Improving Your Chess

If you are just starting out in chess, focus on playing many enjoyable games and developing your board vision. Otherwise, read on!

Most players waste time studying things that rarely decide their games. The goal of training is simple: work on the things that affect, or are expected to affect, your results.

How do you know what those things are? 

Review your games. They can be slow games or blitz games.

Personal game review is the foundation of a chess education. In fact, chess improvement largely comes down to playing games and reviewing them. If a recurring weakness appears, train for that weakness specifically. In this sense, your games write your training program.

How should you review your games? 

By following GM Noël Studer's 3x3 method. First, use a chess engine (e.g., Stockfish) to identify up to three of your own game-changing mistakes. Then—for each mistake, ask yourself three questions:

1. What was my idea?
2. Why is my idea wrong?
3. How is the alternative better?

Once you do this for up to three mistakes, extract just one lesson from the game.

Over time, patterns will emerge. Certain weaknesses will appear again and again. Once you identify them, you can add targeted exercises to your training.

Before consulting the engine, I would personally try to find at least one mistake and one improvement on my own. If I can discover a better idea independently, then I have already improved. But you need not do this, especially if we are talking blitz games.

To reiterate: by reviewing your games, your training program writes itself.

Following this process leads to a remarkable conclusion. All (not most, but all) amateurs need serious work on their cognitive vision, because cognitive errors account for a large percentage of decisive mistakes. Cognitive vision consists of three branches:

1. Alertness
2. Tactical vision
3. Deep calculation

Alertness means mental clarity. It is the ability to not miss basic moves under pressure, whether that be time pressure or psychological pressure. Alertness is an underrated skill, and I recently improved my chess.com blitz rating from 2250 to 2350 largely by training it. 

You train alertness by solving a high volume of simple puzzles below your level. To this end, I like to use blitztactics. Why not Puzzle Rush? Because the patterns are too stereotypical, and alertness is more about raw cognition than memorizing patterns.

Tactical vision is pattern recognition. It is probably the most important branch of cognitive vision because it rewires the brain to think in ways that are useful for chess. In other words, tactical vision changes not merely what you know, but how you think. Consequently, it governs the efficiency of both alertness and calculation. 

The best ways to train tactical vision are to study opening traps, solve puzzles, and play practice games using highly tactical openings. There are many good puzzle books, but I prefer to use chesstempo by solving puzzles on blitz hard mode.

Deep calculation is the ability to visualize and foresee forced continuations. It requires a willingness to mentally suffer; you should train your calculation skills with the highest cognitive workload imaginable. Calculation abilities are especially important in longer time controls. Just about every serious book on calculation is useful. I once solved all the level 0–2 exercises from GM Jacob Aagaard's Practical Chess Defence and gained roughly 150 rating points across my next three USCF tournaments. The book caps out at level 3, and I have not yet worked through those exercises.

Is playing chess blindfolded good for training hard calculations? Yes, but it is equally painful—which defeats the purpose of playing training games—and it has no advantage over deep calculation puzzles. Just make sure to solve those puzzles from your head.

No matter who you are or where you stand in your chess journey, train your tactical vision by solving puzzles 5–6 days a week for about 15–30 minutes. You should not go longer than that unless you can recall your thought process and extract a lesson from each puzzle. The stronger and more active a chess player you become, the more information you can retain and the more time you can profitably devote to puzzle solving.

Afterwards, choose between playing and reviewing games against challenging players or working on a target area such as alertness or deep calculation. 

Of course, not all target areas deal with cognitive vision. Indeed, strategy, opening theory, endgame theory, and technique are important target areas that I haven't discussed. The higher your level, the more you have to make the most out of your position. But cognitive vision is more important insofar that it will explain a far greater number of results in your own games.

Ultimately, improvement is a matter of learning from your mistakes. But the mistakes that matter change as you get stronger. A beginner and a master lose games for different reasons. Consequently, training becomes increasingly personal. The stronger you become, the less universal advice matters and the more personal advice matters.

In the end, your training program writes itself.