5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Chess
By Eddie Wyckoff, a USCF National Expert.
There are many things we can credit to the COVID-19 pandemic, and among them is a historic rise in the popularity of chess, the classic board game of strategy and planning. Everyone has been doing it — chess.com predicted 10 years of growth in just a few months. So be like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and sit down for a game. But how do you go about improving?
Well, you don’t have to be as aggressive as Tingjie Lei, who dragged out a blitz game for 152 moves in an attempt to flag her Grandmaster opponent.
While being stubborn certainly helps, simply following these five tips should result in significant growth for most players.
(1) Develop all of your pieces. If you were taught chess strategy at some point, you probably heard that you should open with pawns in the center of the board. This is sound advice. Make sure to follow that up with developing the rest of your pieces. Your knights, bishops, rooks, and queen (typically in that order) all want a piece of the action. Also, be sure to castle early and often!
Have you ever heard of Paul Morphy? Yeah, he destroyed chess players that didn’t develop. How else did he achieve comical end finishes like these:
If you haven’t already, definitely check out his games. If you study them, you can get your own comical finishes. Here’s one of mine:
(2) Study Grandmaster games. You may have noticed that many of my links are to chessgames.com; check them out! Here’s 14 great games of chess to get you started. If you’re really into this, be sure to also check out chess books and websites. It is very helpful to learn the thinking process behind the moves.
One of my favorite Grandmaster games is below, a masterpiece by the Magician from Riga, the inimitable Mikhail Tal:
(3) Practice chess tactics, puzzles, and studies regularly. These are simple tips, but that doesn’t mean easy. 10,000 hours is a very conservative estimate of the time required for chess mastery, but even 20 minutes a day will significantly improve your game.
Chess tactic trainers will improve your pattern recognition and help you become a Terminator. Chess Tempo and ChessBase Tactics are two free options; I personally like the tactics server at Chess.com even though it is not free.
Many chess studies and puzzles may seem impractical on the surface, but they help more advanced players to spot unconventional wins. Here is one of my favorite studies by Mark Liburkin, which requires underpromotion to knight, bishop, and rook.
(4) Play with longer time controls (15 minutes per side or more), and study your own games afterwards. The longer you spend on reasoning through positions, the better you’ll get. Standard tournament games can last for many hours, and you’ll notice the professionals rarely leave large amounts of unused time.
Using a chess engine is a good way to discover objective things you miss, but if you want to improve, refrain from doing this until after you write down your initial thoughts. Many chess-playing websites such as lichess.org and chess.com offer you the ability to write notes and run free computer analysis in the game window after you finish playing.
If your server of choice does not offer this, or if you want to store all of your chess in one place, you may want your own software. I personally use a paid version of ChessBase, but they offer a convenient free version. This comes with a free Fritz engine, but you can download Stockfish, which is also free and stronger.
(5) Most importantly, have FUN!! If you take it too seriously, you’ll wind up like the SNL Chess Coach.
