In every game I've played, there's always been some sort of idea or epiphany that elevated my skill level quickly. Take poker for example (keep in mind I started during the Party Poker days):

After struggling for months, I stumbled upon twoplustwo and learned about "continuation betting." By merely implementing this concept, I jumped from NL25 to NL100 within a month. Then I struggled for another couple months before reading about the "Shania" metaphor in a really strange twoplustwo post. After understanding this concept, I crushed everyone and played NL400 within two months. And then I learned everything involved with 4-betting, and played NL600...etc etc

However, in chess I feel like I've gotten nowhere. I've played 800 games and my rating (on Yahoo no less), is 1369. It's embarrassing to dedicate so much time to something, yet seemingly hardly make any progress. Something is holding me back from jumping through the early levels, but I can't figure it out. I'm hoping you guys can describe something you learned that took you from 1200 to 1400, or 1600 to 1800.

This ended up being longer than I intended, but hopefully I made myself clear (I originally was going to include a bunch of different games to make my point, but it would be way too long).

Tactics tactics tactics.

I think the easiest way to see this is to get a strong chess program: fritz, rybka, whatever. Give yourself queen odds and try to win, and win convincingly as in the program has zero chances. Then try to do it with rook odds, bishop odds, then knight odds, then two pawn odds.

You'll find somewhere along there, and probably pretty close to rook odds, that you just keep losing. The only reason is tactics. If you did nothing but get your pieces developed and slowly trade material - you'd win easily. But you can't do this without tactics. And the only way to improve at tactics is to do tactics problems, lots of them, and then do them again.

I mean if you became the world's foremost expert on utilizing an isolated d pawn, or if you could recite all of ECO, by heart, forwards and backwards, or if you were the world's foremost expert on rook endings, it would mean nothing without the tactics to convert a simple winning position into a win. On the other hand, if you were a tactical beast but absolutely terrible at the opening, endgame, strategy and pretty much everything but tactics - you'd still be a very dangerous opponent. As evidenced by the earlier computer programs.

Please do, this is not NVG, no tl;dr bullcrap

as to your question, to be completely honest, I have no clue how to answer it. I just cannot clearly distinguish something that brought me up to another level. It would just sort of come together at some point and bam, I was playing much better than before.

However one thing I can say - if you are ONLY playing and not analyzing your games after you play them, you will never improve a lot. When you analyze your games with someone better than you (coach, Rybka, whatever), it might seem to you that you aren't learning anything because you do not produce better short-term results. However, and I am saying this from my own experience, even though you might now "know" that you learned something, all that useful stuff stays somewhere in your subconsciousness and then at some point, without even consciously knowing it, you start doing it. At least that's what happened to me, maybe others have something better to say

Also, Dire, could you please once and for all clearly define "tactics" for me. I have a strange feeling that maybe we use this word differently in Lithuania

Hmmm the definition of tactics. I suppose I would define tactics simply as the calculation of concrete variations. As in, "White to move and win." Ok, 1. Bxh7+ Kxh7 2. Ng5+ Kg6 3. Qd3+ f5 4. exf+ Kh6 6. Qh7# But I'd also include more general board vision in tactics. Leaving a piece en prise being a 1 move tactical blunder.

Basically the counter part to strategy.

I figured out that I play much better without distractions like tv. I also stopped resigning everytime I lost significant material, even very good players(compared to me at least) hang pieces and leave themselves open to mate. Playing d4 has greatly improved my middlegame from **** to meh.

I don't know if there is such a thing in chess, but if I had to come up with a saying, it would be Fischer's "Tactics flow from a superior position." Tactics really are the thing that makes the difference here. You need to learn all the types of tactics and learn to recognize them in games.

But to tie in the quote, I find that following it helps to set up your tactics. That is, putting your pieces on good squares and commanding space gives you a good position from which you can actually use all the tactics you've learned about.

Play over the games of Morphy and Anderssen and the other old players (and maybe Tal too, but maybe he'd hurt your game instead?). It will help you see the tactics applied to real games and also show you how they place pieces in the right spots.

Then, what I did at some point, was start playing the King's Gambit as white. For the cost of just 1 pawn, you get easy development, control of the center, and a space advantage. You'll be so nicely set up that you'll have almost no choice but to play tactically. Or, you can be put on the defensive, but then the idea is that you see the tactics from your opponent's point of view. And definitely go over your games later or else you'll hardly learn anything from them.

But don't worry about actually applying my advice. I'm sure it's wrong and someone will say so soon...

As everyone else has said: tactics, tactics, tactics.

http://chesstempo.com is the best online tool I've found to practice them.

i went from like 850 uscf to 1500 in 4 months after reading a book, forget the title, of like 50 aaron nimzovich games with all the key moves explained and playing it out move by move on a real life board.

I had quit chess at a young age when I wasn't winning or getting better. When slightly older, my brother convinced me to get back into it, and took me to a local tournament. After winning my first two games, I got paired up against another young kid who my brother was familiar with, so he showed me a good line to play against this gimmicky opening the kid played (I don't quite remember what it was). I ended up crushing the kid thanks to that, won my section in the tournament, which in turn got me back into the game.

I can't say I specifically learned something, but it was definitely the event that propelled me to playing on a national level.

/ot story

When my son was just a kid I thought it would be good to teach him the game so I bought a few strat books and I ended up getting hooked on the game. I didn't start playing until I was in my early 30s and only got up to around 1400.

Then poker came along and I havent played in a few years. This xmas I got an Iphone and seems a ton of chess apps are available so Im getting back into it again. (bought the shredder app)

My plan is to work through chesstactics.org to get started on improving my game.

I feel like this happens to a lot of people, with different books. Just immersing yourself in studying a bunch of annotated top-level games should help you a lot. The traditional thing to do is to play through the games of the champions of the distant past, Morphy, Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine perhaps in that order before looking at more modern games.

Dire, tactics I hear what you're saying, but one big thing holding me back is knowing what to do in even middle games. What usually happens at my level is that my opponent and I will crank out 12 or so standard opening moves, and then have no clue what to do next. Then one player will make a mistake, the other guy will jump on it, and usually win (though restealing is still common at my level). "Tactics, tactics, tactics" is important for jumping on those mistakes and putting myself into a situation to use tactics, but you can't always force tactics, and a move that potentially sets up a devastating tactic is not always the optimal move. I'm talking about positions like:



Obviously that's an extreme example, but I think you get the idea. Most tactics training sites put you in a position where a 2 or 3 move combo wins you a piece or mates. While being able to convert in those scenarios is very important, learning how to forcibly put yourself in those scenarios is not easy.

I think "tactics" is too easy and answer. I mean, it's definitely correct -- probably close to 100% of my games contain an essentially tactical oversight by me or my opponent. It's very hard to play so accurately that one denies all possible counterplay against a decent opponent, but often those tactical resources are hard to find.

In my own development, probably understanding the importance of the initiative, space, and planning in winning were the biggest steps. That and going into every game with the intention to win it, trying to find the best moves in every position, and always playing the ideas I couldn't refute myself.

It's really quite useful to play against and discuss things with humans -- there are a lot of parts of chess that are hard to learn just from computer analysis. Books can do a pretty good job, but having someone explain to you why your middlegame plan was terrible -- and what a better one might have been, is pretty indispensable. Resist the temptation to play over a game, notice the tactical reason why you lost, and not try to learn more. There were probably other important strategic mistakes as well, though these are harder to isolate with just a computer.

"Simple" things like what plans make the most sense for a given pawn structure and why it's a bad idea to have pawns on the same color as one's bishop (and when it's not), when to trade pieces...

The whole point of tactics isn't learning a bunch of tricks to mate in 3 or whatever but to improve your board vision, particularly with regard to spotting weaknesses, and learn common themes. I mean all tactics come down to one of two things:

1. Double attack. You attack two weaknesses simultaneously and your opponent can only defend one, so you win.

2. Attack double. You attack one weakness with more material than your opponent can muster to guard it, so you win.

Like in that position you offered, it's obviously dead drawn with decent play. But that doesn't mean there aren't chances especially when there probably won't be decent play. The first thing you need to do is like in any tactics problem, figure out where the weaknesses are and target them. If there aren't any immediate weaknesses, then create them.

So here is how I look at that position. First off, white probably made some big mistakes in the opening. You don't get dead positions like this unless you allow them, but whatever. Okay so what's the "natural" plan? Well the rooks are inactive so the obvious idea would be to put rooks on the d and e files, but what's that accomplish? Not much. They can't really penetrate on the 7th unless black falls asleep. Ok, well if I'm going to think of doing anything but putting my rooks on those files, I better make sure black can't crush me by doing the exact same thing. Ok, if black puts a rook on the d file - no problem, my f3 knight covers d2 so it's not going anywhere. What if he puts one on e8? Oooo. Not so good, the e2 square is weak. We need to take care of that. Ok, we'll get to that, but first let's come up with some plan to create weaknesses too.

Hmmm that c6 pawn sure is pretty awkward. It's a weakness with no real purpose on the queenside. Can I take advantage of it? Yes I can! I can play a4 planning simply a5/a6. Black will have to deal with that somehow, and that will create more weaknesses I can attack. Awesome!

So let's shore up our position and then get to creating weaknesses. Since I'm planning to play a4/etc, I want to keep my a file rook stationary backing up my ambitious a pawn. So I'm going to move my f rook to guard the e2 square. The natural square is e1, but then black can play Re8 and that's annoying since I want to keep my a rook stationary and if I play 2. Rxe8 Rxe8 I still have to cover with e2 square with something like Kf1 and I want to get to creating weaknesses asap. So after thinking all of this through, I play 1. Rfd1! So yes I still have to play Kf1 after Re8, but at least I keep more material on the board and if black plays the more likely Rad8, I can play 2. Rxd8 Rxd8 3. a4 and immediately get on with my plan.

So in many ways the way I get to the idea of 1. Rfd1 is purely tactical. I want to create weaknesses and I want to do it as fast as possible. No deep Steinitzian horse restriction, no classical endgame king centralization. Just a plain ole blunt force plan to attack. And it may not even be the best plan, but that doesn't really matter. Some plan is always a million times better than no plan.

i really hope you don't mean that or i'm pretty sure you turn into what we in germany call "Eislauf-Mutter" (figure skate mother).

I've seen countless of these games when i supervised Junior chess championships at the weaker levels (U14 federal state championships e.g.). Many games would go like 1.e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. Nc3 Nf6 5. h3 0-0 6. d3 d6 7.0-0 h6 and so on. Then when all pieces are out and all Rook's Pawns have moved one square no one knew what to do.

There's several reasons: firstly it's actually not that easy to find good active plans in these beginner's openings. And secondly they don't have studied master games with respect to seeing what possible plans are. And even if they had plans, most games would still be decided by tactical blunders so the outcome of the games would often not be assigned to finding and pursuing a good plan.

So to get better as a beginner: Study old classical games, the plans are often more clearly defined than in this computer-assisted tactical mess modern chess can look like And practise tactical motives.

how is bradpitt not ip banned yet?

I have to strongly agree with YouKnowWho, analyzing your games will help the most. Playing openings that fit your style is also important. When starting out, I suggest playing a vast amount of openings with a large enough sample size to know if you like that opening. Once you find those, study them.

My first USCF rating was 1600, I didn't start until I was a senior in high school (no school team, I had to travel and play as an independent). I didn't know anything about chess clubs. I played obscure openings. I changed to sharp lines like the Sicilian and immediately hit 1800. After studying openings in depth, I passed the 2000 barrier. Read lots of books. Know your endings. I'm a very poor man's Tal. I love to sacrifice for super sharp positions even if unsound. I often find that I miss a setup move and my attack fizzles just enough to lose. Analyzing my play helped me see what I could do better. It's hard to explain, but after awhile, a move just feels right without seeing concrete variations. It's at this point when instinct becomes the best part of your game.

If you are playing classic time controls (highly recommended), take the extra time when the position becomes complex. If you only play on Yahoo, try a real tournament at your local chess club. The two hours you spend studying your game and every move is far move valuable than endless blitz games when your intuition hasn't developed yet.

Since I gave my history, I'll finish. My rating passed 2200 my freshman year in college, but I quit playing due to time constraints. That was 20 years ago. I play blitz daily online and a live tournament once every 2 or 3 years. So I repeat, there is no substitute for live, long games where you can think long and hard about every move.

I hope you improve and find chess as awesome as most of us do.

Ha, I actually do this when I'm watching movies or just wanting to unwind, but I have a bad habit of clicking through the game really fast to get to the "cool parts." And then when I see that the player did something awesome (eg- Morphy), I look at a couple moves before the awesome thing, and a couple moves after. Also, sometimes I cover up the 1-0, 0-1 part to give myself some suspense as to who's gonna win. So I think I should approach these games in a more conducive way to learning, rather than watching for entertainment.

Well, I don't want to list a bunch of accomplishments...I'd just come off as a schmuck. But some brief examples of little things I learned that helped me get to a higher level of competition in a game are:

Warcraft 3-- When this first came out, I was pretty average. But after a couple weeks they started releasing replays of really good players, and I watched a bunch of a really good Orc (ha this game sounds pretty dorky now). Anyway, I noticed that he incessantly levelled up his Hero, even in situations where it was a struggle to kill the creep (the creatures that guard items). Just by doing this and memorizing the guy's build order I jumped into the top 100 (actually had like a 60-3 record...with the 3 losses coming from not knowing how to kill air units at the time).

Trading-- Realizing that no matter what happens, I'm always to blame really helped me (this took me almost a year to realize). A lot of times my superiors would suggest different trading strategies/ideas, but even if I implemented the strategy perfectly, if it didn't work, I was still accountable. Also, the over-used tautology "green is green" that I hated when I first started really helped my progress. Green streaks build confidence, and confidence in yourself/strategy leads to success. Go home green every day, and good things happen. There's all sorts of other little things like this that helped me.

Anyway, those are two more examples of minor things that lead to seeing the big picture of a game...or at least playing it at a higher level.

When you guys use these annotations, do you actually follow along with images in your head? Whenever I try to do that, after a couple moves I get dizzy.

I recently got a chess board so that I can set up the pieces according to the annotations. But sometimes when I'm reading a book and the author lists a huge amount of moves to prove a point, I'm like you have got to be F'ing kidding me.

Also, sorry about all of my consecutive replies. I was out of town for a while, so I didn't have internet till recently.

Yes, I think I should memorize some openings. I understand the general ideas behind a bunch of them, but I've yet to memorize them move by move.


I generally play 10 minutes + 15 seconds per move. So time is often not an issue (I noticed that in 5/0 games I would start out well and then basically have a siezure trying to move my pieces in time...so I give myself big increments).

That's awesome. My goal right now is to get to 1800 on Yahoo. Once I do that I'll start trying to get a real rating, and maybe even look into some tournaments...there's gotta be some in Chicago.

Go_Blue,

You're running into a couple factors that cause your progress in chess to be slower than you'd like. This is going to be long and does contain some of my own learning philosophy (plus some that I've gathered from real researchers) so the conclusions might not be right.

1) Chess has reached an extremely sophisticated level of play. I'm not claiming that chess is more complicated than WC3 or poker here, but because of chess' long history, the play has become much more optimal and so greater knowledge and skill is required to move up the ladder. It's a lot like poker in 2004 compared to poker today. The level of sophistication necessary to beat MSNL at each time period is tremendously different. WC3 is the same way.

2) Chess seems to have a very large subconscious component. You cannot reasonably evaluate every possible move in every position, so you lean on your subconscious to filter out critical details and point you in the right direction. This makes chess more difficult for two reasons. First, training the subconscious to recognize patterns is certainly more intensive than conscious pattern recognition. Secondly, just because your subconscious might pick up on a pattern, that won't necessarily influence your play in a productive manner.

The second point there is something I constantly run into when students dramatically increase their ability to solve tactical exercises but their result in actual play lag behind. Learning the patterns and learning to utilize those patterns are connected, but not the same.

So, what does this mean for you or anyone trying to improve? You must learn important patterns. They must not be merely noted or glossed over, but must become part of your subconscious. Tactical patterns are some of the first that should be learned because they are so fundamental to success. I learned tactical patterns through de la Maza's 7 circles. Others use other methods. In my opinion, this is a reason why carefully studying master games is so useful. You slowly internalize good patterns on a larger scale.

Now you must learn to use those new patterns. How do you do this? By playing chess. Lots of chess ideally. Blitz games, long slow games and games in between. It can all be useful.

one of the best way to jump a level pretty easilly are 3 things.

- learn tactic

- learn endgame, yes its hard boring tedious but know this, once u know ure endings,
u never need to go back there again and its where u can have the bigest edge vs a player, even like somene with 400 pts higher ( nvm pas master strengh tho, they all know it too)

- this is for middlegame, learn to play your knights and bishop, this will help u jump immensly