A general path to chess improvement: all laid out

Improving is difficult: it requires a lot of dedication, and chess is a particularly unforgiving game: you are as weak as the weakest aspect of your game. After reading Dan Heisman excellent book A guide to chess improvement: best of novice nook I am compelled to summarise the following distilled wisdom


Improvement is based on two pillars:

1. Add Positives
2. Remove negatives

Adding positives is improving board vision and tactical ability, learning the tabiyas of your main openings, improving chess ability and knowledge, gaining experience through the play of lots of slow chess games.

Removing negatives is getting rid of bad habits and weaknesses. It is paramount to analyse your own games to identify these weaknesses.

The process is best though of as a feedback loop. While working on the two pillars, analyse further games to see if there is improvement. This is the step where the help of an instructor is useful. While at lower levels vasts improvements are possible just through the study of tactics, at higher levels the comments of a better player to remove subtle misconceptions is increasingly important.

The big five one must reasonably understand and master is :

1. Practice a lot of slow chess. It is important to play higher rated players that will punish you for your mistakes rather than weak players that will reinforce bad habits.
2. Safety and tactics. One must work on a set of tactical exercises up to the point where they are solved almost instantly. Being able to 'figure them out' is not good enough - it will be too difficult to find in a slow game. Just like one does not compute six time seven, memorisation of simple tactical patterns is a massive boost.
3. Piece activity. Getting out of the opening with a fully functional army.
4. Though process. More on this later. This is why slow chess is important. If you play only blitz games your though process cannot improve, nor can your position evaluation.
5. Time management. It is very important to budget and use all the time available. Opening and non-critical moves should be played relatively fast. Just one bad move can lose the game regardless of how well one played up to there. Consistency is the most important aspect. 
6. Understanding of general chess principles (importance of the center, activity, king safety, etc)

(I know it goes to six, practice is step zero)

For the though process, it is

1. What are all the things that my opponent's move does? Is it safe? What are the threats? When analysing possible opponent's replys, one must assume the best possible answer from the opponent, however on the contrary when analysing his move one must consider that it might be a mistake.
2. What are the positive things I want to do? Stop tactics, make a plan.
3. What are the moves that might accomplish my goal? initial candidate moves. Do not stop once you see a decent move, try to look for a better one.
4. Check these initial candidates for safety. Are there checks captures or threats that can defeat the move? Eliminating these is the difference between real chess and hope chess. 
5. Of the final candidates, which one leads to the best position?

If you don't know what to do at all, try to improve the activity of your worst piece or reduce the activity of the opponent's pieces.

Chess exercises

Great list of exercises from Dan Heisman chess exercises. Also pointed out the great exercises from Jeff Coakley "Winning Chess Puzzles for Kids" Switcheroos, Triple Llods and double Whammies.
See this here there and especially here

Chess in corsica

In local newspaper Corse matin I was pleased and surprised to see a section about chess. the team championship feature 220 players. There is a chess show on local TV six time a week ! Find a scan below with two puzzles for your enjoyment. In august they also ran some chess boards and demonstrations on the beach. Nice place to spend chess vacations

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Most valuable twitter advice: Dan Heisman (@danheisman)

http://www.blogger.com/homeDan Heisman is definitely the best person you can follow to get good advice regarding chess. I has a no nonsense, high signal to noise approach that is very rare on twitter. Following list to his own columns you have some gems: for instance have a look at The Three Show Stoppers. Simple advice is gold, since I read this article I paid special attention in my games and noticed that safety and activity are more often than not deciding factors at my level. Actually knowledge of openings is dwarfed by a complete although imprecise developments.

Things are actually simple. to improve at anything, work hard (outside of your comfort zone), think about your moves, play the good moves. Learn from the mistakes in your games.

Thanks Dan and keep it up.

Chess Fork Trainer

About visualization training, I would like to mention the excellent software of Chess Fork Trainer. It is a very useful piece of software that was inspired by De La Maza's 'vision drills'. There are a lot of different options, the idea is to find the safe squares to fork king and piece. One can have a fixed square king (to train with c8 or g8 kings) or random. This is a great software which I find extremely helpful. Here is how a completed exercise looks

mate in ... one

I have started to read Laszlo Polgar Chess: training in 5333+1 positions. It starts with 306 positions which are mate in one. I think this is a great way to practice the fundamentals. Any sportsman practice the basic movements of his sports hundreds of times a day. This set is the opportunity to really improve basic tactical vision, from the ground up. Here is one which really had me thinking (!)

white to move, mate in one.

I think this is one of the best ways to improve basic pattern recognition for beginner players.
 Have fun playing,

Knowledge versus Skill

In his book Chess for Zebras, Jonathan Rowson points the obvious, which as any deep truth is actually not that obvious at all. Knowledge and skill are two different things. To be a better player one need to improve skill. Rowson points out that training hard (going at the edge of one's comfort zone) is paramount. He repeats FM Ken Smith's advice that until 1800 level "your first name is tactics, your middle name is tactics, and your last name is tactics". He endorses Manuel de la Maza's book Rapid Chess Improvement. This tactics pursuit is subject of great following by a large number of players, and is often criticized by others. I think this uncomfortable truth goes for most of the chess publications. A book on openings could for instance be sold to one thousand 2000+ players, or seven thousand 1500+ players. Now the truth is that said book might improve the second category skill at the game by ... almost nothing.

Knowledge versus skill is found everywhere. For every craft (drawing, stock market trading, etc) most people amass knowledge and not skill. And I am not talking about football. I love playing, I like to follow news and results, but most people I play with have outstanding knowledge of the game (the follow teams and players very closely) great knowledge of how to play the game (dribbling, running, what TV shows them) but surprisingly low skill in understanding tactical and strategic aspects of the game. You would be surprised. Creating space, triangle passing, are often not understood by players who are very good dribbling and very good knowledge of history. Chess analogy would be a great knowledge of GM games, knowing who won the latest tournament, knowledge of opening lines 20 ply deep, but have not concept of the middle game plan that these opening are leading to.

Increasing skill is the most interesting thing. There is nothing like winning games against increasingly skilled opponents. Skill is the fundamental aspects of flow, where one must match a difficult challenge against with a good skills. This is why I enjoy a large variety of board games beside chess: I thoroughly enjoy learning new games, discovering tactics and strategy anew. Will I ever be a great expert at any of them ? likely not. My own way of gaming is the one of diversity (with a love for chess).

Enjoy the journey of playing games,