Taking My Own Advice

What happens when I put my recommendations into action

Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses, a Substack for adult chess improvers. I’ve been handing out a lot of advice lately on how to improve. Today I show what happens when I take some of my own advice. Let’s get into it

I’ve written a lot of advice recently. Most of it is just my opinion and perspective, but I’ve tried to make it an educated one. I’ve pulled much of this from my own prior experience as a physician and a teacher of students/residents. Also I’ve pulled from The Chess Steps, Noel Studer, Ben Johnson’s book Perpetual Chess Improvement, and my former coach Han Schut, and my most recent coach Ian Harris. Lastly, I’ve learned a lot from the excellent site Dontmoveuntilyousee.it and Aiden Rainer. Honestly, I’m grateful to have met all of these people and resources and can recommend all of them.

The Plan

Much of my advice is based on the understanding that chess improvement is about 3 things in descending order:

1. Reducing Mistakes

2. Improving Skill

3. Gaining Knowledge

It is my opinion that the greatest impediment to adult improvement is having too many choices. To reduce the choices I recommend that we do the following.

Failure Based Learning

GM Aagaard said that learning chess is like learning an instrument. You need to practice often. That’s why I suggest playing first, studying later. Losing will happen and it’s ok. Analyze every game for critical moments and opening knowledge. Learning is a cycle of try → fail → try again.

By playing first, you’ll quickly see where the gaps are when you analyze the game. It will give you motivation to learn and study. You’ll see if you’re losing to tactics, dropping pieces, losing in the opening, or losing due to strategy. Whatever it is that’s causing you to lose… only work on that! Saves you time and energy. Also helps you avoid the overwhelming number of options out there.

Tactics, Tactics, Tactics

Otherwise known as deliberate practice. We’re pushing ourselves here to the edge of failure. Try → fail → try again is the essence. It’s also ok to do easy tactics as well, something like puzzle streak or puzzle rush as a warm up.

Consistency is much more important than intensity here. When you do tactics, only do it for short sprints (25-30 minutes) and then rest for 5 min or more. It’s even better if you can spread these out throughout the day, but that’s ideal.

Choose one resource for tactics and stick with it. Ian Harris suggested the book I use, The Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book. I also recommend Chess Steps. My experience with Lichess puzzles (which have the benefit of being free) is just that they’re so wide that there’s not really a theme or pattern. My opinion is I like selected puzzles better… but those cost money.

Visualization

My opinion but visualization is the most important skill for improvers. Training visualization specifically is part of what I recommend. The great benefit of visualization training so far for me is that it just makes chess easier. Like deliberate practice with tactics, all we need are short sprints of work. Just a few puzzles each time.

Chess Steps Thinking Ahead and the site Dontmoveuntilyousee.it are good options and I’ve used them both. Currently I’m training with Cognitive Chess which was recommended by Ian Harris.

Study Time

If you have time left over then a session of dedicated study to topics like Opening, Strategy, or Endgame is great. Noel Studer has his famous 1/3 rule where 1/3 of our time is for games & analysis, 1/3 for tactics, and 1/3 for everything else. This is a great place to try interleaving subjects together. Again, short burst of focused activity are great here as is studying different but related subjects. But it’s your free time, so whatever you find most interesting is probably just fine especially if it helps chess not feel like work and stay fun.

Slides

I have a Anki deck for every critical position I missed in my games. Every time I analyze a game, I’ll save a moment where I missed a tactic or missed a defensive move. Once I screenshot the position, I can make a slide that will go into rotation. Anki has its own algorithm to give you spaced repetition. It’s helped me a lot.

Taking My Own Advice.

This set of recommendations comes after nearly 5 years of chess improvement. I have tried, failed, and tried again. I have read books and learned about learning. I have grown gained knowledge from coaches and from online programs. Most importantly, I have found what does and does not fit into my life. It’s all well and good what’s recommended, but there’s no point in setting unrealistic expectations if I don’t have the time. It really wasn’t until about 4-5 months ago that this whole package of recommendations came into being. I’ve been applying them for the last 4 months or so.

In one of my recent posts, I said that adult improvers should play about 20-30 game to get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses. I promised that I would put that advice into action… and so I did. I played 20 rapid games between January 24 and April 7th. My preferred time is 15 min + 10 seconds. I used a physical board to play on and tried to use my best focus. I made sure to analyze them and tried to learn something from each game. I put them all in a study you can find here. During this stretch I continued my training with sprints of tactics and visualization training.

So how did I do? Actually, pretty dang good!

The Good News

I began in January at 1946 and ended up at 2105 in April. That’s +159 points in under 3 months! I scored 13.5/20 with 12 wins, 3 draws, and 5 losses. Along the way I achieved my highest rapid rating ever at 2135 and defeated my highest rated opponent at 2239. That was really cool.

What worked well was playing opening lines (The London, The Slav against 1.d4, and the Caro Kann against almost everything else) that shared common pawn structures. It made it much easier to determine the plans, strengths, and weaknesses for the common structures. I focused on development, getting my pieces into good places, and trying to play solidly until my opponents made a mistake. That worked as a strategy for the most part.

There were more than a few more games where I just was better from early and stayed there. I can’t really say I had some killer tactics, just that I played well and used the threat of tactics to get a better position. Take this position for example:

After 1.Bg5 there is a threat Bxf6 then Nd7 forcing White to play 1…Rd8. After that I had 2.Na5 and Black lost a pawn to 3.Naxc6. They made it worse than by playing 3…Rxc6?? giving me a strong advantage.

On the other hand, some of the games were more of a fight, where one move led to the result. For example White to move and win.

With about 3 minutes left I found Bxe4 followed by Bxd5 and the game was over.

The Bad News

I continued to make some of my familiar mistakes. I sometimes moves too fast. I didn’t always think about my opponent’s best response. I sometimes only thought about how my move worked, and not how it didn’t. Critically, I found that I didn’t know my Black repertoire very well.

In the 20 games I had 10 White games and 10 Black games. In the White games I scored an incredible 10/10. In the Black games however I scored 3 .5/10. Very different. Not knowing my repertoire well cost me at least 3 games right off the bat. Game 1:

My repertoire is to play g6 here…so Nc6 isn’t really a mistake but we get into a theory heavy Panov Attack where Black needs to be very careful. Spoiler…I wasn’t. Theory isn’t yet my strong suit.

Game 2

In this g6 line, Black simply allows White to take the pawn on d5 for a temporary sacrifice. The LSB needs to stay on c8 to defend b7. Bg4 is a mistake in this line, giving White an advantage. Spoiler… my opponent exploited that advantage.

Game 3

Best move here is Nfxd5 but for some reason I blinked. After Bg5 I got hyper focused on what the move does… and missed that it really doesn’t stop Nfxd5 at all. It’s worth calculating the lines but Nfxd5 Nxd5 Qxd5 Qxd5 Nxd5 saves the e pawn. If Nfxd5 Nxd5 Qxd5 Bxe6 then Qxb3 axb Rfe8! skewers the bishop and knight. I for some reason blinked and didn’t take the pawn. Getting emotional (scared) led to a calculation error. White went on to win.

The Verdict

I did pretty well over all. The bottom line is that brief sprints of focused work on tactics and visualization seem to be making a difference for me. The opening changes worked for me with White, but are still a work in progress with Black. I know them much better now. It’s my intent to return to classical time controls and even OTB and see what I can do, but that depends on schedule being favorable.

What I like is that I can fit this training into my life and it’s working!