The art of mastering chess - a complete guide

Nice stuff guys! gg wp. yea ur right binary guy i should have said which knight goes to e4. just for your info I posted this whole line out of my head too, its not an exercise from a book or something. the reason why i came up with this exercise is the fun fact that i had this exact mate in at least 10 blitz games with white against weaker opposition. it just shows some typical attacking ideas in the queensgambit if your opponent misplays the opening.

Hello chessplayers,

Brah Brahsen here, I hope you´re all doing good. This is gonna be a complete guide for chess improvement, which might be especially useful for the lower rated players willing to improve their game. I am not sure if I will be able to put in everything I wanna say about this topic in one post so probably this will not be the last thread about it by me. What I am trying to show you in this post is what you need in order to become a master at chess and what distinguishs those masters from the average player.

Let me start with a short comparison of the different playing strengths. Dont get offended by some of the things I might say about the lower rated players, I have been there myself and the best you can do is to just admit that you are not good at the game yet but are willing to change that. Also note that this is just a general comparison based on my experiences with the different rating strengths.

Beginner level:

-0 game understanding

-full randomness in their games

-no opening knowledge, no tactical skills

-no idea how to win a chess game

-playing for simple tricks, playing "hope chess"

-no calculation ability

Intermediate level:

-some basic opening knowledge, mostly just systems or very simple lines like the Italian game

-they know some tactical motifs and few basic endgames

-they have no conception of positional chess or chess strategy

-they are often clueless and dont know what to do (middlegame)

-only superficial ideas behind their moves

-bad calculation skills

Advanced level:

-decent opening knowledge about the openings they play, still not very in depth and often caught offguard in specific opening lines

-okayish tactical skills, although still enough oversights

-knowledge about endgames and strategy existent

-they understand how to make a plan and what to do after the opening phase but oftentimes their plans are not the best because of lacking strategical understanding

-they have ideas behind their moves

-decent calculation skills, although their lines are oftentimes flawed

Expert level:

-good opening knowledge and understanding about their opening lines, not often caught offguard. still room for in depth inprovement though.

-good tactical skills, few oversights if not in time trouble, sometimes they see tactics that even masters did not see. there is not too much to improve in that part of the game.

-good knowledge about endgames

-good calculation skills, they can see many moves ahead without big mistakes in their lines

- good understanding about how to make a plan and what to do in the middlegame, they can find plans in most structures although not on the level of master players

-they dont make moves without a idea or intention behind them, mostly they are playing decent and understandable moves, not always the best though.

Master level:

- complete, versatile opening repertoire

- excellent tactical skills, tactical oversights extremly rare

- good-excellent endgame knowledge

- excellent calculation skills

- excellent middlegame understanding, they have huge knowledge about structures and middlegame plans

- the moves generally have a deeper idea behind them

I should mention too that in the master level range there are huge differences too of course. The difference between a Fide master and a super GM is enormous.

Now that you know the general skill level at each rating division it is time to concentrate on what to do to climb the ladder up to the master level. Chess masters have a huge game understanding which means they can say a lot of things about every type of position and every type of structure because they have experience and knowledge about them. He knows where to put his pieces, what matters in the position, what his opponent is trying to do and how he can proceed in the game in order to win. This massive chess understanding comes over time and is a product of playing many, many long time control games, analysing them, analysing openings and their specific pawn structures to understand what is possible for both sides in that structure and looking at high quality master games to learn from them. By doing all these things you can achieve the same results. Besides the chess understanding there is also the part which you could describe as Intuition. Why is it that the best long time control players are usually also the best blitz players? Because their intuition is super sharp. It tells them the best moves without having to think and calculate a lot. What is intuition? It is basically a product of all the theoretical knowledge and patterns you know about chess. This includes tactics, endgame knowledge and so on and so forth. They have seen so many different patterns and motifs that their intuition tells them when they see a similar position that that move and that move has to be considered because it worked in a similar position.

The skills that you need to practise to strengthen your chess intuition are these :

-tactics

-endgames

-middlegame plans/strategy

-calculation skills

Besides that there is also the opening part. In order to become a master player you need to build a excellent opening repertoire.

Lets look at how to practise and improve all these things starting with the opening repertoire. Your ultimate goal for the opening phase has to be the following: With black you wanna try to get a equal position which is not dead dry and still provides you winning chances. Against good opponents it will be impossible to get a advantage out of the opening with black so you generally aim for a dynamically equal position which offers you chances to outplay your opponent which is important if you are facing weaker opponents that you dont want to draw against. With white your aim is to get a slight advantage but at least a equal position. Even more as with black you really want to have winning chances with white out of your opening. These aims in mind you buy several opening books and/or buy a program like chessbase which has a opening book integrated where you can see all possible moves in different opening positions. With the help of these books you can build yourself a strong opening repertoire together completely based on your likings. You need to look at a lot of master games in those openings to understand them better and, and this is key, to learn the plans that you have in the middlegame. This is absolutely key and the only way you should learn openings. No idiotic opening lines memorization but instead understanding of the lines and the plans that both sides have in the middlegame. What you will then do is play a lot of long time control games and only use your prepared opening repertoire. Over time you will get a understanding of these lines, might want to rework some lines and finally at some point you will have a complete opening repertoire that you can effectively use against any opponent no matter what playing strenght.

Next is tactics. How to improve tactics? That is honestly not hard to answer as their are thousands of sources where you can solve puzzles. One note that I would like to make is that you should solve tactics about any kind of motif that exists, be it mating attacks or ways to win a piece or promotion combinations or whatever. Only after you know all motifs and every kind of tactic you can make a tick mark next to "tactics".

Same is with endgames. Just get for example the book by Dvoretzky which contains all possible endgames or just get a book where the basic and most important endgames are covered. Try to figure out what kind of endgames mostly appear in your games and focus on those to improve your endgame results quickly.

Middlegame plans/strategy:

This is definitely not as easy to learn as tactics or endgames, it is well learnable though. The main ways you can improve your strategical understanding are to get a book that focuses on strategy, characteristics of a position, weaknesses and so on and so forth and to analyse your own games or other players games to try and find out what plans exist(ed) in the middlegame or late opening phase. There is also a lot of content about plan finding. A simple way to develop a plan in the middlegame is to first look at the characteristics of the position, at the pawn structure, at weaknesses that you or your opponent have to understand the position better. Based on these weaknesses that your opponent has you can look for ways to exploit them like doubling your rooks on the file where a weak pawn is or putting your pieces in front of a isolated pawn to fully control it. It always depends on the characteristics of the position which plan is possible and effective.

Lastly the calculation skills. The ability to calculate long lines in a precise and accurate manner is very important especially in sharper positions where one mistake or miscalculation can decide the game. I suggest 2 methods or tools to better your calculation ability. Number 1 is to play blindfold chess. This can not only be a lot of fun and impress girls at a bar but also massively improves your ability to think of long lines in your head without seeing them on the board. Secondly I suggest you to solve blindfold puzzles. Here is how they work, you get a position and below that position stand the next moves that were played in that position. You have to play through these moves in your head and at the end find the winning tactic.

Here a example for you:

Moves that happened in the position below:

Nbd2 a6 Nh2 b5 Rae1 Qa5 Qd1 Nfd7 f4 f6 a3 exf4 e5 dxe5

-White to move

Thats it for today, peace out.