The Key to Chess Improvement Practice

It goes without saying that in order to improve you have to play ("make") better moves. But most players striving to improve don't think about the fact that there are two distinctly different ways to play better moves. One either has to:

• Find better moves via skills:
  1. Analysis
  2. Evaluation
  3. Time Management & Criticality Assessment,
  4. Stamina, Consistency, Concentration, Coachability, etc or
• Memorize/Recognize better moves via knowledge:
  1. Learning opening patterns
  2. Learning endgame patterns
  3. Learning tactical patterns
  4. Learning and understanding how to apply principles

I wrote an award-winning video on this idea, The Ways to Make Better Chess Moves.

One of the key take-aways from this information is that while practice in chess does not make perfect, it does make better. I think most readers understand how to increase their chess knowledge: you can get opening patterns from a book, video, or here on Chess.com via their Explorer database. Most everyone understands the importance of increasing their tactical pattern recognition by doing repetitious tactical puzzles, starting with the easiest ones that occur frequently and need to be not just solved, but recognized (e.g. "The Woodpecker Method" or de la Maza's The Seven Circles).

But it is in the realm of increasing your skills like analysis and evaluation where most aspiring improvers fall short.  One obvious and common way to practice these skills are to play! Here on Chess.com the buttons to find quick opponents are mostly fast games with short increments. Consider even the "slower" 15 10 option - assuming 40 moves that's 15x60 + 10*40 = 1300 seconds for the game. In a 40 move game that's only a little more than 30 seconds per move.  If you have 3-4 reasonable candidate moves on most moves, you have very little time to find them, analyze them, and compare them - the very skills it takes to analyze and evaluate better.  Compare the Chess.com "button" time controls to the 30 minute per player minimum that the US Chess Federation requires to have a game rated as a slow game - the ratings that are required to give out titles like "Expert" and "Master". And most USCF slow games are played much slower than 30 minutes per side; our Main Line Chess Club, for example, plays weekly rated 65 10 games.

So while faster time controls are definitely fun and give a player the opportunity to learn many openings (assuming they use Explorer after each game) and practice quick tactical recognition, these games are by far not the best practice for improving the important and necessary analytical and evaluation skills that help one improve the most.  I discuss this more in detail in my video Intermediate Time Controls Can Hinder Improvement.

What's the bottom line? It's OK to play the faster time controls but doing so exclusively is not the best way to practice for improvement. I suggest at least including some regular games at time controls of 30 5 or slower (you always want to play slow games with an increment). You might have to use the Chess.com "Custom" time control setting to get these games instead of hitting a pre-set time button or joining a slow chess league, but the extra effort will be worth it. I have a web page on helping those who wish to do this: Finding Slow Chess Online. Happy Hunting!

PS: For non-playing improvement you can't do better than analyzing with strong players! There is much more on improvement via my Youtube channel www.youtube.com/c/danheismanchess, my Chess Tip of the Day www.twitter.com/danheisman, and my website www.danheisman.com .