NM Robert Ramirez's Beginner Study Guide (600-1000 Elo)

Editor's Note: We are proud to present this study guide from NM Robert Ramirez as part of our 2025 Chess Improvement Challenge. We encourage interested improvers to sign up for the challenge, set their goals, and join the official Improvers club!

• NM Dane Mattson's Starting Out Study Guide (0-600 Elo)
• WGM Dina Belenkaya's Beginner Intermediate Study Guide (1000-1400 Elo)
• CM Can Kabadayi's Intermediate Advanced Study Guide (1400-1800 Elo)
• GM Arturs Neiksans' Advanced Study Guide (1800+ Elo)

Hello and welcome aboard! It’s time to take your chess to the next level. By now, you should have a good understanding of the basic rules and a sharp vision of the board. What do I mean by this last part? Well, let’s take a look at the position below.

White to move

Any beginner would feel overwhelmed by the position above. There are so many pieces on the board including the four tricky knights. However, after you play chess for a while, your board vision starts to develop and it shouldn’t take long to realize the white bishop on a1 can move down the long diagonal and capture the black rook sitting on h8. 

If you didn’t see 1.Bxh8 on your own, don’t worry. Developing your board vision is easy. It will improve as you play more games, but I will also provide you with simple and effective exercises in this study plan to speed up the process.

• Who Am I?
• Tactics
• Convert An Advantage And Close Your Games
• Endgame
• Strategy
• Openings
• Playing Games
• What My Study Plan Looks Like
• Extra-Curricular Activities

Who Am I?

Before we continue, allow me to tell you a bit about myself and why I think this study plan will transform your chess.

I’m National Master Robert Ramirez, and my story is quite peculiar. I began studying chess in Cuba when I was almost 13 years old and completely stopped three years later when my family moved to Miami. There are two extremely important things about this. First, in these three years, I acquired the necessary skills to become a national master. A few years after being in the United States, I played some tournaments and without much further preparation, I quickly got my NM title. I know it’s not that impressive and it might sound like I’m bragging, but I only want you to understand how feasible it is to reach this milestone if we focus on what truly matters —let alone breaking the 1000 rating mark.

Now that I’m done bragging, let’s talk about the most important part of my chess training in Cuba. The fact that I was a teenager getting into a discipline where most players begin as little kids made it much easier for me to clearly remember the type of training I did and what I found more relevant during those three years. I remember my journey vividly.

Once I started college, I began teaching chess for an extra income and as my students improved and went on to win tournaments, my small side hustle grew more than I had imagined. Long story short, for the last 15 years, I have been helping students of all ages and levels take their chess to the next level while enjoying the process. 

The last thing you have to know about me is that in the past 15 years I have also made mistakes as a teacher and coach. Such mistakes have made me more aware of how we all learn differently, and I finally have a selected number of tools and techniques that have proven to significantly accelerate the learning process.

The only thing I need from you is consistency over an extended period of time. If you are ready, let’s dance!

Tactics

There is one main question every chess improver should ask themselves: what’s the most important skill I need to develop at this point in my journey? The answer should be as specific as possible. Once you have that clear, the rest becomes much easier.

Up to this point, you should have mastered three main skills:

• Board vision. At the very least, you have to quickly detect what’s being attacked every time a piece moves (yours or your opponent’s).
• Identifying hanging pieces. Pieces without protection are more likely to get in trouble. I know this probably falls under board vision, but I really want to bring it to your attention.
• Basic checkmates. You have to be able to close your games. At the end of the day, it’s all about checkmating your opponent’s king before they checkmate yours.

With that said, at this point in your chess journey, your top priority should be basic tactics such as forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, mates in 1, mates in 2, etc. But that’s too broad, more specifically, you need to: 

• Find basic tactics quickly.
• Fabricate simple tactics—to create the right conditions for a specific tactical pattern to work. 

I think we are finally ready to reveal my favorite resources and techniques to help you with tactics.

General Pattern Recognition 

Sessions per week: 1
Minutes per session: 45

The first thing we need to do is load your brain with as many tactical patterns as possible. When I first started, my coach handed me a tactics book in Russian. Spanish is our official language in Cuba, but that was the only book he had. This book basically had lots of tactical exercises ranging from simple mates in one move to more complex combinations. 

Luckily, you have way more resources today such as Chess.com and their amazing tactics trainer. Just hit start and do as many puzzles as possible without the hassle of setting up the position yourself on a physical board like I used to do. As you go through the exercises, your tactics rating will increase or decrease. This is a fun element to track your progress and keep you motivated.

By Theme

Chess.com also allows you to train tactics by theme. Whenever my students struggle with a specific pattern, I ask them to have a training session where they focus only on that pattern. You can also do this if you don’t feel ready to try the main tactics training where they mix all themes.

Convert An Advantage And Close Your Games

Another Chess.com feature my students and I constantly use is Finish vs. Computer.

How many times have you been ahead in material only to end up losing or drawing the game? We all have been there, and it’s one of the main problems my beginner and intermediate students complain about. In the example above, White just did a tactic that left White ahead by a knight. In an ideal world, White should be able to convert easily, but that in itself is a skill we must master.

Well, something I like to do is pick an exercise (typically the last one of my tactics session) and finish it against the computer (look for the target symbol to play the position against a computer!). If I can convert an advantage against a strong bot, I can certainly do it against my everyday opponents.

Quick Thinking

Sessions per week: 1
Minutes per session: 30

As you may already know, finding good moves is not enough. You also have to find them quickly. I have a favorite resource for that too —the blitz set from www.chesstempo.com. Chess Tempo has a lot to offer, but I personally only use the blitz set and it’s been key for me as a player and coach.

From their home page, we click on Tactics Training, and it will take you to the screen you see below. Then go to Change Set and choose Blitz. I like to keep the difficulty level as medium, but feel free to try them all.

You will be presented with exercises to solve —nothing new so far. However, your rating will change based on accuracy and speed. In other words, sometimes you might get the right answer, but if you take too long compared to the other users of this platform, you might still lose rating points. In essence, you will be drilling rather simple and practical exercises under time pressure, and that’s a skill we certainly need to work on if we want to make it to the next level.

As you can see above, on the top left corner is our timer. On the right, we can see the average time spent by other users.

Puzzle Rush

Sessions per week: 1
Minutes per session: as long as it takes you to complete one survival

In my opinion, Puzzle Rush is one of the greatest additions to chess training in recent years. I prefer the Survival mode where there is no timer, but feel free to try the other modalities too. Basically you are challenged to solve as many puzzles as possible, and if you get three wrong, the game ends.

There are several benefits to this kind of training. However, the main reason why I recommend it at this point in your career is because puzzles are extremely basic at first and they get more complex as you progress. 

For example, my regular tactics rating on Chess.com is around 3000. This means I am given exercises around this difficulty level (3000) every time I click next. As a consequence, I don’t get to train the simpler patterns I encounter in most of my games and that makes me rusty. At the end of the day, many of my games are decided because of simple tactical opportunities. Well, Puzzle Rush makes sure you begin by hitting the basic patterns every time. Many of my students believe it is a waste of time, but I think they are not seeing the big picture.

As a final note, I would like to mention that the three-minute and five-minute modalities are also great for quick thinking. You can even supplement your Chess Tempo sessions with any of these two. Also, you might like to know that the survival Puzzle Rush can be done in more than one session. For example, if you start a survival Puzzle Rush and turn off your device before finishing it, you can come back to it the next day and it will resume where you left off.

Endgame

Sessions per week: 1
Minutes per session: 30

As I stated earlier, for now your top priority should be tactics, but this is a good moment to start building a foundation when it comes to endgames. We need to focus on only king and pawn endgames for the moment. More specifically:

• How to checkmate with one queen
• How to checkmate with two rooks
• How to checkmate with one rook
• How to create and promote a passed pawn
• Rule of the square
• Opposition  

When it comes to endgames, I use only two resources: the endgames playlist I created for you on my YouTube channel and Chess.com. My playlist consists of short videos where I share the endgame knowledge I possess. Chess.com has numerous lessons and drills to master every one of the skills listed above. We all learn differently, so feel free to see what you prefer—maybe both.

Strategy

Sessions per week: 1
Minutes per session: 30

Just like with endgame training, strategy and positional play shouldn’t be your top priority for now, but it’s a good idea to start learning them little by little. More specifically, I would like you to get exposure to:

• How different pawn structures affect your overall plan
• Weak pawns and weak squares
• Piece coordination
• The rule of simplification

As far as resources to learn and practice strategy, I also use Chess.com’s lessons as well as a special playlist I created for you on my YouTube channel. This playlist also consists of specific strategy and positional chess knowledge I recommend.

Openings

Sessions per week: learn your opening and only review it as you find it necessary. It doesn’t have to be reviewed every week.

I know most beginner and intermediate players don’t like it when coaches say, “Don’t worry about openings.” If it were up to them, they would learn a few opening traps and wait for their opponents to fall for them. Well, there are three things I would like to share about openings at this level.

1. The general advice is to learn 1.e4, e5 openings first. Many books argue that it leads to a more tactical game and as you already know, sharpening our tactical sword should be top priority at this point in our journey. 
2. Since I started chess late, I decided to put most of my time into studying the middlegame and endgame. When it came to openings, I picked a system for Black and that’s the only one I have played my entire career from beginner to master level —yeah, no 1.e4, e5 for me as Black. You can check out my Chessable course (Counterblow) to learn more about this system. For white I had a simple 1.e4 repertoire like the one taught by Coach Andras in his Chessable course The Club Player's 1.e4 Repertoire. Once I started playing again in the U.S., I only used systems for White as well. These systems included the King’s Indian Attack, Pseudo-Catalan, Vienna Game with 3.g3, and Bird’s Opening. In case you are wondering, the reason why I prefer systems is because it’s all about understanding where your pieces go and the general middlegame plans rather than memorizing strings of moves recommended by theory.
3. Many people think learning your first opening is about memorizing every single line. Instead, I recommend you learn the first four or five moves and start playing it. Make mistakes and have fun! As long as you control the center, develop your minor pieces, and castle, you will be fine. I mainly say this because many beginner and intermediate players have asked me if they should play certain openings like the Sicilian. Contrary to popular belief, I say go ahead!  Don’t prioritize opening memorization over the middlegame, for example, but you can learn the first few moves and have fun. As long as you make it to the middlegame safely, I’m happy.

Playing Games

Sessions per week: the more you play the better

Q: Is it better to play bots or humans?

It is okay to play bots, but playing humans is the real deal. Don’t be shy.

Q: Longer time controls or blitz?

You need to get exposure to both. I always say that if you prefer blitz, give me at least one day of the week when you play longer time controls. I like the 15|10 time control. If you’d rather have longer time controls, then give me at least one day of the week where you play blitz. I like the 5|5 time control. If you don’t get comfortable with playing under time pressure, you will never master this skill. Regardless of how you feel about the chess timer, it is part of chess—like another piece.

Notice how I haven’t mentioned bullet chess, and that’s because I don’t like it—especially at this level. I think we pick up too many bad habits.

Q: What about daily games?

In case you don’t know, daily games allow players to take hours or even days to play each move. Truth is that the more games we play, the better regardless of the format, but I just don’t like daily games. I prefer when my students play a game in one sitting.

Q: Is Game Review useful?

Yes, I personally play mainly on Chess.com and have gotten so used to their Game Review feature that I run it after almost every single game. Ideally we would review each game on our own first without any assistance, but I know it could be time-consuming. 

What My Study Plan Looks Like

Below you can see what a simple study plan may look like. Duration refers to minutes per week. With that said, it’s perfectly fine to do more.

Extracurricular Activities

If you are like some of my students who have extra time and ask for extracurricular activities, here are some of my favorites.

The Two by Two Exercise

Reviewing games played by more experienced players such as masters is priceless. You can find many huge databases for free on the internet. Just going over the moves without much analysis will benefit you greatly. However, I’m a fan of what I call the two by two exercise. 

Instead of reviewing the game one move at a time, we read the first two moves and reproduce them only in our head. We only play the actual moves on the board after we have visualized the resulting position. Once you get the hang of it, you can do three by three, then four by four, and so on.

Read A Chess Book

Finally, I want to share this great book in case you would like to give it a try. There are many books out there and this one might seem a bit tough, but it will add so much to your chess. Even if you cannot solve any exercises (I doubt it), you will learn a lot from going simply over the answers.