How to Improve: Practicing Skill

We are what we repeat

Apr 01, 2025

Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses, a chess blog focused on adult improvers. Last week we talked about gaining knowledge. The key was to make it relevant, make it personal. I believe that in general, chess knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for improvement. That’s because chess is a skill based game of timed decision making (my opinion). Skills are often the rate limiting step for many adult improvers. So we’re here today to talk about how to practice skills. Let’s dive in.

3 Fundamental Skills

Chess players have at least 3 skills they must improve to play better. Those skills are:

Visualization: What moves are there?
Calculation: What happens after these moves?
Evaluation: Who’s better and why?

Each of these skills builds upon the next one. We cannot calculate until we can mentally perceive what the board looks like after a move or two . We cannot evaluate the resulting position until we can calculate all the forcing moves and possible responses. They rely upon each other, and strength in one skill enables strength in another. The first skill I believe is visualization. For most adults who started as kids, they just naturally developed this skill. However, for adults who started at chess after the age of 8-10, visualization is much harder. I’ve been on record saying that visualization is the most important skill for adult improvers and probably the greatest opportunity for improvement for most of us.

But it’s not just me. In his most recent Perpetual Chess Podcast, GM Wojciech Moranda stated that every player <1500 ELO (I’m assuming FIDE, so <1600 USCF) should be training visualization as a separate skill. I’m not sure how many of us are actually doing this.

Regardless, all three of these skills are required to play “real chess” according to NM Dan Heisman. What he means is that you have to be able to do three separate things to play good chess. In his book, The Improving Chess Thinker, he highlights a basic thought process. You need to be able to understand what the board looks like after a move or two. With that skill you can calculate the series of moves that would happen in one line. Then you can determine if your side if better or worse after that line. Do that repeatedly until you’ve either found the best move for the position or the best move for the time you can spend.

If I look back at my own chess journey, what rings true is that I knew what I was trying to do, I just didn’t know how to do it. I experienced a great mess of thought when I was trying to think through lines either online or OTB. I’d burn through so much time trying to calculate, and keeping track of each line felt impossible. There’s some truth to that since we have only so much cognitive capacity and chess often is able to overwhelm it. I was trying to play “real chess” but I kept getting lost and overwhelmed.

That overload happened for one simple reason. My skills weren’t strong enough yet.

How to Practice

How do we make our skills stronger? In this great TED Ed video, How to Practice Effectively, musician Annie Bosler and psychologist Dr. Don Greene talk through what actually happens when we practice something. Repetition of a skill induces changes in our brain by first inducing changes in the individual nerve cells. When we repeat a skill, the pathway involved in that skill gets reinforced. The body does so by increasing the amount of myelin around the nerve fibers involved. Myelin is a fat-rich substance specific to nerve cells that serves to insulate those nerves as they conduct electricity. The more myelin around a nerve fiber, the less energy required to activate that nerve or the circuit and the more efficiently they work. So essentially practicing a skill induces changes in our brain that make it easier for us to repeat the skill.

In the video, Bosler and Dr. Greene state that “effective practice is consistent, intensely focused, and targets content of weaknesses that lie at the edge of one’s abilities.” They go on to give specific tips on how to build a practice. These are:

Reduce distractions (especially phones and social media).
Focus on the task at hand.
Start out slowly or in slow motion.
Use frequent practice sessions (of limited time) with breaks.
Practice in your brain in vidid detail.

This research was done on athletes and musicians, people who use physical skills. So how applicable is this advice to chess players?

Grease the groove

In this 4 hour long podcast, noted strength trainer Pavel Tsatsouline was interviewed by Dr. Andrew Huberman. They talked at length about strength training and the research behind it. My favorite quote from Pavel is that “strength is the mother quality of all the other qualities.” It means that the skill of strength enables all the other physical skills you might want to achieve.

In one of the more fascinating discussions I’ve heard in a while, it became obvious that there is significant overlap between getting physically stronger and learning a new skill. The process of neurologic adaptation was the same between getting stronger at bench press and learning a language. The difference for physical skills is they often require muscular adaptation of course, but that doesn’t happen until the pathway starts getting reinforced.

At some point in the podcast, Dr. Huberman asks Pavel about “greasing the groove.” The idea is that if someone wanted to get stronger they can reduce the number of reps they’re doing but do them more often. For example if they’re capable of doing 10 pull ups but want to get to 20, then can “grease the groove”. Do 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps, 3-5 times per week. Each day they do the exercises, they separate the sets by at least 10-15 minutes. What research has shown is that after a few weeks of this, their maximum reps will go up significantly. The reason for this gain? Pavel explains that research has shown the nerves in the lats adapt to fire more efficiently and require less energy to be activated. In short, myelin got put down by practicing the skill in short bursts followed by periods of rest.

What I was completely struck by is this sounds exactly like Bosler and Dr. Greene’s effective practice.

Frequent short practice with breaks

To repeat, the tips for effective practice are:

Reduce distractions (especially phones and social media).
Focus on the task at hand.
Start out slowly or in slow motion.
Use frequent practice sessions (of limited time) with breaks.
Practice in your brain in vidid detail.

Quality matters most to get effective practice at anything. Being distracted on average every 6 minutes by a new notification, text, or update will destroy your focus. Once you can focus, just do one thing during your session. Focus on doing that one thing as well as you possibly can but going as slow as you must to maintain quality.

The next point however is “Break up your practice session into multiple time limited sessions throughout the day.” That sounds exactly like “grease the groove” to me. Or maybe it sounds like spaced repetition to you. Even Duolingo will ask you to do this!

I believe that there is absolutely no difference between practicing physical skills and practicing mental ones. The approach is exactly the same. To improve at anything, break the practice into brief, highly focused, quality sessions. This has direct implications on how I will suggest you set up your practice for chess.

One fascinating thing I noted in this video is the research showing mental practice works too. The video highlights a study where a group of intermediate basketball players were tasked with improving their free throw accuracy over two weeks. One group shot free throws, while the other group only mentally rehearsed them. Both groups amazingly improved at the same rate! Once a pattern is established, just imagining a practice session appears to be good enough to reinforce it in reality. I’m going to suggest a way to use this on days you cannot train chess.

The Practice

So if we are to integrate what we know about improvement with what we know about chess, then we come to the practice. We are aiming to improve all three skills simultaneously since we need all three for a chess game. My recommendations are for players who are <1500 FIDE (1600 USCF). If you’re higher than that you can decide how much you want to use in your own practice. I do believe that most of it still will be germain.

My recommendations are to #1) Start slow; #2) Train in short sprints with frequent breaks; and #3) Visualize

#1 Start slow

The simplest way to do that is to just do tactical puzzles with whatever resource you like, but with a twist. Use all 3 skills with each puzzle (visualization, calculation, and evaluation). Before you move a single piece, work out as many separate lines that you can see. At the end of each line, give an evaluation. You can do this with Chess Informant style notation or just your words (like “white is better” or “black wins”).

It’s important that you do this with every puzzle. Don’t just take my word for it, you can hear it right from GM Aagaard on Hanging Pawns. His advice is that we need to train to see lines until the end. The game equivalent of this would be checking all your opponents possible responses to a forcing move. Skip this step at your peril.

Go slow at first, focusing on one line at a time. Quality here is far more important than quantity. Equally important is getting puzzles at a level where you sometimes fail. We need to be right near the edge of our capabilities.

Here’s an example.

It’s Black to move. I was really struggling to solve this one, but once I started writing down the lines it all fell into place. For our purposes here I’ll give you the first move: Rxd3. From there try to calculate one line for each likely response. There’s Qxc7, there’s cxd3, and there’s Rxd3. Each one is a line to calculate and then evaluate the final position. You only need to go until there’s no forcing moves left. In this case it’s just 3-5 moves in total, and that’s usually more than enough in both tactical puzzles and in real games.

Why the tedious work of working out all the lines? Well firstly because it satisfies the “Start slow” recommendation, getting you to practice the coordination of all three skills. Secondly, it gets you to “focus on the task at hand.” As you progress you can go faster, but never skimp on the quality. Most importantly, it mimics actual decision making in a game. No there isn’t always a tactic to find, but there is always a decision to be made. Training the skill of good decision making in chess is a good idea.

#2 Short sprints, frequent breaks

Ideally we’d all be able to focus forever. However there is a real price to paying attention (more on that subject in a later post). There’s a common myth that we need to cram in long hours of hard work, drilling the same patterns over and over again. This myth is fueled by the illusion of mastery that comes with cramming anything. That’s just not how our brains retain information though. Anything we cram will be forgotten soon afterwards because there hasn’t been enough time for adaptation. Also we live with phones and devices clamoring for our attention. The reality is we’re all struggling to keep our focus for any length of time. The good news is, we learn best when we use short sprints of focus with frequent breaks.

What this looks like for us is spending 20-25 minutes on chess practice, and then take a 5 minute break (or more). Provided you remove distractions during the session and bring your full attention to the problem, you’ll have done more than enough quality work in 20-25 minutes. After that, just step away and take a mental break and let your mind wander. That last part is key, allowing your brain to recharge its focus. Then come back and train again. You can train on something else in the next session to interleave skills and material (like visualization training or opening study). Or you can keep it simple and stay with tactics, that’s fine too.

Perhaps the most surprising recommendation (at least to me) I have is to spread these sessions out across the day. Instead of concentrating chess study into one continuous hour, instead have several “sprints” throughout the day. The time away is part of the training. Forcing your brain to come back to visualization / calculation / evaluation repeatedly will send a much stronger signal to your brain to reinforce the pathway. That reinforcement leads to mylenation which makes the skill easier to perform.

#3 Visualize

For everyone under FIDE 1500, dedicated visualization training needs to be part of our training. Honestly for most adult improvers this is probably the biggest bang for the buck out there. Without working on visualization, it is my opinion that just drilling tactics will not pay off. If you came to chess after age 10 (as did I), this is a dire area of need for you. It’s not a skill that just happens to improve on its own in my experience.

There are a few options for this:

Dontmoveuntilyousee.it This is Aiden Rayner’s site and will give you both free and subscription based material to practice visualization. Can recommend wholeheartedly.
Cognitive Chess This is a book of visualization training. I’ve also used this and like it very much. However, it seems for players who are above 1200 ELO in my opinion.
Chess Steps Method (Step 2 Thinking Ahead; Step 3 Thinking Ahead) There are two workbooks in the Chess Steps Method that specifically work on visualization. They’re fantastic.
Listudy.org There are three different free visualization training resources listed, but I have not personally tried them much. The blind tactics take some getting used to.

Other options include making your own opening files with the written moves only. Using Anki to make flash cards with the opening line of choice will make you practice visualizing the line. All you need to get into the Spanish (for example) is 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 But having to “see” it in your head is a whole different skill.

Lastly, the amazing thing is you may not need to do tactics at all after a certain point. You may just have to visualize yourself solving them. If you can’t do training or playing a game on a day, maybe spend 5-10 minutes visualizing yourself solving a difficult tactic. Imagine yourself going line by line through the different options you have and then deciding on a move. Even better, do this a couple of times in a day for short periods of time. It may seem impossible, but just visualizing yourself doing tactics or playing a game carefully might be enough to strengthen the skills you want to develop.

Improving with intention

One of the most important things humans need to know about themselves is that every choice we make, every action we take, is like a little vote for the person we’re going to become. Our brains cannot fully distinguish a “real” action from a thought and will respond similarly to both. Over time, we become what we repeatedly do. Unfortunately this works for both “bad” habits as well as “good” ones. The process is the same each time. Whatever we choose to do repeatedly will be reinforced through the mylenation process we mentioned above.

If we want to improve at chess, then developing our skills is the critical step. Thanks to the TED Ed talk, we know that we can do that through short sprints of focused work, starting out slowly with intention, and pushing ourselves just to the edge of our capabilities. This practice works for any skill we wish to develop, even physical strength. It’s as if our nerves don’t believe it’s important until we repeatedly show them it is. Then adaptation will occur.

What is surprising to me is that focused work broken up into multiple sessions appears to be better than taking the same amount of time in one session. Having come from the “study until it hurts” school of thinking, I can say it never really feels like I’ve done enough. However I find it much easier to fit into my life. Also I cannot argue with the results. I have been training this way for the last few months. Short sprints of tactics and visualization, writing out every line I see and evaluating them. Using visualization training for my openings, and playing games with focus. Over my last 12 Lichess rapid games I have scored 10/12 with 9 wins, two draws, and a loss. I believe I am at my all time high for Rapid rating (I turned off ratings from my end, so I don’t get to see them).

I hope you get some of the same results from your practice. Moreover, I hope you can use these techniques to get the maximum results from the limited time we adults have to spend on chess.

Chess in Small Doses