A guide by a mighty 1200 rated player for breaking through plateaus

After finally reclaiming my amazing 1200 elo again, I've decided to write a guide on how to achieve chess mastery and break through plateaus. I decided to write this quickly before my rating drops again below 1200. Because honestly, who is more authorized to write a chess guide than a 1200 player? (Alert for anyone who isn't familiar with elo: This is self deprecating humour).

On a more a serious note, the intention of this post is to share my thought process for how I'm planning to improve and open a discussion for feedback. I consider it a guide for myself that needs to be reviewed by the experts. Also, I found it easier to present some of these points as recommendations rather than questions, so feel free to point out any mistakes.

One issue that may compromise all of the recommendations that will be mentioned here is running low on time during the game. Try to avoid that by playing longer time controls and giving yourself room to learn.

First, let's start with the fact that given a starting position, the engines will state that the position is almost equal. If we try to set a goal for each move, assuming that there is no forcing checkmate line, then our goal could be to just avoid reaching a worse position. Reaching a slightly worse position is inevitable for human players as they can't play with 100% accuracy all the time, so the focus should be on avoiding positions that are notably worse.

Note that the wording there was a bit counterintuitive, we don't say that we want to achieve a better position, but rather avoid having a worse position. Why is that? We state it that way because it will pave the road for our next section. So let's take an example to make sense of this wording. Let's say that your opponent hangs a queen. This immediately improves your position, even before you respond to the blunder, because you have the ability to capture it and gain material. If you miss that blunder by the opponent and play some developing move instead, your position immediately becomes worse, because the opponent gets a chance to save their queen. To generalize this, playing any move other than the best move makes your position worse. And saying it in different terms, maintaining your position evaluation is synonyms with playing the best move. That's why I see that avoiding worse positions makes sense as a goal.

Now we will state two common ways for a human player to reach a notably worse position.

1. Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind are blunders. These are the single moves that make your position much worse. You can also count mistakes in. Blunders are characterized by sharp changes in the evaluation graph but not necessarily a low accuracy.

2. The second way to reach a much worse position is to play too many moves that are good but not the best. This may accumulate a disadvantage that eventually equates blundering a piece. When you look at the evaluation graph of a game where this occurs, you will not see sharp changes to reach that position, but rather a gradual decline/incline until the position becomes certainly losing. This occurs frequently in grandmaster games as they blunder much less than us.

The key for improvement at our level is to start by identifying which of the above areas impact your games the most. I assume that two players can vary significantly in their average accuracy while both being stuck at the same elo, because they also may vary significantly in how often they blunder. One may be a more accurate player who hangs a queen every some games, and the other may be less accurate but blunders much less frequently. Try to review your last 20 rated games at a given time control and find the cause for reaching worse positions. Is it usually blunders or sequences of inaccurate moves? For the blunders, classify them into two categories - blindness blunders such as leaving a piece hanging and the slightly deeper calculation blunders where you walk into a tactic such as pinning yourself or allowing a skewer. Also try to identify the section of the game where you most frequently play into worse positions (opening, middle game and endgame).

After identifying the major cause, here is a summary of what each type of player should focus on. I will expand on each one later in the post.

- Players who play inaccurately should adopt a more principled style.

- Players who blunder frequently should adopt a more systematic style to avoid the shallow blunders and do puzzles frequently to avoid the deeper calculation blunder.

Note that these two styles are not exclusive, and you should aim for both, but with more focus on the side that you're lacking in more.

Adopting a more principled style will improve your accuracy. From my observation while analyzing games with an engine, the best moves are usually the ones that look principled, except where deeper calculation proves otherwise. Actually, the Stockfish evaluation function relies partly on common chess principles that are listed here  http://rin.io/chess-engine. Read the section that starts with "The main rules that govern the evaluation of position in Stockfish are as follows." I link to this article specifically because I find it intriguing that there is a place for the basic principles in a chess engine even with all the calculation prowess computers have. You should Google more resources on chess principles as the linked rules don't cover everything for human players (connecting the rooks, trading off your bad pieces, taking control over the open files, king mobility, pawn breaks, etc...).

While the above will improve your accuracy, it won't help you reduce your blunders. A move that looks principled such as castling early may line up your queen and king on the same diagonal for a deadly pin by your opponent's bishop. That's where you need to follow a more systematic style. Some online coaches teach their students useful checklists to go through on before you play a move and after your opponent plays theirs. The most famous of which is "Always look for checks, captures and attacks". I bet an arm and a leg that if I manage to force myself to follow this rule, I should easily gain around 200 elo. After these 3 validations, I also have recently added another two points to my checklist that are proving to be useful sometimes.

- Before playing any move, just ask yourself if it's a blunder. Do this before every single move except if you're playing a prepared line or if you're really low on time.
- After your opponent plays a move, always ask yourself if it was a blunder, with similar exceptions to what is mentioned above.

Remember that most players can usually spot tactics in puzzles that they can't spot in games just because they believe that there must be a hidden tactic in the puzzle while lacking that belief during the game.

For the deeper blunders that require multiple moves of calculation to be avoided, the most promising approach is to solve puzzles daily. They can improve your calculation and imprint the common tactical patterns into your memory so you can access them faster during the games and even build more layers of understanding on top of them.

Finally, a thought on opening theory. Remember that at our level, any advantage obtained from a perfect opening is most likely negligible compared to the advantages and disadvantages that we will gain from blunders and inaccuracies after the first few moves. Opening theory is still good at that level, but probably just as an excercise on chess principles and tactics, but there are more direct approaches to study the principles and the tactics. If you play into bad positions in the opening frequently at that level, it most likely means that your calculation and principles need some focus instead of learning more theory.