How I got better at Chess:
From 1000 to 1800 ELO
Are you someone who enjoys intellectual productivity? Do you like taking your mind to the gym once in a while?
Well then, Chess is exactly the game for you. Here are some of the learnings I want to share with you.
Many see Chess as an intellectual pursuit and there’s some truth to it but it shouldn't refrain you from trying to play and improve at this beautiful game. It should in fact encourage you. Several studies have been conducted aiming to determine if Chess can improve cognitive thinking, and some have shown positive results.
It is said to improve memory and deepen your focus. It has been shown to help with ADHD and general mental health. In the faster games with 1 or 2 minutes on the clock, you get to work on your speed and sharpness. As someone who has been playing the game for over 7 years, I can vouch for many of these advantages and I can give you a few tips to up your game.
1. Solve puzzles
Whether you’re a beginner who is just starting out or a super GrandMaster who has won 5 world championships, there are puzzles for all levels of Chess players. Puzzles help us recognize patterns and solve tactics in Chess. There are quite a few ways to checkmate your opponent but the same few tricks keep showing up again and again. Once you recognize these patterns, the calculations get easier, and delivering checkmate will be a matter of following the steps and going through the motions.
Do 5–10 minutes of chess puzzles a day and within a month or two, you’ll up your game drastically. You can find puzzles on sites like www.chesstempo.com which gives you free unlimited puzzles.
Practicing tactics on a regular basis can take you from sub-1000 to 1000–1100 ELO quickly.
2. Play the game
Duh! You gotta actually play the game to improve at it.
“I have the meeting in 5 minutes, I guess I’ll just play a quick game of bullet to kill time” does not count. That helps kill time and gives you a nice adrenaline boost, but it’s not gonna improve your game if you’re not mindful about what you are doing in the game. Avoid bullet games in the beginning and choose longer games. Play the game mindfully and be aware of your moves, your plans, and your opponent's intentions.
I highly recommend Jonathan Rowson’s book ‘7 Deadly Chess Sins’ to understand the psychology of playing Chess and why we make mistakes when we play. He dissects aspects of our play and analyzes what makes us commit these mistakes from a psychological viewpoint.
3. Analyze your games
Chess is brutal. If you keep making the same mistake, it will throw the same outcome at you, much like life.
Since there are countless possible games in Chess and every move can take the game in a different direction, there are endless possibilities to commit mistakes in Chess. In fact, it’s only when one of the players commits a mistake that a game can be won. With perfect play, Chess is a draw.
But these mistakes have a certain pattern to them. Do you keep hanging your knight every time? Well, the next time you move your knight, make sure it is protected by some other piece. Does your opponent keep pinning your Queen to the King every game? Make sure you don’t let that happen.
You can analyze your games on apps like chess.com, lichess, or any other chess engine. Analyzing your games can teach you about the patterns in your mistakes and the potential chances you missed during the game. Every good chess player analyzes their games after playing. In fact, the top Grandmasters in the world have a team of seconds that analyze their games to point out the mistakes they make and show them ways to improve.
Doing this regularly can take your rating from 1000 to 1300 in a couple of months if you are consistent
4. Learn the Openings
Once you’re out of the 1000–1100 ELO zone, you’re going to have to find a repertoire.
You see, several hundreds of years ago, Chess players and masters came up with a few opening moves and developed theories behind those moves. But here’s something interesting
In 2017, Google’s Alpha Zero played against Stockfish, which was considered the strongest chess engine in the world. It was a moment of ignominy for Stockfish as it lost 6–155. Alpha Zero used a brute force approach and learned by playing 44 million games against itself in the first 9 hours.
After all that effort, it still followed the theory that humans have been using for hundreds of years.
So there’s a rationale behind openings. Every opening gives you certain advantages and makes certain compromises in your position. Watch lectures on these openings, try them out in your games and figure out which openings give you positions in which you feel comfortable. This is definitely a process of trial and error until you find two, three, or even four openings with each color that you play almost every game.
If you’re an intermediate player, go deep. Dive into the nitty-gritty of the openings by watching lectures or taking chessable courses from Masters and Grand Masters.
This should get you into the 1300–1500 rating zone.
5. Practice Endgames
Everyone likes the middle game. It is fun, creative, and a lot of action happens on the board. You also don’t necessarily have to be extremely precise with every move you make. But if you play against decent Chess players, you hardly win games in 20 moves. It’s usually a hard-fought battle.
But there’s a way to gain an advantage. Endgame study.
Studying endgames is usually tedious work. When there are fewer pieces on the board, ironically the number of possible moves increases. Precision matters more. Practicing endgames involves actively looking for different kinds of endgames, understanding the techniques, practicing them, and applying them in games. But it pays off. Not many invest the time and energy to study endgames so if you’re willing to do that, you will outperform many of them and that will be good enough to reach the 1800 mark
-Sincerely, an 1800 player
Develop a healthy mental attitude
Let me tell you this very clearly. Chess is hard. There’s a very popular video on Youtube by Wall Street Journal titled ‘Amateur challenges chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen’. It features an “extreme learner” who tries to study Chess rigorously for an entire month and defeat the World Champion Magnus Carlsen at the end of it.
Anyone with the slightest understanding of Chess could have predicted exactly how embarrassingly the remarkable stratagem worked out. My point is, Chess isn’t one of those games where you can upskill yourself by using shortcuts and learning hacks to get better within a week or a month. You gotta play the long game to get good at Chess.
There will be moments where you will curse yourself or hate yourself for making a bad move or following a bad idea. You’re going to lose approximately 50% of the games you play. Now, that’s a tough pill to swallow. But here’s the realization that needs to follow. You can’t berate yourself every time you lose. It’s just gonna wear you out.
Instead, learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them again. Have a curious mind and enjoy the game.
Chess being a competitive game might seem like a strange arena for beauty to appear, given that excellence is what wins you games. But strangely enough, beauty is everywhere in Chess. A pawn sacrifice to gain positional advantage, a piece sacrifice to follow it up with a sequence of tactical moves, or a solidification that leads to eventual endgame supremacy. Chess is beautiful. Enjoy it and have fun. That’s the most important rule.
