CHESS TIME TABLE
Here are few Tips to improve your Chess Drastically
Quality vs Quantity
This is what 90% of chess players do. They focus on consuming lot of information
either through Youtube Videos or just reading Chess Books. Though they are good,
but will not help you in your chess improvement.
Let me explain this fact with an example.
Magnus Carlsen (World Champion in Chess) at the age of 10 yrs started beating top
best players in the world.
Why? - He focused on basics and general principles and understanding of Chess
(Thinking Process). That’s why he could beat a lot of players who spent their
entire life learning chess.
What to do?
Focus on Basics. These are basic chess principles like
1. Opening
- Control the Center
- Develop Pieces
- Castle Quickly
- Connect Your Rooks
Don’t make unnecessary pawn moves which doesn’t help out to develop your pieces in
the opening
2. Middlegame: Find a plan. It could be anything like
- How to Attack opponent’s weak pawns and pieces
- How to coordinate your pieces to the best squares, so that they can control key
weaknesses in opponent’s area of the board or attack something
- Where to launch an attack? - Center, Kingside or Queenside
(Launch an attack where you are strong or have more pieces)
Point: Complete your all task of your opening first, and only then make a
middlegame plan of how to progress further in a game.
3. Endgame: In endgame plan you cannot
- Attack opponent’s pieces. Because they are too mobile
- Cannot attack king. Because there are less pieces on the board. So the king will
not get checkmated
So the plan in endgame is to
- Attack opponent’s weak pawns
- Fix opponent’s pawns so they become weak
Point: Don’t study theoretical endgames as they will occur even less than 5% of all
of your games.
In theoretical endgames, just focus on Rook Endgames as they will occur 90% of all
the endgames in a Chess player’s career (Philidor, Lucena and other few positions
and basic understanding).
What not to do?
- Don’t watch too much of Chess Videos on youtube!
- Don’t read chess books. Chess books will give you 1000s of chess principles. And
in practical games hardly anyone can apply atleast 1 principle from those books
I’m not against reading books. But to improve drastically don’t focus too much on
Books
Training schedule
This is where 90% people makes the mistake. Either they spend their entire time of
their training just playing games after games (bullet or blitz games) and hope to
improve their chess
To improve your chess correct your training schedule. In my recommendation you must
spend
- 10 mins on Tactics.
Just solve 5 tactical problems/day.
- 30 mins on developing general understanding and thought process (Discussed in 1st
Tip).
This could be done by picking up one master game (around 2000 - 2100 rated or
atleast 500+ elo high rated than your level)
a. Then go through the entire game.
b. Don’t focus on the opening moves. Even players around 2000 - 2100 don’t play
openings too well.
c. Focus on middlegame or endgame.
d. Try to guess the moves from the side who has won that game.
e. If your move is different from that move played in the game, find what was wrong
in your move.
f. Do this for entire game and compare your thought process with that of the master
g. While guessing the moves, don’t use chess engines.
h. Use chess engines(computer), after when the game is completed
i. If you do this for 30+ games, you will drastically improve your game
- 30 mins should be spent playing 1 game/day. Idea is to play quality game over
quantity of useless games
- 30 mins should be spent on analyzing your games.
a. First analyze the game yourself without the help of an engine(computer).
b. Find out mistakes yourself
- Where you went wrong Tactically
- After which move, game has changed it’s flow of direction (This is to point out
your strategical or minor mistakes)
- At which position I was clueless (have no plan)
c. Then Analyze the game with an engine
d. Make a list of your mistakes on a paper.
When you make list of your mistakes on a paper for 30+ games, you will come to know
what are the repetitive mistakes you are making.
Then you can fix those mistakes in the future either with a help of a coach or a
friend.
Skill Development
This other key skills that a player should have is
- Attacking Play
- Defensive Skills
- Advantage Capitalization
Now you can use Youtube Videos or my Twitter account (listed quality chess
materials) to learn the above 3 skills. Just remember while watching Youtube Video,
first try to guess the move yourself by pausing the Video and only then resume the
video.
