood the position and all its threats.

Black has just played 14... Rxb3 - how should white respond?

How to analyze better?

When looking at critical variations, it’s important to question your own assumptions about the position by playing through lines and checking errors in your assumptions. Best practice would be to come up with variations on your own before checking with an engine, but at the very least you should be playing through engine lines and testing moves that make sense to you but aren’t suggested by the engine (so you can see where you’re going wrong).

A great way to check if you can actually win that winning position is to play it out yourself against a training partner or against the strongest version of Stockfish, and then analyse the game afterwards to see how you could have improved on your play if you let the advantage slip.

You can also turn the tables and play with the losing side against Stockfish/your training partner - this is a great way to come up with what you think is the best defence and to see how Stockfish/your training partner manages to keep their advantage (or doesn’t - and then you can see what they could have done better). 

After doing this a few times you should have a really good idea of what you should be doing as the winning side and of what options your opponent has for defence, and it’ll be difficult for them to surprise you (or make you use up much time) over the board!

Mistake 2: Being lazy when doing puzzles

Since I often do chess.com puzzles for fun (my puzzle rush addiction is a real problem), I often skip straight to the next puzzle once I’ve gotten the current puzzle right, even if I don’t completely understand why it’s winning or if I know I’d have trouble converting the endgame. After I had to give up one of my extra rooks to avoid stalemating my opponent, I reached this position which is similar to a lot I see in puzzle rush:

White to move and win:

Puzzle Rush stops here and you’ve essentially ‘won’. But in real chess games you can’t actually tell your opponent ‘you resign now’ (unless you're Mr Shaibel) and you still have to win the game. And I had to spend what I felt was an embarrassing amount of time working out how to win the game from this point - fortunately I still had the time left on my clock to figure it out, but if I’d only had a minute on my clock with no increment I wouldn’t have been confident in my winning chances at all.

How to do puzzles better?

You should always be analysing and trying to understand puzzles that you get wrong (and you should also be trying to calculate the puzzles’ solutions before you make your first move - but that’s a topic for another blog!). But you should also be reviewing puzzles that you get right and that you either don’t understand or where you’re not confident you’d be able to win the end position in a bullet game.

You can analyse the position as suggested above, and practice it against Stockfish or a training partner (sometimes training partners are better than Stockfish for endgames, since Stockfish sometimes puts up a weak defense when it sees that every move is losing).

Mistake 3: Not knowing your endgames

There are some endgames you should just know (Silman’s Complete Endgame Course is great as a rough guide for what you should know at different rating levels). At my level, I should know Q vs pawn on the 7th rank, and it’s something I’ve covered before (I think both in an endgame book and in Yusupov’s first orange book) - I did battle with it though, so I’ve never been super confident in it and I haven’t practised it for a few years. And since a lot of my online blitz and bullet games never reach an endgame, I can’t even recall when last I had to play a queen vs pawn endgame.

Part of the reason I was stressed and had to use so much time calculating how to win the position we previously discussed was because I really didn’t want to allow the pawn to move forward to get into a Q vs pawn on the 7th position, even though I knew the position should theoretically be winning. If I’d known my endgame theory I could have just marched my king forward and then stopped the pawn from promoting once it got to the 7th.

Here the best moves according to Stockfish are 44.Kb3, 44.Kb4, and 44.Qf4, all of which allow black's pawn to advance.

How to know your endgames?

Step one would be, of course, to learn the technique in the endgame position you want to know. You can study a book or use online resources like Chess.com’s Endgames trainer or various YouTube videos to learn the method (I think this is a more efficient use of time than trying to figure out the position yourself or using an engine to show you the best moves, which might not make the technique clear). Step two would be to practice the technique yourself until you feel confident that you understand and can perform it quickly under time pressure in an actual game.

And finally, step three is to review or practice your endgames regularly, especially if you play a lot of fast chess and don’t get to a lot of endgames where you can check if you can still correctly implement the endgame theory you learnt. How frequently you do this will depend on you - for example, I don’t need to practice how to checkmate with a queen or how to win a simple king and pawn endgame, but a less experienced chess player may need to review these concepts quite frequently.

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I hope you can use the tips above to improve your at-home preparation so you have a much more enjoyable time when you play rated games OTB or online! I’m going to try be more thorough in my own preparation too, so I can avoid unnecessary stress during my OTB games in future. You can watch the full game I played below (which includes some other mistakes I made), and you can follow my blog/Twitch/YouTube channel for more chess improvement content. Thanks for reading!