The Method: How to Study Chess So It Actually Improves Your Play

Two questions I’ve been asked more than any others are: what to study and how to study. The first one is easy to answer. Openings, tactics, endgames, strategy - pick your passion.

The second one is harder, and it’s where most improvers quietly waste years.

The core problem is not a lack of material. It’s that most study is passive: reading annotations, watching videos, skimming engine lines, solving puzzles by guessing, playing blitz until the hand moves but the mind doesn’t. You accumulate information, but your decision-making doesn’t change.

What follows is a practical way to make study active. It’s a training approach you can apply to games, puzzles, and even online chess.

1) Game Study: Calibration of Intuition

Most players “study games” by watching a master play moves and nodding along. That’s entertainment. Sometimes can be education. But it doesn’t train the thing that matters: choosing moves under the pressure of a tournament game.

This is what turns game study into training: you repeatedly put yourself in the decision-making seat until you begin to feel why one move fits better than another.

Why I recommend Capablanca

Many great players are hard to copy. You watch their games and think: “I would never find that.” That can still be inspiring - but it’s not the best starting point for building intuition.

Capablanca is different. His moves are often so clean and natural that you catch yourself thinking: “I can play like that.” That reaction is valuable because it gives you the motivation to learn more how to actually do it.

2) Puzzle Training: No Guessing, No Timer, No Self-Deception

Puzzles are the easiest place to lie to yourself.

Online puzzle trainers encourage the exact behavior you should avoid:

• playing fast,

• clicking moves,

• guessing,

• and treating the timer as the point.

Real calculation doesn’t look like that. In a tournament game, when you commit to a tactical decision, you need to be sure - or you can easily lose.

So here’s the rule that matters:

Solve puzzles as if you were playing a tournament game.

• Don’t move the pieces.

• Turn off the timer (you need quality first, speed will come later)

• Calculate until you can evaluate the final position with confidence.

• Then commit.

If your level is lower, use easier puzzles. The point is not difficulty. The point is honesty.

The “video vs photograph” test

Stronger players see positions as something alive. The moment they look, they see candidate moves and lines start running. It’s like switching an engine on: moves appear immediately.

Weaker players often see a still image first - like a photograph. The mind is “on,” but nothing moves for a while.

Correct puzzle work pushes you from photograph to video. That’s not a metaphor. It’s the practical goal of calculation training.

3) Online Chess: A Tool That Can Train the Worst Habit

Online chess is a blessing: you can start a game in seconds. However, used without control, it trains two terrible habits:

• playing fast,

• not thinking.

It can become “numb clicking” - playing the first move you see, telling yourself it’s intuition, when it’s really just impatience. The hand learns speed, but the brain learns laziness.

If you want online chess to help, you need a rule set.

Simple discipline rules that actually work

• Set a time limit before you start. When time is up, you stop. No “one more game.”

• Decide the purpose of the session in advance:
  opening practice, calculation focus, endgame technique, whatever you're training.

• Keep sessions short. Online play should support your study, not replace it.

If you’re serious about improvement, most of your progress comes from study, and your best games should be played over the board.

If You Want the Full Protocols

I wrote out the complete training protocols - step-by-step - for all three parts (game study, puzzle work, online discipline) in a downloadable guide called The Method: A Practical Guide to Chess Improvement, together with a downloadable PGN database covering the last three World Championship matches, two of which I visited (commented by me).

If you’d like the full write-up, it’s here: alexcolovic.com/themethod.

Whether you buy it or not, the key idea in this post is simple:
turn passive study into active decision-making practice. That’s where chess improvement actually comes from.