Mage’s Guide To Improvement
Introduction
So many people ask as beginners, “How do I improve?” Or “Why can’t I Improve when I’m trying to?” And many variations of this, but today I am writing this blog to try my best to answer this age old question!
Dedication
The first thing you have to figure out when you are improving is how much time you are willing to spend on improving, through means of studying and of playing games. If you do not have any or enough time set aside to actually study and improve you will probably be struggling for much longer then you need to. My recommendation is to set aside at least half an hour a day or at least a few days a week and keep to this schedule.
I assume you have paused and made some time in your day for chess, if so that’s great! Now we can get to the important parts: what you use with that time. Generally you want to have a 50/50 split of playing games seriously and studying, but if you struggling in your current rating section, you might want to study a bit more and if your rating graph is going straight up than you probably want to keep playing until you hit your real rating.
Games
When your trying to improve You want to have time in your games, so at the very least 10+0 if your don’t have much time, but much more preferably 15+10 and 30+20 so that you can think about your moves and about everything on the board. Playing longer time controls requires you to have some patience and for you to use your time wisely.
Analysis
Taking the game seriously while your playing it is important, but it is even more important to go over your whole game after you’ve played it and see where you went wrong or what you did right. When analysing a game DON’T use an engine (like stockfish or game review); A lot of people only use an engine when looking over a game to see where they went wrong but this doesn’t help you all, since your only looking at computer lines and using it as life support instead of a tool.
Whenever your going over the game, first turn off all the engine help and make notes of where you think you went wrong and lines that look interesting instead. Write your thought process for why you did that move and use annotations if you think you’ve had a particularly good or bad move. Once you’ve done all of that (spending up to half an hour and more) when your sure you’ve done the best you can analysing the game, you can check over with the engine and see how closely your thoughts align with its and if your calculations were on the right track or if they were askew. Keep all of your analysed games in a library of sort so that you can look back on them later if ever needed. 
Studying
Studying is the next thing you do after or before your games, or you use the whole day depending on how much time you have or how you are feeling. Studying helps you learn new concepts for everything from how to get out the opening safely to improving your calculations beyond what seemed possible before to Marvellous endgame compositions. Studying when done correctly stretches your mind out of your comfort zone, forcing you to learn more and more about concepts that you haven’t quite understood before and cementing this new information into your head.
One of the most effective ways to study for many people is chess books: when studied properly you can gain several hundred rating which would otherwise take two or three times as long to achieve, definitely look up some chess books to purchase! (my recommendations go to how to reassess your chess 4th edition by Jeremy silman and learn from your chess mistakes by Chris baker) (please please please avoid the dvoretsky endgame manual as a beginner, usually masters only reference this book and usually haven’t even read it)
Another effective way to study is puzzles or chess compositions, putting you directly into the positions and asking you to solve them. To understand a puzzle you actually have to spend the time to calculated through all of the lines and see why and whether they work or not, pointing out the key points to yourself. Most people will just toss through dozens of puzzles in an hour and won’t learn as much as they can in that period, but patience is vital in every part of chess. Compositions force the reader to calculate all of it out as they are more challenging and show rarer concepts, but also hold the power to push your calculation skills.
The last thing in the list would be videos and blogs, which tend to be something much more passive for learning as your just taking in what’s there and not thinking deeper into the situation. It’s effective for some people but you have to actually take notes on the subject to best remember it. Videos and blogs can help significantly at beginner levels though, as the information isn’t complex to digest and gets to the point.
Ending/TL;DR
In your chess journey you will end up using a combination of all of these to improve; you have to figure out which of these helps you the best according to your needs and time constraints. If your sticking with chess.com I would highly recommend the diamond membership to have access to everything you need aside from books.
I hope that something, somewhere in this blog was helpful to you, but if you just skipped to the end then here’s a tl;dr
- Figure out how much time you set aside every day
- Playing rapid or classical games w/increment
- taking the game seriously and pushing your calculation
- analyse your games thoroughly WITHOUT engine, annotate and add notes!
- Study study study! Studying takes up about half of your chess time when doing so effectively
- Chess books are best, followed by puzzles and lastly videos/blogs
- Rinse, repeat, see what works and keep doing it!
[notes]
1. How to reassess your chess by Jeremy Silman 4th edition and learn from your chess mistakes by Chris Baker I recommend to anyone looking for beginner intermediate books
Conclusion
Thank you for reading and have a great rest of your day! Follow Christina at https://www.twitch.tv/thechessbae who inspired me to write this. If you want educational content check out https://www.twitch.tv/lefonghua and support him if you can!
