Improvement
5 Tips to Reach 1500 Elo in Chess
I hit 1500 on chess.com this summer and would like to share some advice for reaching this much-sought-after benchmark. Here are five tips to improve your game:
1. Play longer time controls
There are many theories about which time control you should play. Through my experience, however, I’ve found that playing long time controls is much better for your development than playing shorter ones. I used to play one 30+0 game almost every day to improve my play.
How does playing long time controls help you? The answer is simply that you have more time to process your thoughts and ideas and make moves based on them. This ability isn’t as honed in blitz or faster rapid (like 10+0) as it is in classical or slower rapid (15+10).
If you’re serious about playing chess, then this is absolutely essential for improving your game. Even if you play blitz, you’ll still have more ideas and more knowledge about when those ideas work if you play longer time controls more often.
However, simply playing longer is no help if you don’t analyze your games, and that leads us to the second tip.
2. Analyze your games
This is perhaps the most widely known tip, yet it still isn’t done as much as it should be. Analyzing your games effectively is necessary for improving at chess since you can learn what your exact weaknesses and strengths are. This doesn’t just mean clicking the “Game Review” button at the end of a game and forgetting about it afterward.
Instead, I recommend having a spreadsheet or Lichess study of games that you’ve played, containing comments on mistakes and tips to improve. One common mistake I made was forgetting about absolute pins, which I learned after investigating trends throughout my games. This tip was also recommended by the amazing NM Nelson Lopez — aka ‘Chess Vibes’ — on YouTube.
You don’t need to spend two hours analyzing each game you’ve played. A simple analysis of about five minutes is enough (and recording it somewhere). Be sure to include mistakes that you made (including psychological ones like rushing or taking too much time), tips to improve, which side and opening you played, as well as any strengths. Personally, I like to write down if I had a brilliant move in a game, or if a game felt extremely exhilarating.
3. Be involved with the community
This tip may not seem related as much to improvement, but being part of a chess community is beneficial to your game. Being part of a local chess club can help you increase your skill and gain “informal” mentorship which you would’ve not been able to get online. Being part of a community or knowing people who are also enthusiastic about chess increases your focus on improvement as well.
Being involved online also helps increase your interest in the game. There’s a strong Twitch chess presence, with streamers like Hikaru, Naroditsky, and GothamChess. Even though these streams may seem more like a leisure activity, more educational ones (like Naroditsky’s speed runs) can help with improving at chess.
If you aren’t able to watch streams or would prefer not to watch them, YouTube also has a large chess community. Educational chess channels include Daniel Naroditsky’s channel, Chess Vibes, GothamChess, and Hanging Pawns. Channels not as focused on improvement can also help spike your interest in chess, indirectly supporting your chess play.
4. Learn opening theory and strategic ideas
Once you begin climbing the rating ladder, knowing some basic openings and their strategic ideas goes a long way. This is especially true if you want to play more complicated openings like the Sicilian Defense, but also applies to openings in general.
Say, for example, you’re interested in playing the Italian Game as White, specifically its most positional line— the Giuoco Pianissimo. Instead of memorizing moves, you should try to understand its ideas. Common themes in the Giuoco Pianissimo include preparing the pawn break d4, moving the b1-knight to g3 to possibly jump into f5 at an opportune moment, playing Re1, and retreating the bishop to c2 to defend the e4-pawn (shown below).
To properly play the Giuoco Pianissimo, you need to understand these ideas and when to implement them. Throughout all openings, understanding these themes is extremely important. Even in a tactical opening like the Sicilian Najdorf, understanding ideas is necessary, (such as when to play Nd7, when to play b5, when to not castle at all, etc).
How do you learn such ideas? Simply look for resources, such as opening books, courses, and videos, that focus more on ideas and themes than specific moves. You can also find ideas by looking through master-level games, but that usually requires more time and tends to be more difficult. Nonetheless, whichever way you use to learn such ideas, the very fact that you are doing so is significant to your improvement.
5. Be sure to do tactics puzzles
The key to improvement under the master level is to train tactics. I’ve had so many games where I was losing, then won or drew due to a tactic and vice versa. This doesn’t mean just doing puzzle rush or blindly completing a hundred puzzles. Especially if you got the puzzle wrong, you should look at the difference between your moves and the correct moves, and why your moves are incorrect. Even if you got the puzzle right, analyzing alternative moves that you were considering helps solidify tactical ideas within your mind.
In addition to doing a few tactics puzzles each day, you should, whenever you’re analyzing your games and opening positions, look for possible tactics. When you’re doing this, try not to move the pieces around so that it resembles a “real game” environment. This will help with figuring out what moves to play in an actual tournament or online game, as well as improve your calculation skills.
Conclusion
I hope these five tips will help on your journey to chess improvement. As a summary, here they are:
- Play longer/slower time controls
- Analyze the games you played
- Try to be involved with the community online and in person
- Learn openings and their related thematic ideas
- Do tactics daily and understand their principles/ideas
Thank you for reading! Please clap and respond below if this article helped you on your chess journey.
