There are very few chess books out there that focus on hardwiring patterns without referring to specific matches that I would like to mention (I haven't been through them, but they might be a good choice for efficient learning):
- "Chess Training Pocket Book, 300 Most Important Positions and Ideas"
- its follow-up: "Chess Training Pocket Book II 320 key positions for players of all levels"
- "GM-RAM: Essential Grandmaster Chess Knowledge" (only the patterns, without the solution or explanation, but with the help of an engine we should be able to work on that without being close to GM level)
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I read Chess Training Pocket Book twice 25 years ago when I was rising from 1400s to 1900s. I have the sequel, but have only used it a little bit.
I have GM-RAM and use it for training. It serves to focus my study of a vast number of other books on specific games, positions, and ideas. I’ve been through about 1/3 of the middlegame positions and maybe half of the endgame positions.
Victor Henkin, 1000 Checkmate Combinations is the best book on the subject.
As you get older, improvement is more difficult, but not impossible. I’m in my 60s and hit my peak OTB rating of 1982 12 years ago. Even so, I won a local weekend tournament last year. I was the 5th highest rated player in the event.
tldr; how to improve past 2200 as an adult chess improver? (2000 is not good enough)
Background: I got my first chess set in the 1970s and on my first chess journey I played for about 10 years, >95% of all games with my schoolfriend, who later joined a chess club whereas I did not pursue chess any longer after high school, as I chose to have studying/job/family which left no time for a hobby.
When my friend entered the chess club, his rating was DWZ 1570 (the German Elo-like number, comparable to FIDE-Elo), which until now he has improved to 1620 (which should roughly translate to 1950 chess.com Blitz rating). Back then, at the end, I could beat him in about 40% of all games, and he beat me in 60% (we almost never had draws).
Now as I am retired, fate has brought me to the other side of the globe, to Indonesia. Surprisingly, in my neighborhood there are about a dozen chess players (young and old) with ratings above 2000, and once a year (at 17th of August) there is a chess competition. I refused to play there last August, but subsequently got the task of my wife to defend our household honor by playing in that competition 😂. Time is probably too short for August of this year, but until August next year it should be feasible to learn enough to play exciting games against respectable opponents.
This is the reason why I am back into chess with strong motivation and dedication, and time, too. Now the question is: how to improve to that level in a short time?
What have I done so far?
First, I played my first two online games ever (and the last for the time being), lost both due to simple blunders - probably as expected. In the past I had only played otb with no time controls (certainly no tournaments). I noticed that playing with time controls completely threw me off-guard: my time management is abysmal, I only used 90 seconds of a 10+5 game. Also, I noticed that I had a kind of tunnel view, that kind that you feel when you are in survival mode, which is absolutely detrimental to playing a decent game. Any advice on preventing falling into that survival mode?
I subscribed to a few youtube channels, such as ChessVibes (explains a lot of chess principles), TheBigGreek (main German chess channel), ChessCoach Andras, DrCan'sChessClinic (focus on chess strategy). I also watched a few others (e.g. ChessDojo) to see what's their book recommendation or their recommendation on improvement in general. But it seems the latter's focus is on those players who have already surpassed the 2000 barrier.
Then I started to make a plan on improving: I made a collection for each part of the game that I intend to study (opening, tactics/puzzles, checkmates, endgame, strategy, commented games of masters). While doing that I already started doing puzzles, online as well as books. Random tactics from chesspuzzle dot net and chesstempo, and some free courses on chessable (e.g. the 500 tactics puzzles, which are waaaay too easy, I went through them in one day). I noticed that on these platforms I rather guess-clicked through the problems, without reading them out in full depth. I need to develop more discipline on that.
I have worked partly or fully through some books. The good thing using books is that I completely read out the problems.
- "Chess Opening For Black Explained, a Complete Repertoire (for Black)" (featuring the "Accelerated Dragon" on e4 and "King's Indian" on d4): I stopped working on that after the advice of ChessCoach Andras to rather focus on middle- and endgame. However I noticed that I need a bit of opening, I will explain later on that.
- "1001 Deadly Checkmates" by John Nunn: Worked through half the problems so far. Most of them are fairly easy, though interesting. Some of them are challenging. My success rate is about 90%, and for the remaining 10% I mostly got the move order wrong
- "Winning Chess Tactics" by Yasser Seirawan: too easy (the only thing I got from this book was about the x-ray tactics, I didn't know it had a name)
- "Pump Up Your Rating": I stopped after the first two chapters, as it seemed I didn't get anything substantial out of it - obviously it is over my head
- "Winning Chess Exercises for Kids" (which is not only for kids, it has a thousand puzzles, both tactics and checkmates): worked through 2/3 of the book with success rate around 80%, so it's challenging enough.
Finally, I am currently building up an opening repertoire, for both, black and white; I will explain more about that in the advice on opening
During my recent chess journey so far I have read and watched a lot of advice on improving in chess, here and elsewhere, however some seem to be contradictory (e.g. about opening), and some seem to be plain wrong. I'd like to discuss with you guys about these advices, what's your take on them, and how far have they taken you on your improvement journey? As a start I'd like to show you my take:
advice: play a lot of games.
This seems to be a double-edged sword, and I have seen a lot of players who play loads of games but don't improve significantly. Around 15 years ago I had a journey into the world of the traditional Asian game of Go (for those who are interested, I made it from total beginner to 2nd kyu within two years, comparable to 2100 in the chess world, so significant improvement as an adult is definitely possible!). The advice on playing games there is to basically play against far stronger players, e.g. 5 dan (comparable to GM or IM in the chess world), so you can adopt the good patterns and don't have to unlearn bad habits. It's the main reason why top Asian players are still better than top Western players, as their kids grew up playing against much better players, soaking in the good patterns. But with strong engines available now (20 years after strong chess engines) this should level out. I strongly suppose that this applies to chess as well. I will probably abstain from playing a lot of random chess games, before I have made a learning journey through all the parts of the game, from opening to checkmate (also to prevent this awful survival mode feeling; I don't have that feeling when playing otb, and the very same applies to the game of go as well).
advice: analyze your own games
This was a suggestion given by Botvinnik, the coach of the 3 K's (Kasparov, Karpov, Kramnik), and I've seen that advice many times. However, I think that mainly applies when you're on a level beyond simple blunders, such as hanging pieces and missing simple knight or queen forks. What is the point of an analysis when the result is "I lost because I hung my queen"?
advice: play slow games
That resonates with me, as I need a good piece of time to ponder on my moves. However it seems that nowadays on any chess server people play Blitz, and the gold standard for rating seems to be the blitz rating. Also, developing a good time management for long and short time controls seems to be essential. I noticed that sometimes the top masters ponder on a single move for 40 minutes, and after that their time left is 20 minutes for 15 moves. How reasonable is that? How do you manage your time during a game?
advice: don't bother with openings , focus on middle- and endgame
Others advise not to neglect the opening too much, as there are lots of traps lurking for you in the opening phase. During my first chess journey with my schoolfriend, I only knew very rudimentary openings, as we always played the same moves, the Ruy Lopez or the Italian game (I didn't know their name at that time). When I played against someone other than my schoolfriend who opened with d4, I was completely thrown off-guard ("what? you can play d4 as first move? what crap is that? 😂"). So I feel that it is the right time for me to learn and study opening (next to doing tactics and checkmate puzzles at the same time), and I am interested in those openings that I had never had a clue about during my first chess journey: playing d4 as white (also, because most chess masters recommend starting with e4), and as black the Sicilian Defense as response to e4 (embracing the many variations of the Najdorf). I have already started building up my repertoire manually, with an opening database and two engines (stockfish 16 and Lc0) - rather than learning from a book or some master's repertoire. So far it is fun, and doing that myself step by step gives me the opportunity to actually memorize the patterns.
advice: do tactics puzzles: 99% of all chess is tactics
This advice seems to be unambiguous, since most of the time you lose due to tactical blunders. On the other hand I have seen many people who do thousands of puzzles (some of them with a puzzle rating no lower than 2900) but are still stuck around the 1500s or even lower (Probably these tactics monsters better focus on strategy). Doing tactics and checkmate puzzles is probably necessary all the time when you want to improve your chess. However, it may matter the way you do it. The point of doing tactics and checkmate puzzles is to be able to apply that knowledge to your games. Doing random puzzles is probably not the most efficient way to do that. Recently I discovered that on some websites dedicated to chess puzzles (chesstempo and chesspuzzle dot net) you can select puzzles by theme, e.g. knight forks, deflections, decoys, or intermediate moves (zwischenzug) etc. I intend to do that in the near future, so I can memorize the patterns. Does anyone know of a book that does it this way? Also, the good thing with these two puzzle sites is, that puzzles are being selected according to your puzzle solving skills, so that the puzzles remain interesting. One thing that I remember from my go journey is, that in regards to improvement it is best, if you can solve 85% of the puzzles, otherwise it will be rather difficult to internalize the patterns.
advice: study endgames, especially rook endings
Others advise to skip endgames as a beginner, since you will never reach the endgame stage. Funnily, what the games of chess and go have in common is, that their endgame is often being neglected, even though you could benefit from it more than other parts of the game, after you have advanced to a certain level. In spite of the long break, I don't consider myself a beginner, so I intend to study that, too, probably starting with the book "100 Endgames You Must Know", then "Silman's Complete Endgame Course From Beginner To Master" (quote by ChessCoach Andras: "probably the only book that will not make you hate endgames"), Shereshevsky's "Endgame Strategy" and maybe (if I still feel like it) "How to Play Chess Endgames" by Karsten Müller (the reading order is recommended by ChessCoach Andras). In case you didn't know: endgame is sexy 😋
advice: study the games of classic masters
That seems a good advice, as you can learn all aspects of the game: a broad journey through openings, how to conduct a proper attack (e.g. in "1000 Best Short Games of Chess"), or endgames (e.g. in "Capablanca's Best Chess Endings"). "Inhaling" good moves from the classical masters seems a good way to improve your chess intuition. It is said that top chess masters know more than 10000 games by heart, they even know when and where it was played and by whom. So far I only know one (Reti-Tartakower, Vienna 1910, with a spectacular checkmate) from the book "Logical Chess Move by Move", that has a few dozen games with comments suitable for beginners. There's a plethora of books with commented games, e.g. Kasparov's series "My Great Predecessors", the "Mammoth Books of the World's Greatest Games". I will probably memorize a few hundred (one per day should be a good pace) before extensively starting to play myself.
For the next point I haven't found any good advice in the chess world, I'd transfer it from the world of go, so take it with a grain of salt:
advice: Hardwiring chess patterns
There are hints out there that chess masters do acquire hardwired knowledge. A lot of knowledge. Besides thousands of memorized games by masters, you can also see that when masters play puzzle rush in a speed that you will not be able to follow. Yes, I can easily recognize a backrank mate in 1 or 2, but for most other types of these problems I need to stare at the board for much longer.
Regarding pattern recognition I heard during my go journey, that chess is more about calculating, whereas go is more about pattern recognition. However I learned that this is utterly untrue. In chess there are patterns everywhere: checkmate patterns, tactics patterns, attacking patterns (such as the "Greek Gift"), pawn structure patterns, endgame patterns. Knowing all these patterns help us doing calculations more efficiently. You can stop calculating when you know the pattern that you have arrived at.
Knowing patterns as the first basic skill can radically shortcut your calculation, the second basic skill. And I believe that most ambitious chess players who seek improvement struggle with that. They can easily see a one-move tactics or a mate in one, but a two-moves tactics or mate in two is much more difficult, or to be more exact: three times as difficult, because you have to calculate a three ply deep position (your move, your opponent's move, and your final move). Mastering the step from one-move problems to two-move problems is the hardest. From two-move problems to three-move problems it is still hard, but not as hard as the previous step; "only" 67 percent harder (3 ply to 5 ply). With increasing depth the increase in calculation gets less. What distinguishes the masters from others is, that they have found an efficient way of pruning the search tree: they can assess candidate moves quickly by knowing promising and unpromising patterns.
There are very few chess books out there that focus on hardwiring patterns without referring to specific matches that I would like to mention (I haven't been through them, but they might be a good choice for efficient learning):
Any experience on these?
Last but not least something that I haven't found any solution for yet:
How to gain immediate overview of the whole board, with all the interacting pieces?
E.g. how to immediately recognize, when you hang a piece? How to quickly blunder-check? Top chess players can do that almost effortlessly (well, yes, Hikaru occasionally hangs pieces when playing bullet, but he might be doing that on purpose, calling it "Botez Gambit" 😂).
Or more generally: how to immediately capture the situation change when moving a piece?
You will probably need that skill in virtual positions, too, that you reach during your calculation. I am especially struggling with these and haven't found a good way to handle that.
Any advice will be welcome. For now I enjoy the journey and am curious where it will lead me.