It's got a beautiful UI, and it's a conversational chess tutor that goes over the basics, tactics, advanced strategy and with whom you can play and will point out mistakes and blunders for later review. Perhaps it is too basic for anybody that has a few hundred games of chess under their belt but if you know nothing about the game, it is a great way to get into it. As the author say, low level chess is about learning patterns and short-term strategy (what should I do the opening, how to checkmate with a rook, etc.) and this app teaches exactly that, in a gradual way.
1) Playing lots of games (https://online-go.com and https://gokgs.com are good for this). I usually have a few correspondence games going and then try to play a normal speed game daily. Don't worry about winning and losing, just play. Begin to internalize how standard tactics reappear regularly on the board.
2) Do tsumego (life and death) a lot. But don't just try things and see what happens. Try to read out the entire sequence before looking at the answer. (SmartGo One is a good app). Cho Chikun's beginner ones are good [1]. Try to work on a subset of problems (<100) until you can just look at the formation for a few seconds and see the answer. Play out all sequences to really understand why they don't work. Getting the answer isn't really the point, it's that you internalize the tactics involved in all tsumego.
3) As someone who spent WAY too much time reading books about Go strategy and tactics before I could barely play the game: don't do that. Books become much more useful once you are a SDK (single digit kyu) player. Until then, just play and study life and death. Reading books isn't bad, it just isn't that helpful when you can get beat in a game because you don't have the basic tactics down.
I gained the most from gobase.org, just clicking through professional games. The tool you can review/replay games with lets you try to guess the next move - just let them play the first 10-15 moves and then start guessing. Don't spend a ton of time thinking, just _guess_. Guess over and over, and if you don't guess the move after 5-10 tries, have it tell you, try for a few seconds to understand why that might be a good move, and continue.
You should totally do the tactics and puzzles that you can find (that same site has a bunch), but there's a lot more strategic recognition and pattern-matching in go than chess.
I'm also interested to hear if there are better tools though in the last .. Christ, twenty years? I'm old now -.-
Go is so wonderful as a social game. I took its philosophy on "teaching-games" (ie, every game is approached as an opportunity to learn/teach more than as a competition, and handicap structures are built-in to skill difference), and have applied them to chess as I start playing with my 7 yo son.
We both really enjoy playing the game at our absolute best when I start the game less one rook, knight, bishop, and two pawns. I'm not a great chess player though.
Anyway, more to your question, finding a way to play Go in person is such a game-changer, literally.
1. Play and have fun. You won't stick around if you don't.
2. Tsumegos, most important are the tesuji and life & death when beginning, opening/ending don't matter when a blunder kills half the board. See https://goproblems.com/
If looking for a book. Cho Chikun's life & death corner problems progress in a systematic manner from beginner to dan level.
It is a nice app but it had too many bugs for me to consider renewing my subscription with it. It would sometimes make suggested moves that were just completely wrong. I did provide feedback on some, which they agreed were bugs.
I downloaded "Learn Chess with Dr Wolf" yesterday from this comment, and I am completely hooked. What an incredibly well-designed and thoughtful learning tool. This has renewed my interest in Chess!
"Only about 10% of players ever gain more than 100 points, and only about 1% of players gain more than 200 rating points given years."
This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study, just some light YouTube watching. 500->800 felt like all it took was learning a few openings and not blundering pieces. 800-1050 felt like it came mostly from getting familiar with the common patterns from those openings that led to advantages/disadvantages. Most of my learning here came from reviewing my own games and trying to understand why my mistakes were mistakes.
I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games. The time constraints are too rushed to really think about what makes a move good or bad. I assumed it was a young person's thing, but the author said he plays these quick formats too.
If you follow the link to the data analysis [1] you’ll see that the argument is based on higher rated players. Low rated players have much higher variance in their rating and can improve by quite a lot, just by learning to stop blundering. That’s basically the situation you’re in.
Getting to 2000 rating is going to be quite a mountain to climb for you, unless you’re very young.
But that’s not surprising at all if you assume every player has a ‘ceiling’ performance they can attain, isn’t it?
Higher rated players tend to be closer to their potential than lower rated ones, leaving less room for improvement, in any sport. They also will be more likely to get worse over time because, the nearer to the top, the more roads lead you downwards.
You’d have to pick a very peculiar metric to measure performance to compensate for that.
And not to forget to avoid disappointment: An online 2000 is maybe an offline 1800 or so. Online ratings are in general higher than what people actually have offline.
I’ve known this guy off and on for years. When we first met 15+ years he was slightly better at Go than me, which was middling amateur. All the Go books say if you want to be a pro you have to start as a child.
But he studied, and studied, and last I knew he was 3 dan, which is about the point you can entertain the idea of becoming a pro (if I just worked harder).
Kids have a lot more free time to sink into a singular concern. Warnings about how something are out of the reach of adults aren’t actually hard rules, they’re just really good rules of thumb. But if you can make the time, it’s not impossible.
I don’t think chess is any different there. Small improvements may set reasonable expectations, but there are people who can blow right past them.
You're right I think. Most adults really don't improve at chess very often. They do when it's a new hobby, but then they plateau. And it's not that they couldn't improve further, it's just that they're not able or willing to do the things necessary, which is usually a lot of exercise and study. It's just a hobby for most people at the end of the day, and they'd rather spend an hour at the club discussing and blitzing some silly openings with friends than spend an hour solving puzzles or studying endgames. We still all carry the illusion of some prospect of improvement, that's the human condition. But most people don't take it very seriously and are more in it for social reasons.
> but there are people who can blow right past them
Ultimately, I think this is what's often downplayed in these conversations. Just because your friend was able to excel at Go in those 15 years, doesn't imply that any other specific person would be able to do the same, even with the same study. You'll find many people who attempted this but simply couldn't get past a lower plateau.
So, when you say "if you can make the time, it’s not impossible", I'm not sure that that's true. My suspicion would be that for a significant portion of the population, it would in fact be literally impossible. (edit: I was reading a different thread where somebody was asking about becoming a FIDE CM, that's what I was referencing here as being impossible for many, I don't know anything about Go ranks).
A friend of mine devised an empirical rule to predict the highest Go ranking that a player will reach: the ranking after the first 4 years of play plus 4.
They have a nice date/rank graph and all those graphs start with an almost vertical growth which slows down and flattens. Some players play less often and get weaker but that's not the point.
I have no idea if it applies to chess too, possibly with different parameters, but why not? They are both games played with the brain by humans.
They say you need to start as a kid for 2 main reasons, one as you mentioned time. Second is survivor bais. There are way more kids that suck as chess/whatever and stop playing than prodigies on path to become grandmasters.
> I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games. The time constraints are too rushed to really think about what makes a move good or bad. I assumed it was a young person's thing, but the author said he plays these quick formats too.
I'm 47 and started playing around 5 years ago. I only play Blitz and Bullet because I find it fun. In the first two years I went from around 1000 on lichess to around 1700. I've been "stuck" at 1700 plus or minus 100 since then.
I know I could improve with puzzles and classical time controls and study and analysis but I have no interest in that. I play games for fun. If I improve then great. If not no problem. It's the same as breaking out a game of Tetris or something for 5 minutes to me.
This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study,
Is rating on chess.com similar to rating in lichess? The article mentions 1%, but you start with 1500 in lichess??? If you lose often, you quickly go down. But if you keep an even record, you stay in 1500.
I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games.
As in the article, speed training helps recognizing patterns and dealing with them. At first it seems impossible to play significant moves with so little time, but you can try to just doing it. You'll adapt very soon.
I recommend starting with blitz 3+2 and later bullet 2+1. There are tournaments of 1+0... or even less time. 30 seconds is really crazy.
> If you lose often, you quickly go down. But if you keep an even record, you stay in 1500.
Is that actually true? You start at a 1500 in lichess, but that is a provisional rating and the outcome of your first few games are going to cause BIG swings in your rating. After your rating is no longer a provisional rating then that is going to slow down.
Losing a few games at the start might take a lot more wins to "even out" in rating. Just keeping an even record might not be enough to stay 1500.
I am currently in a run playing rapid 5|5 because I found myself consistently running out of time in longer time controls. To me, improving at rapid is making significant progress in my overall chess abilities. I developed a better understanding of end games and openings , so that I can spend more time being careful in the middle game. Recently I noticed that I don’t run out of time in Rapid, and that’s progress to me, regardless of my ELO
Rating on chesscom is wildly different than on lichess in lower rating ranges.
300 cc should be similiar to around 800 lichess. Around 2000-2200 ratings even out on both sites and on higher ratings lichess ratings tend to be lower than on cc.
For improving longer time controls are better. The old adage, that if you want to play blitz better you should play rapid and that if you want to improve rapid you should play classical is still valid today. Blitz is beneficial only at higher rating ranges (2000+) to allow practising openings, and even that only in moderation. Players who don't play classical time controls (90min+30sec/move at least) tend to plateau around 2000-2200 online.
This ofc doesn't mean that blitz isn't fun - vast majority of my games are in blitz time controls.
Some people just want to have fun and that's what blitz is for. Why are people so preoccupied with improving when it comes to chess? If any other game is mentioned the discussion will not be so centered on improvement as it is with chess. Maybe it is because chess has this air of a "thinking man's game" which does not really deserve. It's just a game like any other.
Once a certain acumen is reached, chess becomes a much better spectator sport.
Older games become interesting to watch, mate in 6-8 puzzles become tenable, chess books about specific openings make more sense. Once a player knows how to finish basic endgames and accord himself properly in the middle game, they have the tools to grasp opening theory. From there on, there is a huge body of information about opening theory, playing styles, control and leverage of center, etc etc.
Much of the ink spilled about this game is a bit impenetrable without some acumen. But with enough appreciation to the past and present trends, one can fine tune one's playing style and really make the game your own.
Because learning and improving is part of the pleasure of chess. It's a game you can enjoy to play, but also enjoy to study. As you improve, there's a tangible sense of progression which is rewarding. And the scope for progression goes very very deep.
Not all other games have this feature. If I play Catan with my friends, it's fun, but then the game is over. I'm not going to analyse my game and discover new tactics or strategies, like I will with chess.
I mostly played blitz with openings where queen is moved in the first 3 moves and got to ~2000 (no proof, sorry). I didn't study chess at all outside of playing it intensely for 1-2 years. Of course, my end game was also very bad. It was such a frustrating fun I had to stop.
There are of course players that know how to fully exploit mistakes in the bad openings, but when you're rated so low, openings rarely matter, especially if the opponent has to exploit a weird opening you have.
There's many more patterns related to pinning, tempo, that are worth much more for quick rating progress.
The author says specifically blitz/bullet is suboptimal for learning, for precisely the reasons you mention. The author plays these types of games to kill boredom.
I've been playing chess since I was 6, and I'm 7 now.
You should learn endgame and tactics, the basics of opening and maybe a few openings. endgame will teach chess. openings teaches you openings. especially when you're a beginner people will make moves that don't make sense. Plus aren't there like over 4 or 5 quadrillion possible moves just within the first 10 moves?
It doesn't necessarily matter that there are quadrillions of possible openings. Studying traps that occur often in the openings you play is definitely helpful.
For example, if you're an 1. e4 e5 player you'll want to learn how to counter the Fried Liver attack, as it's one of the most popular lines at the beginner to intermediate level.
You don't need to know many lines 7 moves deep either, just a couple of moves is already very helpful.
Is this advice not going in the exact opposite direction to what looks like a well-researched TFA with an n=1 experiment to back it up? Why do you think your opinion differs?
I can only speak from my experience but blitz worked for me. I would make occasional, furtive attempts to learn but nothing ever worked. Then one day I started playing a single five minute lichess game with coffee in the morning at work. And when I would make a mistake, I would do a takeback to see what I did wrong and how I should have played it. Sometimes I would play the puzzles.
Doing this and nothing else, I went up about 100 points a year for five years, from 1200 to 1700. (And then I stopped but I also could tell that I would have to start approaching it differently to go further.)
I love quick games, 3min blitz being my favorite and I suck at chess. It makes it almost a different game to me. I stopped playing for years because my memory of chess was slow boring waiting. Blitz is just full on, all the time.
You may learn up to a stage, when a complete beginner, by quickly and repeatedly being exposed to basic mistakes without having to think much. Afterwards it is probably detrimental indeed.
As someone who is at 1000 and also one of those people who only slam blitzes, I can confirm that one benefits from it only to a point, mostly developing skill in quickly reading the board and identifying the low-hanging-fruit moves.
Yup, starting to play 2+1 increased my 5+3 rating by 200 up to 1800 (lichess). But continuing to play 2+1 with no analysis or thought hasn't increased my rating further.
I do only play for fun / to kill time, though. So a few games a day on a metro or whatever. So with no aspirations to actually improve I think I'm at the peak of my natural ability.
I had been playing regularly for the past 30 years or so. After I watched "The Queen's Gambit", my rating went up about 100-200 points on Lichess. I was hovering in the 1800-1900 range, and shortly after watching it, I broke 2000 for the first time.
While the series did inspire me to study a little more, I'm pretty sure the result was due to an influx of weaker players who also watched the series, rather than my playing ability. But I still jokingly tell people it made my rating go up.
Fun to see GM Axel Smith mentioned, I used to be his student as a teenager, when he was still an IM. Great teacher and just a wonderful person overall. I can vouch for his methods, even if I was a teenager when I practiced them.
This is a great article on how to improve chess as a beginner, from the perspective of a former beginner. Basic recognition of patterns is the bedrock of tactical calculation. And focusing on problems that can be solved quickly is a good strategy for building it.
I do want to champion the cause of harder problems though, because there is more to calculation than pattern recognition. And this will become more and more important above the very impressive 1500 the author managed to reach.
Calculation is a conscious mental process that needs training in its own right. It involves the ability to visualise board states, remember where you are in the game tree, enumerate candidate/forcing moves and threats, heuristics like the method of elimination. None of these can be trained purely through these simpler problems, only through slowly taking your time applying all these techniques. This is why blitz rarely leads to an improvement in your base ability. The only way to build out your ability beyond what you can immediately recognise is to really struggle with positions you can't solve in 8 seconds, or even 8 minutes. This happens naturally if you play longer time controls(and actually spend your time). It's also tremendously helpful to join your local chess club and work through some problems with a stronger player to guide you. That's also a lot more fun to most people.
Learning chess doesn't have to be just a lot of rote exercise. You can also read books on positional chess, pawn structures, endgames, and openings. No, they don't decide games as much as tactical mistakes but they certainly influence games profoundly whether the players are aware of them or not. And a more "holistic" approach can be more motivating.
The way I've heard it described for go is that beginners improve fastest by focusing on problems that require them to calculate 1–3 plies out of their comfort zone. These build strongly on pattern recognition (those are the comfortable bits) but also include some game tree walking (at least in go, 1–3 plies make up a pretty heavy game tree for a beginner.)
The idea is that calculation practise is great, but it also takes a lot of time. In the time it takes a beginner to solve one very deep calculation problem, they could have finished 40 pattern recognition problems and that would probably be more beneficial. So calculation and pattern recognition has to be balanced, and a few plies out of the comfort zone strikes that balance.
This is how I feel as well. I did a little studying, but it not only felt like a treadmill, I actually felt like I was using less of my critical thinking skills the more I studied. Stuff like memorizing openings, memorizing the best move a chess engine would give you for certain situations, stuff like grandmasters memorizing entire games - this all seemed to be pretty common. I didn't see the point in putting in work only to enjoy the game less.
Of course, plenty of people enjoy a much more memorization heavy game. But it feels like ruining the fun part of the game to me.
I'm 1700-1800ish lichess (Crazyhouse and King of the Hill). I agree with this, but with one caveat. I memorize a few openings just because games can get crazy sharp pretty quickly, and there are a few patterns or move orders in the opening to memorize just so you aren't mated quickly.
I don't memorize games several moves deep, just 3-4 maybe 5 depending on the opening, which especially in Crazyhouse as there are only probably 3-4 good openins.
I love playing Scrabble (with people I know), still competitive, but try to play words you know and share the meanings after the game so it's fun and you learn.
(Scrabble champions just memorize the spelling not the meaning) (They probably also know a lot of the meanings but my point still stands)
I feel the same way, and it's what drove me to backgammon instead. Lots of fun, far less things to memorize to be competitive, and the dice make it exciting (and infuriating!).
>Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy.
That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast. They don’t teach you to play better at chess. It’s like copypasting some code from the Internet without fully understanding how it works.
In chess, it’s absolutely necessary to have a long-term plan: especially at lower levels, your ultimate goal should be attacking the king most of the time.
Use the engine smartly. Because it will tell you what move is objectively the best. It won’t tell you what move is best at your level. At different levels the best moves are different.
It’s important to train tactics but not with puzzles. Puzzles model situations that are out of context. It’s like training your swimming movements without hitting the water. It may be not harmful, but not particularly useful. Instead, you should get “puzzles” in your live games within the context, seeing the bigger picture.
Of course, you should play games. How can you expect to get better at playing chess without actually playing chess? Moreover, playing games and getting feedback on them should be the bulk of your training. Learning happens by trial and error.
Without dissecting this article any further, there is a battle-tested approach on how to get better at chess at any level and age:
- Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.
- Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.
- Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.
Of course, these are not hard and fast rules. But this is a solid foundation for the success.
> That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast
What you wrote, is exactly in-line with what the OT said: "Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy."
You are beginner, you need some opening, some little patterns to move out from the beginner level, and then you reach a new plateau, but you understand the basic, you have your "first stripe white belt" game and from there you should search for sure a way to move to the next plateau.
Not having a long-term plan and focusing on short-term patterns is fundamentally wrong. You won't only hit the plateau but will be stuck there unless you relearn chess the right bias-free way.
> - Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.
> - Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.
> - Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.
I've tried learning strategies rather than tactics, but it's significantly harder both to learn and to use. I've learned a lot about imbalances for example, but all of this knowledge goes out of the window whenever I start playing.
You actually shouldn't learn any strategies. They're usually too difficult and very often don't make any sense.
There are two possible long-term plans: giving the checkmate and gaining more resources if you feel like you don't have enough to give the checkmate. In the majority of your middlegames (depending on your level) your plan should be attacking the king.
Attack the king and align your moves with this plan. That's the only strategy you should have. Don't overcomplicate chess. Then you should play as much as possible and get feedback. Most of the time you get it when you make a mistake and your opponent punishes you. This way you can slowly, game by game, build the next layer of your chess understanding.
1. Instead of thinking, "sheesh, I suck" after losing, start thinking, "well played" (even if your opponent was in a losing position and beat you on time or with a sneaky pre-move; they still won). This simple reframing makes it less about the gaps in your abilities and more about having found an opponent who outplayed you that game. Finding better opponents is a good thing; you will learn more.
2. Actively make loss about growth: review games you lost. Find (a) the losing move and (b) the reason you made that move (harder, but important). Use that info to change your thought process to reduce future mistakes. This can be as simple as, "it's 2am and I've been playing blitz for 3 hours, I'm too tired to play my best, I'll stop playing after midnight". Or "I keep missing mate threats. I will say "checks, captures, threats" in my head after my opponent makes a move to train myself to systematically seek dangerous intent, until that process is so internalised that it's natural. I will also solve mate-in-one[1] or mate-in-two[2] puzzles on Lichess for 10 minutes a day until they feel obvious."
3. If you lose three games in a row, stop playing for a while (a few minutes/hours/days, whatever you need). If losses hugely affect your mood, a long string of them can make you feel really low. Pre-emptively break that cycle and do something else for a while.
Yeah. You have to realize that in chess there are two players and one of them is going to lose. Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's your opponent. To progress in chess you need to win more games than you lose. 50.5% win rate is enough in the long term.
My suggestion based on my own emotions with chess is that you should start playing quick games like 3+2 or something. The time and emotional "investment" in those games is low enough that you might not care when you lose. Just start another game and try again. Losing classical game that you were playing for 2 weeks is a different beast.
I'm the same, but I haven't managed to grow out of it. I just get frustrated and keep playing in anger until I win, which sucks for my social life.
Oddly, the only sport where I'm chill about losing is tennis, where I think "nice, they played really well". Everywhere else, including chess, it's "how could you do this to me".
The only time I managed to be chill in chess was after I'd taken MDMA, and then when I'd lose I'd think "they played better, they deserve it". It went away after a few days, though, never to be repeated (presumably without more MDMA).
I thought I was the only one that ever felt that way. It was many years ago when ICC was the only place to play online, and I was exactly the same. I could play bots, but not people. Losing to a bot was one thing, but another person? No way! I ended up writing about the online chess experience for some class I was taking at the time. I think that what's finally did it for me. And since that time, I basically accept losing, failure, as a part of the process of learning and growing in all areas of life. Some years later I played in OTB tournaments. These would be weekend events where a game could last 4 hours, and you'd play two or even three in a day. It could be pretty grueling. And of course, you have to accept your losses. It's an amazing experience to be an adult and lose to a child or teenager. But yes that's happened to me more than once. I'll also add that it's amazing to win an OTB tournament. Once I played in a large weekend tournament, six games over three days. I was in the under 2000 section (my rating was in the 1600s), and for some reason, I simple could not lose. Even in games where I would have a losing position, I would still manager to win, or in one case draw. I was bullet proof, and it was such a wonderful feeling -- felt like I was walking ten feet off the ground. The only tournament where I've ever won a cash prize, too. So, anyway, go for it. Don't let your fear of losing stop you from trying in any area of life.
I prefer losing actually - I always find myself a bit dissapointed after achieving victory.
From every loss I learned something (either that my tactics need work, that I need to improve my understanding of this or that structure, that I need to add a line to my repertoire), from victories not so much.
Also I find that going for a beer with opponent when they win is usually much better experience than when they lose - people tend to be more open and talkative after win than after loss.
Wins feel unearned (the opponent just played so bad) or accidental (he played good but made this one mistake, it could have gone either way).
In case of the loses you feel way more in control somehow (ooh, I definitely shouldn't have done that) or are just funny (I can't do anything, they are wiping the floor with me, it's comical) where you set up your own small goals to achieve because you have no hopes of actually competing (yes! I got him this one time so it's 12-1 not 12-0).
Find whomever regularly can beat you, be thankful, and play them as often as possible until they can't.
Players are very lucky if they can irl find people that can beat them. The goal should always be to play someone who is better when possible, because it's the only way to improve via gameplay.
Most people don't play chess. Many fewer will ever play beyond the casual game with someone over a holdiay. Meaning that anyone who is remotely serious about improving will likely very quickly find themselves without anyone better to play.
I'm not a "good" chess player. But about half of the adults that I know, who play, won't play me for the same reason that you don't play. So I mostly teach children to play. Some of them can play now. They likely won't beat me for a long time to come. I don't improve over these games. The games are sometimes marginally fun for me. One kid won't learn for the same reason that you won't play. Those who do play are lucky to be able to improve their game against my play.
I was the same. I can't easily describe what changed, but now I don't play to win or lose, I just decided to play for the sake of playing.
If you lose a game, just stop playing for a bit, and don't give in to the feeling of wanting to play another to prove you can win. This will only result in frustration.
If you lose, make yourself think "That was a fun game. I learned X, and will try and do Y next time."
I've been the same way for as long as I can remember. It applies to single player games, too.
I've found that there are some games that losing isn't completely off-putting. But I think the real issue is that the fun I get from most games is in winning, not in playing. If I was playing for not reason (not to win, no goals, etc) I wouldn't play it, and would do something else instead. Winning makes it feel enough better than I want to play.
I've been trying to "overcome" this, too, and having the right mindset is start. "I'm here to enjoy the game, not the win.", etc.
Take up any online multiplayer game and then lose a lot. Lose till it wears you down, so you'll stop caring, about loses ... and wins. It will feel terrible at the beginning and you'll want to come back to single player games that are built in a way that lets you win, but after some time (years) you'll no longer care and will enjoy the game itself not the result.
Just play quick unrated blitz games. Then when you lose it doesn't matter for anything. After a while, you will start to think "hmm, it's more fun when I get an opponent who's close to an even match with me". And then you'll just naturally want to play rated games. And if not, that's fine too.
I am the same, I'm so terrible at chess that it's just not enjoyable for me, and I don't have time to learn it properly, so I just don't play even though I find the game interesting and a bit addictive.
Honestly: Play a game where you are supposed to win.
There is a reason why single player video games are still popular. It is fun to win!
I play ARPGs, where, I mow down hordes of enemies with a mere mouse click with fun graphics and sound.
Is this cotton candy compared to playing PvP games. Absolutely. I've done serious PvP before. But, after a day of work... sometimes, it is just fun to save the world, or make it burn.
and here I was happy to get up to 1000 in Chess.com after 2 years (only to then just hover around forever). Knowledge is power etc etc but at one point nothing replaces studying.
I've found that anything under 15 minute clocks just feels like brain poison to me, though. Your brain goes completely into pattern matching mode and lose out on the actual interesting tactical analysis you can do when you're taking a bit more time. I have been queueing up daily games instead and it's nice. Games take a month to resolve but if you just continuously add to the queue that's good.
EDIT:
> I learned a bunch of openings with White for 6 months or so, also via Chessable. Amazingly I won more games with Black, where I had learned nothing, than with White. I got frustrated with this, and switched my openings entirely. It had literally no impact on my rating, and I continued to improve.
I felt this so much recently. I got kind of obsessed with the Evans gambit, and would still lose to people who would play into the gambit and let me go down the lines I knew well. I'd just flummox later on. The game below a certain point is really just "don't blunder as much as the opponent"
Sounds good to me! Ratings are a treadmill. As you get better so do your opponents. You'll always have a ~50% winrate.
I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)
That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.
Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.
Your analogue is probably true to a certain extent, but in reality maintaining your current form in any domain of expertise is easier than achieving that form in the first place.
I only really have video games as an easily quantifiable example, but playing in top 1% of League of Legends doesn't really require anything more than a couple games a week to maintain that level. I have the knowledge, I know what to do, and I can execute on that. Perhaps this would be harder in a domain that leans more on physical or mental condition which tend to decrease over time, but probably not so much in Chess and the like.
I've accepted that I'm worse at chess than other people in some innate sense, but puzzles have been nice. I really enjoy the chess.com lessons as well, and listening to someone explain stuff is always pleasant. I might not absorb much, but it's better than nothing.
It's not brain poison, if you're at the level you're at. Pattern matching is incredibly important, and dishing out many games to learn those and avoiding blunders would probably help you a lot.
Have you tried mixing up games with daily moves with rapid and blitz? Mixing “do it right” with “do it fast” training is more effective than doing only one of both.
One thing a friend of mine mentioned about studying, is that you can get in a weird cycle where you end up reinforcing answering incorrectly to a thing over and over.
I think that blitz reinforces my bad habits of approximate pattern matching and ultimately makes me play worse in my other games. If I want to "do it fast" I can just open my dailies and play them fast! But this is a me problem, I routinely play board games etc too quickly, and lose because of it. I do not need help with "do it fast".
Readit News
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-chess-with-dr-wolf/id135...
It's got a beautiful UI, and it's a conversational chess tutor that goes over the basics, tactics, advanced strategy and with whom you can play and will point out mistakes and blunders for later review. Perhaps it is too basic for anybody that has a few hundred games of chess under their belt but if you know nothing about the game, it is a great way to get into it. As the author say, low level chess is about learning patterns and short-term strategy (what should I do the opening, how to checkmate with a rook, etc.) and this app teaches exactly that, in a gradual way.
Not affiliated, just a happy and now paying user.
1) Playing lots of games (https://online-go.com and https://gokgs.com are good for this). I usually have a few correspondence games going and then try to play a normal speed game daily. Don't worry about winning and losing, just play. Begin to internalize how standard tactics reappear regularly on the board.
2) Do tsumego (life and death) a lot. But don't just try things and see what happens. Try to read out the entire sequence before looking at the answer. (SmartGo One is a good app). Cho Chikun's beginner ones are good [1]. Try to work on a subset of problems (<100) until you can just look at the formation for a few seconds and see the answer. Play out all sequences to really understand why they don't work. Getting the answer isn't really the point, it's that you internalize the tactics involved in all tsumego.
3) As someone who spent WAY too much time reading books about Go strategy and tactics before I could barely play the game: don't do that. Books become much more useful once you are a SDK (single digit kyu) player. Until then, just play and study life and death. Reading books isn't bad, it just isn't that helpful when you can get beat in a game because you don't have the basic tactics down.
[1] https://tsumego.tasuki.org/
You should totally do the tactics and puzzles that you can find (that same site has a bunch), but there's a lot more strategic recognition and pattern-matching in go than chess.
I'm also interested to hear if there are better tools though in the last .. Christ, twenty years? I'm old now -.-
We both really enjoy playing the game at our absolute best when I start the game less one rook, knight, bishop, and two pawns. I'm not a great chess player though.
Anyway, more to your question, finding a way to play Go in person is such a game-changer, literally.
If looking for a book. Cho Chikun's life & death corner problems progress in a systematic manner from beginner to dan level.
Also https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...
This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study, just some light YouTube watching. 500->800 felt like all it took was learning a few openings and not blundering pieces. 800-1050 felt like it came mostly from getting familiar with the common patterns from those openings that led to advantages/disadvantages. Most of my learning here came from reviewing my own games and trying to understand why my mistakes were mistakes.
I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games. The time constraints are too rushed to really think about what makes a move good or bad. I assumed it was a young person's thing, but the author said he plays these quick formats too.
Getting to 2000 rating is going to be quite a mountain to climb for you, unless you’re very young.
[1] https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA...
Higher rated players tend to be closer to their potential than lower rated ones, leaving less room for improvement, in any sport. They also will be more likely to get worse over time because, the nearer to the top, the more roads lead you downwards.
You’d have to pick a very peculiar metric to measure performance to compensate for that.
You mean, "unless you have unlimited time."
But he studied, and studied, and last I knew he was 3 dan, which is about the point you can entertain the idea of becoming a pro (if I just worked harder).
Kids have a lot more free time to sink into a singular concern. Warnings about how something are out of the reach of adults aren’t actually hard rules, they’re just really good rules of thumb. But if you can make the time, it’s not impossible.
I don’t think chess is any different there. Small improvements may set reasonable expectations, but there are people who can blow right past them.
Ultimately, I think this is what's often downplayed in these conversations. Just because your friend was able to excel at Go in those 15 years, doesn't imply that any other specific person would be able to do the same, even with the same study. You'll find many people who attempted this but simply couldn't get past a lower plateau.
So, when you say "if you can make the time, it’s not impossible", I'm not sure that that's true. My suspicion would be that for a significant portion of the population, it would in fact be literally impossible. (edit: I was reading a different thread where somebody was asking about becoming a FIDE CM, that's what I was referencing here as being impossible for many, I don't know anything about Go ranks).
You can check that on https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/ and pick some players at random.
They have a nice date/rank graph and all those graphs start with an almost vertical growth which slows down and flattens. Some players play less often and get weaker but that's not the point.
I have no idea if it applies to chess too, possibly with different parameters, but why not? They are both games played with the brain by humans.
I'm 47 and started playing around 5 years ago. I only play Blitz and Bullet because I find it fun. In the first two years I went from around 1000 on lichess to around 1700. I've been "stuck" at 1700 plus or minus 100 since then.
I know I could improve with puzzles and classical time controls and study and analysis but I have no interest in that. I play games for fun. If I improve then great. If not no problem. It's the same as breaking out a game of Tetris or something for 5 minutes to me.
Is rating on chess.com similar to rating in lichess? The article mentions 1%, but you start with 1500 in lichess??? If you lose often, you quickly go down. But if you keep an even record, you stay in 1500.
I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games.
As in the article, speed training helps recognizing patterns and dealing with them. At first it seems impossible to play significant moves with so little time, but you can try to just doing it. You'll adapt very soon.
I recommend starting with blitz 3+2 and later bullet 2+1. There are tournaments of 1+0... or even less time. 30 seconds is really crazy.
Is that actually true? You start at a 1500 in lichess, but that is a provisional rating and the outcome of your first few games are going to cause BIG swings in your rating. After your rating is no longer a provisional rating then that is going to slow down.
Losing a few games at the start might take a lot more wins to "even out" in rating. Just keeping an even record might not be enough to stay 1500.
300 cc should be similiar to around 800 lichess. Around 2000-2200 ratings even out on both sites and on higher ratings lichess ratings tend to be lower than on cc.
For improving longer time controls are better. The old adage, that if you want to play blitz better you should play rapid and that if you want to improve rapid you should play classical is still valid today. Blitz is beneficial only at higher rating ranges (2000+) to allow practising openings, and even that only in moderation. Players who don't play classical time controls (90min+30sec/move at least) tend to plateau around 2000-2200 online.
This ofc doesn't mean that blitz isn't fun - vast majority of my games are in blitz time controls.
Older games become interesting to watch, mate in 6-8 puzzles become tenable, chess books about specific openings make more sense. Once a player knows how to finish basic endgames and accord himself properly in the middle game, they have the tools to grasp opening theory. From there on, there is a huge body of information about opening theory, playing styles, control and leverage of center, etc etc.
Much of the ink spilled about this game is a bit impenetrable without some acumen. But with enough appreciation to the past and present trends, one can fine tune one's playing style and really make the game your own.
Not all other games have this feature. If I play Catan with my friends, it's fun, but then the game is over. I'm not going to analyse my game and discover new tactics or strategies, like I will with chess.
There are of course players that know how to fully exploit mistakes in the bad openings, but when you're rated so low, openings rarely matter, especially if the opponent has to exploit a weird opening you have.
There's many more patterns related to pinning, tempo, that are worth much more for quick rating progress.
No way you get to 2000 by cheesing, maybe 1000 max. 2000 rating is not low, it’s top 0.3% on chess.com
You should learn endgame and tactics, the basics of opening and maybe a few openings. endgame will teach chess. openings teaches you openings. especially when you're a beginner people will make moves that don't make sense. Plus aren't there like over 4 or 5 quadrillion possible moves just within the first 10 moves?
For example, if you're an 1. e4 e5 player you'll want to learn how to counter the Fried Liver attack, as it's one of the most popular lines at the beginner to intermediate level.
You don't need to know many lines 7 moves deep either, just a couple of moves is already very helpful.
Doing this and nothing else, I went up about 100 points a year for five years, from 1200 to 1700. (And then I stopped but I also could tell that I would have to start approaching it differently to go further.)
I do only play for fun / to kill time, though. So a few games a day on a metro or whatever. So with no aspirations to actually improve I think I'm at the peak of my natural ability.
While the series did inspire me to study a little more, I'm pretty sure the result was due to an influx of weaker players who also watched the series, rather than my playing ability. But I still jokingly tell people it made my rating go up.
This is a great article on how to improve chess as a beginner, from the perspective of a former beginner. Basic recognition of patterns is the bedrock of tactical calculation. And focusing on problems that can be solved quickly is a good strategy for building it.
I do want to champion the cause of harder problems though, because there is more to calculation than pattern recognition. And this will become more and more important above the very impressive 1500 the author managed to reach.
Calculation is a conscious mental process that needs training in its own right. It involves the ability to visualise board states, remember where you are in the game tree, enumerate candidate/forcing moves and threats, heuristics like the method of elimination. None of these can be trained purely through these simpler problems, only through slowly taking your time applying all these techniques. This is why blitz rarely leads to an improvement in your base ability. The only way to build out your ability beyond what you can immediately recognise is to really struggle with positions you can't solve in 8 seconds, or even 8 minutes. This happens naturally if you play longer time controls(and actually spend your time). It's also tremendously helpful to join your local chess club and work through some problems with a stronger player to guide you. That's also a lot more fun to most people.
Learning chess doesn't have to be just a lot of rote exercise. You can also read books on positional chess, pawn structures, endgames, and openings. No, they don't decide games as much as tactical mistakes but they certainly influence games profoundly whether the players are aware of them or not. And a more "holistic" approach can be more motivating.
The idea is that calculation practise is great, but it also takes a lot of time. In the time it takes a beginner to solve one very deep calculation problem, they could have finished 40 pattern recognition problems and that would probably be more beneficial. So calculation and pattern recognition has to be balanced, and a few plies out of the comfort zone strikes that balance.
It's like studying the meta instead of actually playing.
Of course, plenty of people enjoy a much more memorization heavy game. But it feels like ruining the fun part of the game to me.
I don't memorize games several moves deep, just 3-4 maybe 5 depending on the opening, which especially in Crazyhouse as there are only probably 3-4 good openins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
(Scrabble champions just memorize the spelling not the meaning) (They probably also know a lot of the meanings but my point still stands)
That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast. They don’t teach you to play better at chess. It’s like copypasting some code from the Internet without fully understanding how it works.
In chess, it’s absolutely necessary to have a long-term plan: especially at lower levels, your ultimate goal should be attacking the king most of the time.
Use the engine smartly. Because it will tell you what move is objectively the best. It won’t tell you what move is best at your level. At different levels the best moves are different.
It’s important to train tactics but not with puzzles. Puzzles model situations that are out of context. It’s like training your swimming movements without hitting the water. It may be not harmful, but not particularly useful. Instead, you should get “puzzles” in your live games within the context, seeing the bigger picture.
Of course, you should play games. How can you expect to get better at playing chess without actually playing chess? Moreover, playing games and getting feedback on them should be the bulk of your training. Learning happens by trial and error.
Without dissecting this article any further, there is a battle-tested approach on how to get better at chess at any level and age:
- Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.
- Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.
- Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.
Of course, these are not hard and fast rules. But this is a solid foundation for the success.
P.S. My FIDE rating is 2423.
What you wrote, is exactly in-line with what the OT said: "Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy."
You are beginner, you need some opening, some little patterns to move out from the beginner level, and then you reach a new plateau, but you understand the basic, you have your "first stripe white belt" game and from there you should search for sure a way to move to the next plateau.
> - Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.
> - Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.
> - Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.
I've been thinking recently that I should play anyway so that I could grow out of this condition. Any tips for that?
1. Instead of thinking, "sheesh, I suck" after losing, start thinking, "well played" (even if your opponent was in a losing position and beat you on time or with a sneaky pre-move; they still won). This simple reframing makes it less about the gaps in your abilities and more about having found an opponent who outplayed you that game. Finding better opponents is a good thing; you will learn more.
2. Actively make loss about growth: review games you lost. Find (a) the losing move and (b) the reason you made that move (harder, but important). Use that info to change your thought process to reduce future mistakes. This can be as simple as, "it's 2am and I've been playing blitz for 3 hours, I'm too tired to play my best, I'll stop playing after midnight". Or "I keep missing mate threats. I will say "checks, captures, threats" in my head after my opponent makes a move to train myself to systematically seek dangerous intent, until that process is so internalised that it's natural. I will also solve mate-in-one[1] or mate-in-two[2] puzzles on Lichess for 10 minutes a day until they feel obvious."
3. If you lose three games in a row, stop playing for a while (a few minutes/hours/days, whatever you need). If losses hugely affect your mood, a long string of them can make you feel really low. Pre-emptively break that cycle and do something else for a while.
[1] https://lichess.org/training/mateIn1
[2] https://lichess.org/training/mateIn2
My suggestion based on my own emotions with chess is that you should start playing quick games like 3+2 or something. The time and emotional "investment" in those games is low enough that you might not care when you lose. Just start another game and try again. Losing classical game that you were playing for 2 weeks is a different beast.
Oddly, the only sport where I'm chill about losing is tennis, where I think "nice, they played really well". Everywhere else, including chess, it's "how could you do this to me".
The only time I managed to be chill in chess was after I'd taken MDMA, and then when I'd lose I'd think "they played better, they deserve it". It went away after a few days, though, never to be repeated (presumably without more MDMA).
From every loss I learned something (either that my tactics need work, that I need to improve my understanding of this or that structure, that I need to add a line to my repertoire), from victories not so much.
Also I find that going for a beer with opponent when they win is usually much better experience than when they lose - people tend to be more open and talkative after win than after loss.
In case of the loses you feel way more in control somehow (ooh, I definitely shouldn't have done that) or are just funny (I can't do anything, they are wiping the floor with me, it's comical) where you set up your own small goals to achieve because you have no hopes of actually competing (yes! I got him this one time so it's 12-1 not 12-0).
Players are very lucky if they can irl find people that can beat them. The goal should always be to play someone who is better when possible, because it's the only way to improve via gameplay.
Most people don't play chess. Many fewer will ever play beyond the casual game with someone over a holdiay. Meaning that anyone who is remotely serious about improving will likely very quickly find themselves without anyone better to play.
I'm not a "good" chess player. But about half of the adults that I know, who play, won't play me for the same reason that you don't play. So I mostly teach children to play. Some of them can play now. They likely won't beat me for a long time to come. I don't improve over these games. The games are sometimes marginally fun for me. One kid won't learn for the same reason that you won't play. Those who do play are lucky to be able to improve their game against my play.
If you lose a game, just stop playing for a bit, and don't give in to the feeling of wanting to play another to prove you can win. This will only result in frustration.
If you lose, make yourself think "That was a fun game. I learned X, and will try and do Y next time."
I've found that there are some games that losing isn't completely off-putting. But I think the real issue is that the fun I get from most games is in winning, not in playing. If I was playing for not reason (not to win, no goals, etc) I wouldn't play it, and would do something else instead. Winning makes it feel enough better than I want to play.
I've been trying to "overcome" this, too, and having the right mindset is start. "I'm here to enjoy the game, not the win.", etc.
Good luck. :)
There is a reason why single player video games are still popular. It is fun to win!
I play ARPGs, where, I mow down hordes of enemies with a mere mouse click with fun graphics and sound.
Is this cotton candy compared to playing PvP games. Absolutely. I've done serious PvP before. But, after a day of work... sometimes, it is just fun to save the world, or make it burn.
Successful people fail often. Failures fail only once.
If you want success, make failure part of your DNA.
I've found that anything under 15 minute clocks just feels like brain poison to me, though. Your brain goes completely into pattern matching mode and lose out on the actual interesting tactical analysis you can do when you're taking a bit more time. I have been queueing up daily games instead and it's nice. Games take a month to resolve but if you just continuously add to the queue that's good.
EDIT:
> I learned a bunch of openings with White for 6 months or so, also via Chessable. Amazingly I won more games with Black, where I had learned nothing, than with White. I got frustrated with this, and switched my openings entirely. It had literally no impact on my rating, and I continued to improve.
I felt this so much recently. I got kind of obsessed with the Evans gambit, and would still lose to people who would play into the gambit and let me go down the lines I knew well. I'd just flummox later on. The game below a certain point is really just "don't blunder as much as the opponent"
I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)
That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.
Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.
I only really have video games as an easily quantifiable example, but playing in top 1% of League of Legends doesn't really require anything more than a couple games a week to maintain that level. I have the knowledge, I know what to do, and I can execute on that. Perhaps this would be harder in a domain that leans more on physical or mental condition which tend to decrease over time, but probably not so much in Chess and the like.
I think that blitz reinforces my bad habits of approximate pattern matching and ultimately makes me play worse in my other games. If I want to "do it fast" I can just open my dailies and play them fast! But this is a me problem, I routinely play board games etc too quickly, and lose because of it. I do not need help with "do it fast".