Good advice. Both those series are highly instructive.
Get Good -- Listen to the Masters Think
Sort:
Jun 28, 2022
0
#3
Yes, this was my comment on another post. Bartholomew's videos were genuinely 'revolutionary' when I fist stumbled upon them, and I credit a lot of my improvement early on to those videos. (I also hired John as a coach for approximately six months thereafter!). I believe he was also the first to start a series of this kind on Youtube. Highly instructive, and trying to formalise my 'thought process' to be somewhat structured, looking for weaknesses, etc - helped me a lot.
Naroditsky improves upon that idea by playing longer rapid games and doing a significant post-game analysis, which includes looping in other historic games that share the same themes and patterns that he recognises from the speedrun games, and because he records his games from a live stream, he also responds to a lot of the beginner questions we all think of, such as "Why there and not here", "Why that move", etc - so again, is very instructive.
No amount of watching videos is a substitute for real world practice though, so in addition to these great resources, make sure you are constantly drilling tactical puzzles, endgame exercises and analysing your own games in a similar fashion!
Great way to improve -- listen to chess masters think out loud.
John Bartholomew's "Climbing the Rating Ladder" series
GM Daniel Naroditsky's "Chess Speed Run" series
One of the comments in another thread tipped me off to the above resources, here's the comment, to which I agree.
I am in my 30s. Started playing chess 3 years ago - and bottomed out around 650 after a month of playing online. I'm now over 2000 - which isn't that high in the grand scheme of things, but not too bad considering where I started and how recent that was. Point is, I wouldn't put too much weight on age being a determining factor in your chess improvement! It's mostly the amount of serious time you can commit to, for adult learners.
If you can find the time to commit an hour or two to chess every day - an expert level is definitely within realistic reach within a few years. It's just about prioritizing your study to make for the best use of your time.
For me, it was Tactics (I've did 20,000+ puzzles), Endgames, Game Analysis and middle game planning - largely in that order. Too many people waste valuable hours learning things that are abstract or not that common. Those areas should give you the best bang for buck.
I'd also highly recommend "John Bartholomew's Climbing the Rating Ladder" series on youtube, as well as Daniel Naroditsky's chess speed run series. Both are very insightful and I improved from 1100-1200 over two days just by changing my 'thought process' to what I was seeing in those videos back when I was newer to the game.