Chess Teaching Fundamentals by IM Erik Kislik
By establishing first principles we can all agree on about chess and chess improvement, it is much easier to make forward strides. 1. Almost all chess players are initially taught the wrong piece values and do not appreciate the value of a tempo. 2. You will learn the most from: 1. Playing 2. Analyzing 3. Training – in that order. 3. Differentiate between temporary study and long-term chess study. 4. When tired or lacking energy for intensive chess work, focus on passive learning. 5. Playing players 200-300 elo above you is optimal for improvement. 6. GM Aagaard’s three positional questions are very useful to think about at the board. 7. Try to consider multiple candidate moves on each move and consciously try to be aware o f what you thought of after a g ame (making it much easier to learn from your games and thought process this way). 8. If you blunder too much, practice scanning the board for undefended pieces or pawns to increase your awareness. You should also develop a mental strategy for co ping with blunders. 9. To improve your visualization of lines and ideas that you consider unseeable or outside of your grasp, I recommend simply trying to visualize and conceptualize the difficult tactic or idea with your eyes closed. 10. Doubled pawns and isolated pawns (specifically central) are not always weaknesses; weaknesses are usually not weak unless they can actually be exploited. 11. In terms of objective advantages, focus on static advantages that have real meaning; the initiative or “an attack” does not constitute a real advantage (those are temporary advantages that have the potential to turn into long-term advantages). If you c laim you are objectively better because of your initiative, realize that it needs to turn into something concrete. 12. There are three things you can do with an extra pawn: use it to try to attack the opponent’s king, use it to try to win more of the opponent’s material, or use it to queen a pawn. If you are completely unable to do any of those things (even in the distant future), the extra pawn m ight not mean anything in the position. 13. Solidity – You cannot lose a chess games w ithout making a mistake. Make your strong opponents force you to make mistakes. Many amateurs go into chess wanting to be an unstoppable force when it's better to go in as the immovable object. 14. Consistency in playing good moves is the most important thing in chess. You don’t need to play brilliantly to play good chess; Carlsen stressed the importance of playing a lot of good moves ("I would just like to play 400 good moves in my match against Anand") above all else. else. 15. I ask myself 5 helpful questions after a game to understand clearly what happened. 16. Chess has many facets – avoid neglecting important aspects of chess strength. 17. Below 2000, the emphasis should be on developing competency in different areas. 18. Commitment devices are very he lpful in chess, and a coach is a good e xample of one. 19. Keep notepads near your working space to write down important chess questions you have about anything (positional questions, opening questions, or anything in general you want to make sure you do not forget about). 20. Effort applied is the number one predictor of success across various fields, including chess. Study and do things that will keep your effort level at a maximum. 21. Task-oriented motivation is best for chess players. Task-oriented players persist at tasks longer and are more confident. 22. Your training should mimic a real rated g ame as closely as possible. 23. Try to enjoy the experience of playing and studying as much as possible.
Let’s break these concepts down.
1. Almost all chess players are initially taught the wrong piece values and do not appreciate t he value of a tempo: 1 (pawn), 3 (knight), 3 (bishop), 5 (rook), 10 (queen) were what I learned when I first started playing chess. Now we know from rigorous methodical testing and research involving the strongest chess software and hardware in the wor ld by Grandmaster Larry Kaufman and others that the most correct (rounded) piece values are: 1 (pawn), 3.45 (knight), 3.55 (bishop), 5.25 (rook), 10 (queen). This is most important to understand in the case of piece imbalances, when you need to make j udgments about the relative values of the pieces. For instance, in general two rooks are slightly stronger than a queen. Three minor pieces are also stronger than a queen. Believe it or not, I have had arguments with strong grandmasters in the top 100 in the world who did not know that thr ee minor pieces are generally stronger than a queen. Part of the reason why they got this wro ng was because the chess engine Houdini had very inaccurate queen valuations that overemphasized the strength of the queen. In many amateur games below 1800, I see White put a knight on g5 and take a pawn on f7, assuming that this wins material when Black has to capture on f7 with his rook and recapture with his king. White exchanges bishop and knight (7) for rook and pawn (6.25), but actually loses material in the process of thinking he’s winning material and conducting a professional attack. This is one of the m ost simple instances in chess in which knowing the corre ct piece values would prevent you from playing something completely counterproductive. I have always sacrificed exchanges (giving up a rook for a knight or bishop) for quality and compensation pretty easily. After studying the book Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy when I was 18 and seeing lots of exchange sacrifices, giving up material for quality has always struck me as a great psychological and practical idea. Exchange sacrifices are some of t he easiest to justify. This is not an innate thing. You just see 50 e xamples of it and start to see and sense what good compensation is. Essentially any player can grasp it and become more flexible with material. It is also very important to note that a tempo is worth a quarter of a pawn in chess. It is no surprise then, when on the very first move with White to play (i.e. with an extra tempo), a running ches s engine will usually give a score close to +.25. The value of a tempo is far more important than many players consciously realize. Imagine hypothetically that someone sacrifices a piece for two pawns and a strong attack. Many amateurs might conclude that this is not enough compensation. It very well can be if you factor in the value of a weak king, which is hard to quantify, and the value of a couple of tempi that the attacker has while the defender's pieces are offside. Two or three pieces out of play can easily be a half pawn or a full pawn of value to the attacker. It is very helpful to incorporate this kind of flexible interpretation of material and time into your c hess understanding. Shocking or slow-moving victorious sacrifices will make a lot more sense to you when viewed from this perspective. It is worth noting that the bishop pair is worth half a pawn in general. When one side has the bishop pair, the most important minor piece on the board is the unopposed bishop. This is the bishop which has no opponent. This concept was emphasized in the book The Method in Chess by Grandmaster Iossif Dorfman and I find this to be one of the very few rules in chess that is not dogmatic and very much worth thinking about almost any time you have the bishop pair. Oddly enough, the correct piece values should be basic knowledge, but no one has w ritten it in any books and chess coaches do not t each it, so their students simply do not get the fundamentals down properly. It is important to know the correct piece values, but also to be flexible in how you think about material. Pawns that become passed and very dangerous are the only real material value that changes dramatically based on the position. In certain positions, a passed pawn on the 7th rank is worth at least a material value of three pawns. I t is extremely hard to quantify when a passed pawn is worth a value of two versus when it is worth a value of three. A discussion of this sort would not only be very vague with
a high margin of error. I doubt it would have much applicability. The important thing is just to be aware of the value a strong passed pawn may confer to one side. If a well-supported passed pawn breaks into your 6th or 7th rank and you are up a pawn, it is worthwhile to consider the fact that you may not have an advantage. Thinking too statically just about the normal numerical values might lead you to believe you are up a pawn plainly, but the positional value of a far advanced passed pawn is extremely important. When computers started to handle passed pawns extreme ly strongly (thanks to Vasik Rajlich’s very deep research with Rybka), their middlegame strength went up dramatically overnight. 2. You will learn the most from: 1. Playing 2. Analyzing 3. Training – in that order: It should be understood very clearly that playing is the number one source of improvement. There is nothing more personal, more revealing (about your own play), and more e ngaging (using close to one hundred percent of your mental energy) than simply playing. Very often at the board you will realize why cer tain moves are good due to small tactical points you would have otherwise missed if you were not focusing so intently. Suffering in bad positions over the board (in my case, which happened many times for many hours), forces us to search harder and deeper at earlier stages of the game so as to avoid this suffering. We also develop a deep understanding for why we suffered in the first place and how we could have avoided it. There are many positions that we simply realize are hard to play or unpleasant just by playing them. A lot of those positions will not be understood in any other way besides physically playing them. For instance, your sense of danger and sense of urgency in chess are developed almost exclusively from playing. While playing you realize the most things, make the most evaluations, judgments, and calculations, and exert yourself fully so that you can see your strengths and weaknesses clearly. Very often a position might not seem that exciting or difficult in analysis, but over the board one realizes how rich, difficult, and interesting it is. I advise you to play as many tournament games as possible, whenever possible. The number two source of improvement is analyzing your games. This is best done with a stronger player or coach, but inevitably we also need to analyze games ourselves and t ry to teach ourselves everything that we can. Analyzing is one of the most important skills we can develop in c hess. Once you get into the habit of asking yourself a lot of questions about your own games, the learning process becomes much more internalized and easy. The third main source of improvement is whatever you like to do for training yourself. For players under 1700, I almost always recommend doing CT-Art (Chess Tactics Art 6.0) t wo or three times to completion to improve your tactical patter n recognition. I like to focus my personal study on digestible games collections (I do not see any basis at all for the popular ideas that chess is 99% tactics, 99% calculation, 99% pattern rec ognition or that endgames must be studied first) because the y most closely mimic a real game situation and the type of holistic approach that is ideal for getting be tter at all phases of the game. I quite like books like Understanding Chess Move by Move by John Nunn and Understanding Chess Middlegames by John Nunn. If you are able to find a good book that simply goes through well-annotated games and can give you a very good basis for knowledge and a clear per spective for thinking about chess, it is almost always a good idea to study it when you have some time. 3. Differentiate between temporary study and long-term chess study: The distinction between things you only need to learn once and t hings you should study continuously throughout your chess career is very rarely made. Basic endgame knowledge, basic tactical motifs, famous games in an opening you are planning to play (to get some ideas about a new opening you are adopting), classic games from t he past, and playing through recent Grandmaster games every week (which almost every strong player I know does) are all examples of temporary chess work. Basic endgame ideas and simple tactical motifs are learned one time. Once you learn t hem, you do not just forget them because there is nothing abstract about a concrete concept. Something is definitely wrong if you are studying endgame books one hour a
day for three or four years. After a month or two of serious work, the diminishing returns on this work will be quite extreme and you will gain a lot less than you ex pect. Famous games, either from a new opening you’re interested in or from the classics, are intended to be an enriching experience to get a feel for how very strong players played and handled position types. I would not dwell on games from 60 years ago too much beyond to get a feeling for what they were aiming for and how they handled certain types of positions. Often times I just play through the older games quickly to just get a rough idea of what happened and the goals each side had conceptually. Once you complete this task one time for whatever your goal is (say, to pick up ideas in the Closed variation of the Sicilian Defense or to study some classic World Championship games), there is no need to do it again if you get the basic ideas they were striving for. Good examples that come to mind are the two games won by Botvinnik in the Closed Sicilian in the World Championship Match of 1954. There wer e two games where Botvinnik played excellently with Black, which still serve as ideal examples for how this opening should be played today. Most modern players plunge right into analyzing lines with engines and don't see how great players actually won games in their variations and where t hey put their pieces. This is an example of a one-time task that helps you develop a good understanding of the openings and position types you play regularly. The point is essentially to develop competence and to pick up ideas to increase your pattern recognition and to add to your c hess toolbox. I am always impressed when a strong player makes a correct analogy by saying, “This position reminds me of a position from Kasparov -Karpov.” Lastly, nearly every strong player I know plays through the TWIC (This Week in Chess) g ames each week. This is a collection of all of the new Gr andmaster games compiled for free and posted on a website online. By playing through the recent games, you can get a clear idea of the recent opening trends and middlegame ideas being played at the highest level. I usually quickly play through the games once without such deep immersion, but rather to see the direction of the play and how games were won and lost. When very interesting positions arise, I like to turn on the engine and get a clear idea of what was going on. This is also a commitment device that helps keep the game fresh and exciting with brand new exciting material coming at you every week. Long-term chess study involves the types of things that you will constantly want to work on, and that are ideal for chess understanding and improving your chess consistently, as opposed to mere competency and pattern recognition. In this catego ry belongs your games, your openings (if you save and update analysis on them especially), study of typical pawn structures, study of well-annotated games, and whatever working databases you have of acc umulated instructive chess examples (for instance, I have a working database of instructive Grandmaster positional errors). You could look at all of these things as a work in progress. Approximately once a month I look through my database of my own games and notice instructive things I had m issed before, which stick in my mind because I played the position, analyzed the position previously, and thought about it a lot. Nearly every day I update my opening files when I become c urious about a specific variation or see it in a high-level game. I also regularly update databases full of exercises, and databases full of positional errors. Any time you see an interesting game or idea, you c an easily put it right into this database and use it to expand your chess knowledge. This is a pro-active approach to chess learning. People ask me all the time for a training program that is specific to their needs. Essentially you will want to do all of this tempor ary study at some stage in your chess c areer, but whatever you do at any particular time should be based on whatever you prioritize as most important at the given time. For instance, right after a tournament, I always deeply analyze all of the games I just played while the games and my thoughts are still fresh in my mind. You will want to study at least one basic endgame book (perhaps Understanding Chess Endgames by John Nunn or Endgame Play by Shereshevsky), develop a solid base of internalized tactical patterns (I did this partially with t he help of the massive book CHESS by Laszlo Polgar which has thousands of simple mates in it, but nowadays seems most easily done with CTArt), and become acquainted with the be st moves and ideas played throughout chess history. If you feel
you are particularly weak in basic endgame competence, you may want to spend one hour every day for a month going over a basic endgame book. Most players under 1600 should work hard at developing a stable tactical base firstly. Realistically, if you spend a month intensively studying all of the World Championship games of the last 100 years, a month developing a solid tactical base, and a month obtaining a dec ent endgame base, you should be at least on e qual footing with (or above…) almost all of the players at your rating level in all of those areas. That can knock out much of the temporary chess st udy and competence that many players are lacking. If you feel t hat your tactical play and your endgame play are reasonable and not your main issues (this was how I felt when I was 1800), it makes sense to place a greater emphasis on developing chess culture and expanding your chess education. Since I had read a lot of chess books before my first rated tournament game, chess culture was not a major issue for me. I had bigger problems with basic opening knowledge, calculation, and general chess thinking, which were all aided tremendously by playing and analyzing. In other words, giving the same plan of improvement for every chess player is illogical, because everyone has different weakne sses. Realizing the importance of temporary chess study is important for developing players. Most players will want to combine temporary chess tasks with more long-term chess study tasks, focusing on whatever motivates you to put in the most effort at any given time. That may be an endgame book (temporary), it may be a tactics program (temporary), it may be classic games, it may be your own games, it may be openings, or it may be a games collection. If you have two hours to spend on chess and no possibility to play a serious or meaningful training game, you may want to spend 30 minutes a day developing a tactical base, 30 minutes a day developing an endgame base, 30 minutes a day playing through games, and 30 m inutes a day studying from a games collection. As a simple metric I set for myself, I liked to study at least 4 pages a day from chess books when I was training seriously. Although some pages take much longer than others to study, generally this is a small and manageable goal that can be done on a regular basis. Being productivity and working towards something gives your training a lot of purpose. With a simple routine of getting 4 pages a day knocked out, you can study at least 6 full chess books in a year and feel very productive while doing so. This will only increase your motivation and interest. When you feel that temporary work is no longer needed for your tactical base or endgame base of knowledge, you will probably want to switch to mostly games collections and studying the typical openings and middlegames you are expecting to play. When done properly, this also dramatically improves your tactical play and your endgame play, even if it is more holistic than focusing specifically on either of those areas. The main exception to this general study plan is whe n there is a particular case of urgency, such as right after a tournament, when you should almost always make sure you have analyzed your games properly. Another exception is right before a big tournament, when you may want to focus heavily on getting the basic ideas down in your opening repertoire. 4. When tired or lacking energy for intensive chess work, focus on passive learning: In terms of working on chess actively, ex-World Champion Botvinnik used to say that one hour of work was an ideal working period for maximum consecutive amount of effort at full capacity in chess. I remember the late Grandmaster Gyula Sax used to talk about how Grandmaster Judit Polgar would drop pieces after 4 hours of consecutive analysis. In view of this, when I work on chess for many hours, I like some of the work to be slightly passive (such as checking some grandmaster games and lightly analyzing them with an engine or watching a chess video with commentary from a strong player) or to include necessary breaks. This runs contrary to the popular notion that your training must always be active and energetic, but pays attention to the human side of e xhaustion. When you cannot work at full capacity, it makes sense to take a break or do something lighter. The effect of rest on the body after exercising is a very solid example that analogizes well with taking a break after long periods of intense concentration in chess.
New research (studies published in December 2015) indicates that intense immersion into difficult tasks with two hours of consistent work may actually be optimal for maximum learning and depth of study. The immersion is considered deepest around the t wo hour mark according to the research. I certainly studied chess this way. I f you have the time to play or study chess every day in some depth, do so. If you have to split up your chess time more care fully and have the choice between working on the game for five hours on Monday or for 90 minutes e ach day on Monday through Wednesday, the latter option will be more effective for learning. Luckily we usually do not nee d to make such compartmentalized decisions, but if you do, realize that spaced repetition is important and that your effort and retention will be greater when spread out over more days with roughly the same amount of time spent. So if you have the time to work on chess, do so, even if it is passive work. If you need to split up your time carefully, try to dedicate a regular amount of time – ideally two hours for maximum immersion if you can - to c hess every day. 5. Playing players 200-300 elo above you is optimal for improvement: This is an established idea from sports psychology. For instance, in most martial arts, competing with a fighter one rank above you makes putting in the attempt worthwhile, bec ause you still have a reasonable chance of succeeding. In essence, the attempt is not futile, but you get the maximum c hallenge and put in the most effort. In chess, playing someone one rank above you would be about 2 00 elo above you. 20 years ago, a statistician named Glickman published that chess players typically score just 73% when they are 200 elo higher-rated than their opponents. Recent reports by statistical chess analyst Jeff Sonas show that the same thing is just as true today. The expectation according to the e lo tables is 76%, meaning that the higher-rated player loses rating on average. Most people are not aware of this: if they simply play stronger players, they can gain elo by doing nothing. Yet playing 50 games against stronger players tends to increase a player’s playing strength by a lot, for players at almost any level. By playing 50 games against stronger players and analyzing them all in depth, it is not uncommon to see a player improve 100 rating points. Clearly you should seek out stronger opponents to play against. If you could have a training partner to play two times a week who is 200 or 300 elo stronger than you, reviewing the games with a coach or stronger player would gradually pull you closer and closer to your stronger opponent’s level. Most likely over time you will get quite familiar with your opponent’s thinking tendencies as well. Many of my 1800 students do this: they play training game after training game w ith 2100 players and we review the games together. After about 10 such training games, they usually getting really close to the other guy’s level and exploit almost all of his opening inaccuracies thanks to my advice for handling the opening. This kind of training also helps a lot with confidence, and makes you less afraid to face stronger opponents. An important and rather obvious point rarely mentioned in chess literature is t hat as humans we constantly adapt. One of the great things about playing stronger players is that over the course of many games, you will gradually learn to adapt and avoid many of the mistakes you made in the past. Adaptation versus stronger players is an enormous part of getting better. Mimicking stronger moves and a clearer thought process to your benefit are also side effects of these protracted matches. A typical advantage higher-rated players have over their o pponents is psychological. Once this advantage is gone, it dramatically helps the lower -rated player. In the Grandmaster norm tournaments I have played, the top-rated player lost rating points in approximately 90% of the tournaments. This was partially due to greater effort applied by the weaker players, but also due to chess being inherently somewhat drawish, and the lowest rated players in these events having a very strong psyche. 6. GM Aagaard’s three positional questions are very useful to think about at the board: In terms of questions to ask yourself during the game, I like the proposal of Grandmaster Aagaard in GM Pre p: Positional Play: (1) What are the weaknesses? (2) What is the opponent’s idea? (3) What is the worst-
placed piece? – a fourth very relevant question taken from the aforementioned The Method in Chess is to ask, “Who benefits from the exchange of queens?” One more thing that I like to ask myself (usually in the opening or a tense middlegame) is: What are the pawn breaks in a position? You would be surprised how many positions should be played by simply swinging an inactive rook towards the center because it was one side’s worst piece. I find that players under 160 0 typically have trouble with activating their rooks (especially when the rook is their worst-placed piece) in the early middlegame, or coming up with at least a broad plan for where to put them. It is amazing how many tactical exercises suddenly seem a lot easier when you simply scan the board for major weaknesses in the defending side’s position before you start thinking about co ncrete candidate moves. Since I grew up studying the books of IM Mark Dvoretsky, prophylaxis (and the opponent’s ideas) were always a natural part of my chess t hinking. For those who do not have so much classical chess knowledge, it may be quite counter-intuitive to think about the opponent’s threats consciously. Incorporating such questions in your thinking in long games has good potential to help right away. Asking such simple questions during a long game very often directs your attention and focus to the best candidate moves to consider. When I give e xercises to my students, I often find that professional players instantly consider the best move, while the m ain issue is that my students rated under 2000 usually simply do not consider it. I have seen firsthand that thinking through these questions is helpful and in many cases will highlight weaknesses, bad pieces, or threats that should be addressed in the position. 7. Try to consider multiple candidate moves on each move and consciously try to be aware of what you thought of after a game (making it much easier to learn from your games and thought process this way): This helps avoiding the cognitive bias of anchoring, which occurs when you latch onto the first piece of information you encounter. It is important to have multiple options to c hoose from, and to try to widely consider as many good options as possible. In terms of candidate move selection, it is important to consider all of the moves that may dramatically alter t he evaluation of a position. Often times there are quite few, and this makes the task easier. If x is the most active move, you have to look at it and come up with a concrete reason why it is not good if it looks like it's the only move that might change t he evaluation of the position. Once you establish a real reason (besides a vague one about dogma), then you can reject it. Most of the time when I give exercises to students, if they seriously consider the best move as a likely candidate, they usually get it right. The m ain issue seems to be meaningfully considering the correct move at all as a serious candidate. When players start playing, there is a tendency to just look at the board, find a move, and play it. It takes time to unlearn this, and focusing on thinking through multiple candidates is a good way to improve your conscious chess t hought. There is usually little time for this in blitz, which is a typical reason why longer games are much superior for optimal learning. As you practice recalling as much as you can about your own thoughts from your games while analyzing your games, you will continually improve your own understanding of your thoughts and correct a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings you had at the board. If you can list the main candidate moves you considered during the critical moments of your games, you can make a lot of headway into improving your move focus at the board. 8. If you blunder too much, practice scanning the board for undefended pieces or pawns to increase your awareness. You should also develop a mental strategy for coping with blunders: An easy task you can do in any position is to look around the board quickly to observe if any pieces or pawns are undefended. In a certain position, you may notice, say, a g7 pawn is undefended by performing this task that takes a couple of seconds. Such a simple awareness of observation may later cause yo u to spot a tactic or avoid losing material a few m oves down the road. If you start to notice that you tend to leave a
lot of pieces undefended for many moves in a row in your games, piece harmony may be a serious issue for you, since this happens relatively rarely in high level chess. When you blunder something and are emotionally rattled, it is important to try to calm yourself down and think as objectively as possible. Leaving the board, going on a brief walk around the playing hall, and taking a deep breath c an help a lot if you have the time on your clock to do so. When you get back to the board, try to notice the virtues of your position. Especially late in the game, a very common occurrence is that the defending side misses an opportunity to hold a worse position or create a fortress due to their own emotional collapse. Mental toughness needs to be developed here. If you can effectively cope with your blunders in a game, your later moves in those games will be better. As an example from my own personal experience, I had one tournament in which I lost to 7(!) Grandmasters in the same event. I made costly oversights in every single one of those games. The important thing was to recover after the error, learn as much as I possibly could from those games, adapt, and realize that every tournament I ever play in my life after that will be less painful. Moving forward, it was e asy to look ahead with confidence. 9. To improve your visualization of lines and ideas that you consider unseeable or o utside of your grasp, I recommend simply trying to visualize and conceptualize the difficult tactic or idea with your eyes closed: Many players feel like certain moves ar e outside of their grasp. For instance, from the game Nakamura-Carlsen, Zurich 2014: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1745310 many players might feel like 37. Qf1! b5 38. Rxh7! is a tactical idea outside of the ir ability. But if you play through the winning variations to their completion and try t o close your eyes and just envision the winning motif and sequence, you will realize that it is not actually so difficult to grasp. Note that t his is significantly easier than solving a tactic blindfolded because in those cases you need to keep the position in your mind and actively problem solve. In this case, you merely need to play out the pattern in your mind so as to visualize and conceptualize it. For very difficult ideas in chess that are startling or surprising to me, I like to do this. It actually does not take very long and gets easier the more that you do it. Ideas and moves that seem shocking or impossible to find with logic at the board only appear that way due to lack of familiarity with similar concepts. This simple exercise helps cement difficult patterns in your mind and make sense of them. 10. Doubled pawns and isolated pawns (specifically central) are not always weaknesses; weaknesses are usually not weak unless they can actually be ex ploited: It is important to point out that isolated pawns are not always weaknesses like many amateurs believe. With an isolated queen pawn (IQP), usually you will have two half-open files adjacent to the pawn (the e- and c-files) and it is ideal to put rooks there, and try to achieve as much piece activity as possible to compensate for the I QP. Typically things work out well for the side with the IQP when he is able to create direct mating threats, maintain consistent pressure, or advance the isolated pawn forward so as to make use of greater development and activity. The side playing against the isolated pawn has two main str ategies: to target the pawn directly, or to try to restrict its movement by firmly controlling the square in front of the pawn. Having queens off the board generally makes it easier to put pressure on the isolated pawn, because the side with the IQP gets less attacking chances. Typically the side with the isolated central pawn wants to keep as many pieces on the board for maximum chances of activity, although there are some interesting ex ceptions where trading rooks makes it easier for the attacking side. There is often a dynamic balance and an isolated pawn is not necessarily a bad thing, because of the activity you can often obtain on t he open files and with your active pieces. Having a large number (three or more) o f isolated pawns really does start to influence the evaluation of the position a lot, but having one o r two isolated pawns is usually not such a bad thing. Many players are taught to value pawn islands and count w hich player has more of them. It turns out
that being aware of the amount of pawn islands for each side has very minimal practical value, and there are very few logical rules you can attach to it. With isolated pawns though, having a large amount of them will almost certainly devalue your pawns overall. When people discuss isolated pawns, this important point is almost never mentioned. Having a couple of isolated pawns is usually not a problem when you have an isolated d-pawn and, say, an isolated a-pawn, because most of the time the a-pawn is not a part of the play in any way and does not affect the evaluation of the position. In many cases, backward pawns (pawns that cannot advance without being captured by a pawn and losing material) are actually weaker than both non-backward doubled pawns and isolated pawns. It is important to think about these concepts loosely and flexibly and try to develop an understanding of the game that allows you to concretely judge pawn structures in an intelligent way. Letting go of dogmatic views about weaknesses helps in taking a major step forward towards becoming a better player. Most players are taught to not move pawns in front of their king. In fact, this is often a very counterproductive rule that prevents players from making decisions on a case -by-case basis in a more open-minded way. It is often a conceptual question: Should I let the opponent get a strong knight on c4 or should I play b3? Should I let the opponent get a strong knight on f4 or should I play g3? You have to weigh the pros and cons, but in an awful lot of cases, no actual weakness is created, especially from a modest move like g3. There is just a bias among amateur players that you shouldn't push pawns in front of your king. This bias prevents them from using simple concret e logic in the position at hand. Keep in mind that g2 -g3 only potentially weakens two squares (f3 and h3), as opposed to g2-g4 which potentially weakens four squares (f3, f4, h3, and h4). It is a category error to think the same way about pushes of g3 and g4 conceptually, but players taught to not push pawns in front of their kings may not learn or think about the difference. Even then, it is vital if those weaknesses can actually be exploited. 11. In terms of objective advantages, focus on static advantages that have real meaning; the initiative or “an attack” does not constitute a real advantage (those are temporary advantages that have the potential to turn into long-term advantages). If you c laim you are objectively better because of your initiative, realize that it needs to turn into something concrete: Too often players suggest that t hey are better because they have an attack. A lot of the time, their attack has no actual focal point and it is really an optical illusion. This happens especially often when the defending side has no structural weaknesses. Thus, a player claims he is better , a few moves are played, and no material is won or structural damage caused and the position remains balanced. This makes little sense. If you focus on stat ic factors in your objective evaluations, it is much easier to follow your line of thought, your reasoning, and to verify your claims and beliefs. More reasonable would be to say somet hing along the lines of, “I have the potential to create threats here. This is a temporary advantage known as the initiative. Perhaps it might turn into a static advantage.” Focusing on and effectively grasping the statics and fundamentals in a position increases your positional understanding. Realize that evaluating positions is extremely important because strong players evaluate the position on every move and in every line they calculate, to decide which move to go for. In evaluating positions, stronger players tend to say, “I don’t know” much more often than their lower-rated counterparts. Does this mean that strong players really do not know the evaluations of positions well? No. It just means that generally they have chosen to have a flexible view about their beliefs until they are more certain. In actuality, usually Grandmasters are excellent at narrowing down the likely evaluation of the position to a narrow r ange of one or two possible evaluations, and thus get their evaluations wrong much less frequently than weaker players due to having a more open-minded perspective based on concrete things t hat they can prove. Exercises asking you to simply evaluate a position are very good at developing your evaluation skills and figuring out what factors in a position you tend to overlook or overemphasize.
12. There are three things you can do with an extra pawn: use it to try to attack the opponent’s king, use it to try to win more of the opponent’s material, or use it to queen a pawn. If you are completely unable to do any of those things (even in the distant future), the extra pawn m ight not mean anything in the position: Being up a small amount of material very rarely causes the game to win itself by force, and to be successful, you need to make use of it in other ways. In the first instance, you simply use the extra material to overpower your opponent, attack their king, and win the game. In the second instance, you use the extra material to win more of the opponent's material and eventually the game. In the third instance, you use your superior force to help you queen a pawn to win t he game. These are the three things you can do when up material and t rying to win based purely on your material superiority. This simple way of thinking about the problem helps us understand why e xchanging pawns when up material is generally not the best idea: this gives the opponent more potentially drawable or holdable pawnless positions to aim for, and gives you less potential to queen a pawn. Additionally, fewer pawns on the board means you have less attacking resources. W hen you are up material and considering making exchanges, it is very logical to ask yourself, "Does this exchange help me attack the opponent's king, win material later, or potentially queen a pawn?" If the answer is no to all of them, then the exchange is almost certainly going to ease the opponent's defense. Evaluating exchanges in these situations is actually not so difficult to understand when you frame it from t his perspective. These questions are also helpful when evaluating whether to go for a piece exchange in an endgame when you have the advantage.
13. Solidity – You cannot lose a chess games w ithout making a mistake. Make your strong opponents force you to make mistakes. Many amateurs go into chess wanting to be an unstoppable force when it's better to go in as the immovable object: It is important to understand that chess games are not wo n or lost without at least one mistake being made. There is always a clear lesson to be learned from any decisive game. There has been a recent trend causing players to generally play more solidly, as opposed to attacking wildly and impulsively in a swashbuckling manner like many players did one hundred years ago. This recent trend is partially due to the influence of good coaches and much bet ter opening play. After all, coaches rarely suggest playing bad opening lines and most good openings do not involve taking an insanely high amount of risk. This usually leads to a relatively solid position that allows you to play with a certain level of mistake tolerance. In some openings, a few inaccuracies c an be permitted without losing the game outright due to a high inaccuracy tolerance. When players try to crush their opponents, they tend to lose sight of the opponent’s ideas or the more fundamental aspects of the position, like the central pawn structure’s influence on the evaluation of the position. Tal Syndrome is a problem for many players: trying to mimic Tal’s legendary attacks, even when their positions do not merit aggressive play of that sort at all. I t is also important to note that generally solid play tends to make your position easy to play. A position being easy to play means that you w ill make less mistakes in it, which is important, because we only lose chess games by making mistakes. This is precisely why strong players generally hate it when their weaker opponents head for solid, drawish positions. In the past, players had almost no solidity and 2300s lost without a fight generally to 2500 players in the 90s. The single biggest change in modern chess is that 2100-2300 players are now significantly harder to beat, in large part due to not being wild hackers who outrageously weaken themselves the w ay many did in the 90s. Especially in the opening, strong players work hard to avoid forced draws, or being forced to e nter very drawish endgames. That's what most of my work is aimed at preventing when I help strong G randmasters with opening preparation.
14. Consistency in playing good moves is the most important thing i n chess. You don’t need to play brilliantly to play good chess; Carlsen stressed the importance o f playing a lot of good moves ("I would just like to play 400 good moves in my match against Anand") above all else: Few players understand that chess players on average play 200 elo weaker from moves 30 through 40 in classical games. This is usually due to time pressure, but shows that c onsistency is a major issue for chess players in ge neral. I remember thinking early in my chess life that good chess was about playing brilliant double exclamation mark Grandmaster moves that I saw in books. Later I realized this was a huge exaggeration, and is mostly an idea put out there by people selling tactics books. The main thing to understand is t hat Grandmasters simply play a lot more good, sound moves than we aker players do. The emphasis is not on brilliance, but on soundness and quality. Part of improving your chess competence is improving your consistency. Many chess books give off the impression that you need to play insanely deep moves to win games, showing examples where purportedly you have to see three brilliant moves in a line that is ten ply deep to be able to play the move you want to play. This is in fact extremely rare, and only a tiny fraction of elite chess ability. When I actually analyze a lot of these examples, very o ften the author (sometimes even a Grandmaster), makes a massive err or already on the second move in the calculation. A lot of the time, the first move of these examples c an be played based on simple logic or process of elimination, despite the fact that the author tries to give you the idea that you need to see something you don’t have to see. Thus, the narrative that you needed to spot a phenomenal te n move line merely serves to confuse the chess student, embarrass the author, and give completely the wrong emphasis and focus for playing good chess. The emphasis should clearly be on consistently playing good moves. 15. I ask myself 5 helpful questions after a game to understand clearly what ha ppened: After tournament games, I like to run through these questions to better understand the game, what happened, and how I can improve from it: 1. Who won the opening battle and why? 2. What were the key moments of the game? 3. What large errors or blunders were made and why? 4. What positional errors were made? 5. Could the pawn structure have been profitably changed by either side? Another valid question to ask yourself after a game is, “Where could I have saved thinking time?” I like to write down the thinking time used on moves I spent the most time on and ask myself later if any of those thinks wer e unjustified. Such a process may help you save a lot of time in future games. Typically after games our thoughts are quite c haotic. Thinking through these questions afterwards helps add a lot of structure to your internal thoughts and prevents players from c reating selfserving narratives about their games. The most common narrat ive to describe a loss is that the game was lost due to only one error . Certainly this is true in some cases, but far too often it is used as an excuse to not look at the game objectively and learn from one’s errors. These questions help you develop a good understanding of the opening phase of your games, t he critical moments, the positional mistakes, and the flexible ways that pawn str uctures can be handled in your own games. Note that question 5 is different from question 4. A profitable pawn structure change may be equivalent to the game move played and thus not necessarily an improvement over the game objectively, but c ould be worthwhile for purely psychological or practical reasons. It enriches your positional understanding in a general sense to be aware of different ways you can reasonably alter the nature and structure of the position.
16. Chess has many facets – avoid neglecting important aspects of chess strength: Playing chess (and different pockets of chess improvement) can be classified into 5 categories: 1. Concrete knowledge 2. Pattern recognition 3. Calculation 4. Positional understanding 5. Logic. An emphasis can be placed on the last two aspects, which help out tremendously in every phase of chess. I primarily focus on improving the logic and positional understanding of my students. Nevertheless, developing players should try to make sure that they are improving in all of those areas. If you sense that you are specifically weak in any category, you can adjust y our training accordingly. Concrete knowledge refers to specific positions in openings or endgames. Pattern recognition refers to specific patterns of moves, such as tactical motifs like forks. One of the many important reasons for analyzing your games is to saturate your mind with good patterns that you may recall, rather than reinforcing incorrect ideas and bad patterns. You can easily reinforce bad ideas and patterns if you do not analyze your games in which you made a lot of misjudgments and misevaluations that you still think are correct because you did not check them. Calculation refers to the variations that you try to work o ut at the board. Positional understanding refers to your grasp of positional concepts and ideas, such as those relating to pawn structures and the evaluation of positions based on static factors. Logic aids you in applying all of these things besides concrete knowledge, which is an ex act application of concrete moves. One of the reasons why studying games collections and playing and analyzing your own games are optimal is because they hit all five of these categories, and nearly every other form of chess lear ning does not. Calculation is improved the most by simply playing, because in a real tournament game, typically you are sitting at the board calculating non-stop for 4 hours. We hardly ever do any c alculation this intense in any other setting. Most of t he positional understanding I developed was from studying and playing games, and understanding how the structures influenced the positions being played. From these categories, it is easy to see how multi-faceted chess is: Too many amateurs fall into the trap of thinking everything is based on deep calculation and that Gr andmasters are seeing an unreasonable amount of moves ahead. The reason why elite Grandmasters can often penetrate right into t he heart of a position in a few seconds is act ually due to a deep understanding of the important aspects of the position influencing the evaluation. Their tr emendous positional understanding and grasp of nuance provides them with clear logical guidance as to where to look, and how the position likely stands. Developing one’s evaluative skills and positional understanding should not be underestimated, and are extremely vital in making good judgments quickly. 17. Below 2000, the emphasis should be on developing competency in different areas: Initially chess is largely about localizing simple processes. This means rapidly developing your ability in the process of seeing simple threats, and making simple tactics become subconscious and automatic. I have yet to work with a player who did not c omprehend simple tactics, so it was purely a m atter of lack of familiarity and not enough games played if they struggled with them. Although I have tried to refrain from analogies throughout this book to give the most concrete possible statements about chess, I will share one here. An International Master who is an e steemed chess coach likes the analogy to dr iving. He says, “You can compare localizing simple processes in chess with driving. When you learn to drive, initially you just need to practice enough to press the break and accelerator and steering automatically. And in the c ase of manual, changing gears. This process becomes subconscious only by driving.” It is important to understand that getting better at chess is mostly based on improving your awareness in many areas: tactical awareness, positional awareness, sensing weaknesses and bad pieces, sensing danger, sensing urgency, sensing critical moments, r ecognizing solidity, and being aware of what you are trying to achieve in various positions. Strong players sense these things significantly better than players rated a few hundred points below them. At lower levels, developing basic competency with common tactical patterns and simpler motifs and ideas is of paramount importance. Deeper ideas like a
well-defined sense of danger or grasping the only idea to play for in certain complex positions can come later through experience once you have developed a good base. 18. Commitment devices are very he lpful in chess, and a coach is a good e xample of one: A commitment device is anything that helps you stay committed to the game, and acts in some sense as something that keeps you invested in the game. Having an excellent computer for chess was a big step forward for me, and motivated me to work on chess a lot. Having really nice chess sets at home additionally added to my motivation, and spurred me on to analyze as much as possible using those sets. When I worked toge ther with players, it was almost always best to work in the context of a coach and student relationship so that we organized times better, and committed ourselves more to using our time optimally. When committed to a couple of hours of serious coaching a week, you will always get in at least the minimum time you want to devote to chess. As a brief note about children, in my experience, children who have no coaching simply give up the game as so much of it remains a mystery to them. That’s a shame because playing may have improved their general learning skills and structured thinking. Chess to some degree is a mysterious game. When relatively inexperienced students study with e ngines, there are many simple things they don't understand that a coach can clarify. There is also a natural placebo effect (increased confidence for one, increased energy and m otivation for others) in working with a coach. For players who are not ultra-serious about the game, they may easily just drop it without structured learning as a staple o f their chess diet. Young players who play the game are much less likely to get obsessed about chess books and the literature the way I was, and can drop out much more easily. 19. Keep notepads near your working space to write down important chess questions you have about anything (positional questions, opening questions, or anything in general you want to make sure you do not forget about): I recommend writing down the key points mentioned here on a notepad (spec ifically the questions to ask during a game and directly after a game – the piece values can be quickly internalized by review). I keep one notepad next to my computer for opening que stions I have. I keep another notepad for other chess-related questions (often positional) that I have. Write things down immediately if you have questions, because you may have a lot of them and they will probably just slip your mind if you do not write them down right away. 20. Effort applied is the number one predictor of success across various fields, including chess. Study and do things that will keep your effort level at a maximum: Perseverance is a better predictor of success than ability or talent according to many sources, such as the 2015 book Grit. That re search applies to chess quite well too, and I was able to achieve more in chess than some of my more talented acquaintances through determination, huge amounts of effort and consistent hard wo rk. Part of the reason why playing is so important is that your e ffort level will be at its highest. Outside of games, if you feel that you are not putting enough effort into the game, try to plan and execute a strategy for maximizing effort. My effort is maximized by focusing on tasks and trying to complete them. This can be applied to what you do both on and off the board. Off the board, commitment devices help me apply more effort and be eager to study and work on the game. At the board, the general chess work I have done at home and in my opening analysis helps me more eagerly put in more effort. Most players make the most gains when they are just interested in a particular book or topic. This is closely connected to how much effort you will put in. That is exactly why it's good to find players, analysts, and playing styles you like the best and put effort into studies in that direction. For the vast majority of players, working on technical and t heoretical endgames is extremely boring, and causes them to burn out due to the fact that they're not too interesting and barely even applicable. Whereas
when I was training and picked up a book like Development of a Grandmaster by Michael Adams (a very light book), I studied the 150 page book in a week because I was really interested in it. 21. Task-oriented motivation is best for chess players. Task-oriented players persist at tasks longer and are more confident: Ideally you would be task-involved, as in interested in your chess work for its own qualities. This tends to lead to greater intrinsic motivation. Task-oriented players are less threatened by failure because their ego is not as tied to outcomes, but more closely aimed at achieving mastery and having maximum enjoyment. Ego-oriented players tend to take losses more personally. When I think about the reactions of non-improving titled players I have seen after games, this is especially true when I think about the outbursts I have seen. Ego-or iented competitors also have a tendency to set unrealistically high or low goals so that they can have an excuse if they do not reach their goals. Taskoriented players on the other hand persist at tasks longer and are more confident. Chess players who have confidence issues especially should try to become much more task-oriented. A task-oriented approach specifically at the board could be to simply focus on t he three Aagaard positional questions, to consciously consider multiple good candidate moves, and to try to think consciously at the board as well as possible. In my case, if I can succeed at this task, I feel good about my games. W hen players have poor results with a result-oriented focus, they may simply quit. If they enjoy the process and the training, they will probably stick to it. Approach your goals in tiny pieces that are within reac h. Take small steps every day towards to become the player you want to be. 22. Your training should mimic a real rated game as closely as possible: It is no surprise that playing is the best way to get better. That is what we are rated in after all, and where the bulk of our experience comes from. It is the same across practically every sport: you should focus on mimicking real event conditions as closely as you can to perform t he best in your events. Things that have an artificial fee l to them tend to have less help than you might expect if you are not aware of this. Similarly, in analysis, you should mimic professional analytical conditions as closely as you can. This would mean avoiding analysis sessions with non-serious players or in large groups where people are fooling around. It is worthwhile to point out that joint analysis with other players can be m ore physically tiring than playing, due to constantly moving the pieces and having to re -orient yourself to all of the new positions that come up on the board very rapidly. When working with a coach, after three hours, it is mentally draining to constantly adjust, take in all of the new positions, and grasp as much as possible because it is so much information flying at you at once. This is one ex planation for why playing a four hour game may be less tiring than analyzing for three hours. If you are tired in analysis, passive learning is fine. Playing blitz has very minimal benefits for beginners and generally players under 1800. The main thing you will benefit from those games is learning the types of tactical blunders you are making and getting a basic feel for the positions, but that is only if you properly analyze those games in some sense, such as running automated blunderchecks on 10 games at once after playing a series. The simple fact is that basically no beginners do that, so the se blitz games just end up being an enormous waste of time. Playing blitz games and clearly blitzing out moves quickly to try to win on time is a very bad strategy for any player that wants to get better. That time would be much better spent playing 45 minute games. Amateur players also need to take longer to understand fundamental aspects of a position, so it is logical that they should gain a lot less from playing fast games. At my level or even lower around 2200, it can make sense to play blitz to test out openings and get in some good games against Grandmasters. After all, above 2200 strength, hardly any players play longer than 15 minutes online, so f or training with long games there is basically not even an option to do so. Players under 2000 will not have an issue finding a similar strength (or 200-300 e lo higher) player to play at any given time of day on the online servers ICC and PlayChess (and perhaps e ven chess24) for 15, 25, or even 45 minute games. The longer games the better, as they allow you to actually think deeply about the positions you are playing and
develop your basic evaluative and calculating skills and ability. As an amateur, your national chess rating is based on games not played under these conditions (blitz) and is what people tend to judge your strength by, so it would only make se nse to practice under similar conditions and hone your calculating, evaluative, and logical skills to be able to play as well as possible in that time control. 23. Try to enjoy the experience of playing and studying as much as possible: This sounds as cliché as, “Have fun!” but my point is more nuanced than that. When players are defending bad positions and clearly not liking it, they tend to despair and play more weakly. As I improved my defensive ability and got more experience, I started to play a lot more confidently and have more fun, even in worse positions. While I stress the importance off the board of urgently patching up your weakest are as and analyzing pressing matters first at any given time, in the long run, you will want to get into the habit of studying the kinds of things that give you the g reatest stimulation and enjoyment. Studying what you like allows you to not deplete your willpower too much, and even helps build it up again if you're having fun. Since there are so many different aspects of chess, there is always something fun to work on unless you are completely drained mentally. It is important to find out what makes you enjoy the game the most. While the chess study tasks that give you the most satisfaction are usually person-specific, playing great games and gaining rating points make everyone feel good. People also tend to fee l best when they are well-rested and have plenty of e nergy. Creating good habits before tournament games like preparing for your opponent (without tiring yourself out), taking a walk, and not eating too much are likely to increase your enjoyment at the board. At the very least, try to get plenty of sleep the night before tournament games, and go into each game with the clear intention of playing the best game of your career.
