Can data help you improve your chess rating?
“I am convinced, the way one plays chess always reflects the player’s personality. If something defines his character, then it will also define his way of playing.” — Vladimir Kramnik.
Sooner or later, every player faces an obstacle to his or her chess progress. To overcome this challenge players often turn to established resources to help them grow:
- Chess books
- Tactics training
- Studying the games of masters
- Learning opening traps
- etc
Sometimes these methods help, but at other times progress is slow (or non-existent), despite significant efforts on behalf of the player.
Why do these efforts so frequently fail to lead to the improvement that chess players hope for? In my experience, it’s often because players are training hard, but they aren’t training smart. What good is opening theory if you’re blundering your queen in the middle game? And tactics will do you little good if you can’t convert an easily winning endgame.
Every chess player is unique in their playing style and capabilities. A proper training regime requires a player first to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are relative to their opponents. This is where modern chess engines can help.
Viswanathan Anand is known as one of the first Grandmasters to embrace the training power of the engine. His run as the 5-time world chess champion was fueled by hundreds of hours combing through games with a computer engine to understand what he was doing well and where he needed to improve.
Today, thanks to the advances made in engine capabilities since Anand first became champion in 2000, you can get those same insights in minutes, rather than hours. With Aimchess, our computer engines can analyze a thousand of your most recent games in a matter of minutes and catalogue your most common errors. We can detect your strengths relative to other players in your rating range and the weaknesses that are holding you back from becoming an even better player. Rather than blindly training tactics, you get personalized lessons to work on the very weaknesses we’ve identified for you.
With Aimchess, you can train smarter, not harder. Sometimes life is about the journey, not the destination. But wouldn’t you rather take the most direct route to where you’re going?
How to get started?
Aimchess offers a host of free features to get you started.
Get started by baselining your personal chess stats here (free account registration required for full analysis).
