Improve your Puzzle Rush score by looking in the right place

Here's a nice tip for improving your puzzle rush score - at the start of each puzzle make sure you're looking at the TOP of the board (your opponent's pieces), not at your pieces along the bottom.  I don't remember conciously deciding to always start by looking at my own pieces, but I stumbled across this by accident and today I went from 21 in 3 minutes (which I've done many times) to hitting 22, then 23 in just three attempts.

I'm also doing aimchess's Tactics Challenge, where you do tactics puzzles with either 1, 5 or 10 minute time limit. You also have a time limit per puzzle: 10 seconds, 30 seconds or 2 minutes.  You pick the level of difficulty; try and pick something slightly challenging for yourself.  My "instant solving" stops around 1200; you want a length of time that matches a typical "have a think about this move" in a real game. If you like blitz, pick the ten seconds or 30 seconds options to simulate what you'll be doing in a real game.

I'm a bit annoyed at myself for pushing my puzzle rating up too high on lichess (2100) and chess.com (2500 peak).  It means when I click the "puzzles" button I'm looking at situations I can solve if I reeeeallly take my time.  Those are fun in a way, but not helpful for the typical game situation I find myself in.

I still make blunders in blitz/rapid games and I think that doing a ton of 1200-ish level puzzles, with tight time requirements, will help me.

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I recently played 12 5+3 blitz games in a row on lichess and lost 10 of them, dropping from 1350 to 1300.  I'm looking to see how the lines I played, and my opponent replied, matches up against the opening training I'm doing on chessable on the Scotch (white), French and Queen's Gambit Declined (both black). The short answer seems to be "not much - it goes off track after 4 or 5 moves most of the time".

If you're not sure how to do this, open the analysis board on lichess. Look at bottom right and click the leftmost button, the one that looks like a book.  Then click the third tab, the one with your name on it. Lichess is now showing the stats from your own games (rated only, no imports or casual). You can filter further with the gear icon on the right. 

Pro tip: change from your white games to black games by clicking the third tab again.  

Use this great tool to see where you typically makes mistakes or where your opponents tend to do the same.

I've found a really nice free endgame course

 "Basic Endgames" on Chessable is a free collection of exercises in endgames you should know. I've just started it but I know it's something I've been looking for. Chess endgames are full of motifs and drills/exercises that you just need to know, like how to get a single pawn to the other end of the board, or if you're on the other side, how to STOP a single pawn getting to the end of the board.

The sections include: 

1. Pawn Endgames
2. Queen + King vs King
3. Queen vs Pawn
4. Mating with King and Rook
5. Rook endings
6. Bishop vs pawn

It goes on, but you get the idea.  You can also practice some of these endings on Lichess in a way that doesn't demand perfect moves. 

I can also recommend the six specialized endgames section from lichess: pick the piece type you want to focus on (ie pawns, bishops & pawns, rooks & pawns etc) and try to do ten puzzles from that area. If they are too hard, dial down the difficult with the Difficulty setting in the bottom left. 

There is benefit in doing puzzles that take a while to figure out, but there's more benefit (I think!) in doing a bunch of puzzles that you can solve quite quickly - under 30 seconds maybe? That's the kind of speed you need for most games you'll play and practicing those fast ones until you see the answer without even thinking about it...that's a good feeling!

Never Give Up! Never Surrender!

 

Galaxy Quest (you really should see this,if you haven't)

What a game! I played some blitz (5+3) this afternoon and this game was an air-punching victory for me!

It started with a pretty dense cluster of pieces in the center, during which I made bad moves, swinging the game to my opponent. We are both rated around 1300 on lichess.  I shuffled my pieces around trying to fix my situation (the eval bar showed a steady -6 through this time) and threatened his queen; I thought for a second I had the queen trapped and I guess they thought that too, because they just moved their king, allowing the queen to be captured.

The green arrow shows that they could have moved their queen to safety, but didn't.  A couple of moves later I followed that with this nice little tactic, forking the rook and king while my knight is safely on e6 (it can't be captured because the queen pins that pawn), and my opponent resigned.

I know it's hard to press on with a game where you're badly down in material, but at the level most people play chess at (myself definitely included!) pieces can still be given away for free which could turn the game around.

Amazing! Another "perfect" game!

 After a rough night at the chess club I played a quick 15 minute game this morning and it turned out to be another "perfect" game, where the computer says I made no errors at all. 97% accuracy and only 22 centipawn loss.

A crucial moment - they put their queen in line with their king

My over the board (real-life) game feels really flabby, like I can't see what is happening in the game properly, but I'm doing much better on the computer screen. 

I'm almost through the five "on the attack" chess tactics puzzle courses I'm doing on chessable; when I'm done I will have a mental library of over 1000 puzzles that I've seen at least ten times each. It *should* help me in games; it certainly can't hurt. 

I left a comment on one of the rook puzzles, asking why the last move worked the way it did, and the author kindly replied and altered the text of the puzzle to explain it better. That was very nice of him!

Nice Shortcuts to Practice Against Bots

 I like practicing openings against the computer but you never know what the computer is going to do. Chess.com has a solution for this: you can specify which opening you want to practice.

This feature is under the "Learn - Practice - Openings" menu on chess.com. Don't confuse it for the "Learn - Openings" area, which is a different thing.

I created menu of bookmarks that go straight to the openings I want to practice.

Those are bookmarks to Chess.com's openings practice page - you pick which side you want to play and which strength of bot you want to play against.  

The other great features are

• You can wind the game back as far as you like and play a different move
• You can wind the game back and make THE COMPUTER play a different move!
• You can turn on/off assistance feature at any time, such as engine lines so you can see what the best moves are: turn them off for a challenge or turn them on to help learn.
• You can change the bot strength at any time during the game.

Use the small buttons on the bottom row: the second one lets you change the bot and the third one, the reversing circle arrow, resets the game back to the starting position. Use the "gear" icon to change the settings of the assistance features.

The last two links in my practice menu, playing against 1 e4 and 1 d4, I had to custom-make as those aren't considered "openings" by chess.com, but I think it's valuable to play against them when you don't know what opening is coming.

Practice vs 1. e4

Practice vs 1.d4

The only drawback with the customizing is that the game defaults to the 3200 bot, so be sure to change it before you start playing, unless you are looking to be crushed!

What Opportunity Tactics Did I Miss? Use tactics.bitcrafter to find them

 I found this nice tool at tactics.bitcrafter that examines your games on lichess and finds the tactics you missed from the last 25 games you played there: these are situations where your opponent left the door open for a big hit from you and you didn't take the easy money.

Here's an easy example of one I missed - a simple king-queen fork, with the pieces out in the open! I took five seconds to overlook this golden opportunity but instead I retreated my rook; I faintly remember not noticing that my bishop was covering that square. I went on to, undeservedly, win the game on time.

This one is more subtle - I had a 7 point swing in my favor waiting if I spotted this Nb4. It would allow me to get that knight to c2 and fork the king/rook and white would have a hard time stopping it cleanly.

The site does NOT include errors that you made on your move - it's just positions where you had an opportunity due to your opponents blunder and didn't see it. I think this is a very valuable tool because you can identify gaps in your perception of your opponents moves.

One thing to remember - it only finds tactics in game where you used the "Request A Computer Analysis" button on the analysis board.

Missed Opportunities in the Opening

Free Stuff in the Opening 

Oh boy, this game is kind of embarassing.    I'm play a Scotch opening and my opponent goes astray quite early, serving me up several opportunities to take pieces/pawns. But I didn't take them, fearing some kind of trap or gambit that just wasn't there. But the calculation was much more straightforward!

Two attackers - one defender.

Same again - two on one.

I should have taken the e5 pawn and the knight in the second image.  Lucky for me my opponent opened the door to me attacking his rooks and he rage quit on move 13. I'm almost 1500 rapid on lichess now.

Study-wise I'm leaning hard into the "On The Attack" series. It will take months to get through the whole lot but I'm determined to find out if it improves my play by recognizing over 1000 puzzle positions. So far....no. But I'm definitely improving at recognizing the puzzles themselves; on about the fourth repetition I'm starting to recall the moves by sight instead of calculating them (if I even can calculate them!).

I'm still completing my last two games in a chess.com tournament. I'm pretty sure I'll come second in my group with 7.5 out of 10, which is pretty good (EDIT: I won my last game, and the tiebreak! I don't know on what basis, but I will be in round 2!) . And I'm playing a lot of slow correspondence games against friends from the chess club. They are very solid players and I may need to start studying something new to learn what I'm lacking in those games. The occasional blunder that throws the game doesn't help either!

Visualisation as the Master Skill of Chess?

One intriguing training site I came across is Dont Move Till You See It. He suggests that if you train your visualization skills just 10 minutes a day you "unlock" the chess knowledge you have learned through studying because you're making your brain work harder during the exercises, compared to when you sit at a board to play. Your "chess mind" will be more forthcoming with the information after you've made it work hard at visualizing with your eyes closed.

His course is free to start; you get enough to work with and you can pay for premium content if you wish.

You can hear the creator talk about his system - and he gives away all the techniques for free - on Chess Journeys ep 82. I've got the five free emails describing the exercises but haven't done them yet.

As Fabiano Caruana says - "Visualization is probably the most important thing in Chess.

Mistakes and blunders, if we strip them down to the bare essence, are problems with visualization."

Nice explanation of an instructive chess game

 I've never heard the stages of a chess game explained so clearly - this a really helpful video.

Seeing it explained with a physical board is a nice surprise too - I think it makes it easier to understand.

Playing openings without memorizing

 Several of my chess buddies have expressed surprise that I'm not working on memorizing openings. It feels like an important part of chess, learning the exact "right" moves to play at the start of the game, but I've found several videos where smart people say otherwise. For a start, your opponents are unlikely to reply with the "right" responses to your theoretically perfect moves, not past one or two moves anyway.

I thought I'd put the videos in one place for easy reference:

Here's what they all agree on: play using the basic chess principles (control the center, develop pieces, king safety. Play slow games, not fast. Analyse your games after you play them.

Chess Dojo on learning openings from 0-1200: I just found these guys last night. I love that they have a structured training course, telling you what skills/books you should be using at different levels of chess ability. They emphasize NO opening theory till about 1200 ELO. They have some videos (I haven't watched yet) about opening principles.

Adult Chess Improver: Complete repertoire for black and for white, and here's a 6 part playlist containing those two wherein he talks about it a bit more. Again it's "use opening principles but don't focus your limited study time on openings, because that's not where you, a lower-rated player, are losing games."

Andras Toth: How to Get Better at Chess 0 to 1700: part one and part two. "90 games out of 100, games are not won, they are lost". A point I've made in earlier posts; games at this level are mostly decided by who blunders most/first/last (take your pick!).   Focus on tactics and calculation, and the basic principles: development, central control and king safety.

Spend 60% of your chess time studying, 40% playing. No bullet, 10-20% on blitz and just for checking your openings, because these short games don't give you time to think.

In my tournament games against higher level players they simply don't make those kind of errors! I wait for my chances to take something off them, but it never comes! I'm at the point where I need to learn the next set of skills; Chess Dojo suggests it's understanding tempo.

More About Chess Dojo

Look at their "Chess Dojo Training Program" playlist to see what you ought to know at different levels. It's free to know the requirements; you'll see them in the video. For me at about the 1000 level here's what they'd like me to do.

Polgar 5334 problems book: all mate in 1s, up to #700 of mate in 2

Learn Chess The Right Way book 3 (defense), Susan Polgar 

Chess.com Puzzle Rush 5 min: 14 (I have 27)

Chess.com PR Survival: 16 (I have 30+ I think)

Endgames position #1: be able to win with queen or rook

They have other requirements: memorize a particular game, review/annotate games etc.

Play 25 classical games (thats like 45 min + 30 sec?) and do 10 post mortems with a stronger player

At this level you should be good at playing in a miserly fashion; not giving up material  (i.e not hanging pieces, staying defended). They talk about chess having three “dimensions”:  material, tempi and quality of position. Beginners need to focus only on material, but at this level start to think about tempi. 

They expect you to try and win games by sheer force of material; taking more of it from your opponent than they take from you, then finish the game with a king+queen or king+rook combo.

Playing a "perfect" game

 The chess.com engine says I made no errors when playing this game, which is really nice to see. My stats are on the right side.

It's one of ten games I'm playing as part of a daily tournament on chess.com. In my group of six players I think I'm going to come second - it will be very difficult to catch the guy already in first place.

The game itself felt very smooth as I was playing. I didn't have any big breakthroughs but I did have three opportunities to pick up a pawn from my opponent.  He had a hanging bishop that I looked for ways to capture safely, but could not make that happen.

Interestingly, the engine says some of the times I captured a pawn that wasn't actually the best move! It preferred a positional move, but I'm a simple man and feel better when I'm ahead in material. It feels like a more flexible and "easy to trust" evalation for my abilities.

 I saw towards the end he could get into my back ranks but it didn't look like he could do any damage before I did the same to him, but with enough control to mate him. Thank you, Datiss, for the game!

Getting a New Chess Routine together

My daughter's idea of playing chess: all the pieces get together for lunch.

 For a few days there I was feeling quite overwhelmed with chess resources.  I'm trying to improve how I play, but I was caught between a bunch of ideas and resources I had found. After my run of blitz games on chess.com a couple of months ago I've actually played very few real games against people; I think I'm spending too much time studying!

I'll start with my conclusion first, if you want the short version.

I'm doing (or at least trying to) the following each day

1. One, perhaps two, 15 minute-per-side games on lichess.org. If you play you MUST analyse the game afterwards. (I played a nice one last night!). (Got this advice from Chessvibes on youtube)
2. A ten-minute tactics run on aimchess.com. I usually get 18-20 right. Around #12 is where I usually slow down and have to reaaalllly think.
3. Do problems from the Polgar "5334 Problems" book. They're all mate in one/two puzzles, but it comes highly recommended. Write down your answers, do the problems in your head even if you're using a physical board. I made a spreadsheet to track my answers.
4. Do tactics training on chessable.com; despite not grooving with the opening training there yet I'm enjoying the "On The Attack" (pawns/bishops/rooks/knight/queen) series of free courses. After seeing the same puzzle a few times I'm solving them very quickly; I hope this will translate into seeing them in games too.
5. I haven't started this regularly yet but I'm planning to combine information from chessable openings courses and using the chess.com "openings practice" feature. It sets up the board with the opening you desire, then you play against the AI of whatever strength you want, and the eval bar / lines will show you if your moves are "right" or not. This works better for me because you get to take back moves and go down different branches on-the-fly. I think I'll learn more this way, but that remains to be seen. I'll use the chessable courses to tell me which opponent moves I need to be prepared for, but I'll decide how deep into the lines I'll try to learn.

I'm trying to change my openings to something that makes better use of my supposed skills in tactics: my London/Slav are very positional and rigid and don't lead to many tactics. My friend Matt suggested the Scotch for white and Scandinavian with Qd8 for black and I'm enjoying both already.

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I'm currently under the sway of Adult Chess Improver and Andras Toth (video 1). The first advocates not studying openings to any serious depth: you should know the basics/goals of the first couple of moves, but its more important to play solid, principled chess, not try to memorize multiple lines to 15 moves each. Check out his videos in the link there, he explains it very well. 

Toth hilariously HATES the London System :)  It teaches you only one pawn structure, among other issues. Counterpoint- GM Aman Hambleton said he played mostly the London all the way to his GM rating!

Toth is looking for beginner's to know enough about an opening to recognize a non-book move when they see it, and know how to to punish it (video). He dislikes timid play when aggression is called for and also despair's of beginner's "material first" mindset. I know why we do that - it's much easier to track material and know "I've got more firepower than my opponent" vs "I'm willing to lose a piece to get a better position" because I don't trust my skills to be able to judge a "good position" yet.

Both recommend, like almost everyone does, getting good at tactics!

My current stats are: 

puzzles/tactics: chess.com 2400, lichess.org  1900

rapid games on lichess.org 1400

blitz/bullet: 900 on chess.com

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Web Sites

1. Chess.com for playing games against people and bots, plus lessons, daily tactics and puzzles (both "timed + gradually increasing in difficulty" versus "untimed and difficult")
2. Aimchess.com for tactics training and general chess training. It has a neat feature where it analyses your games on lichess and chess.com and finds where you made a mistake, presenting it to you as a puzzle. It has a range of puzzle types and lessons including some I hadn't seen before, like "find the bad move in this sequence of moves".  My favorite feature here is the "do as many tactics puzzles in ten minutes as you can; three wrong and you're out"
3. Chessable.com has training courses which work by rehearsing/practicing "the correct move" over and over again until you have it memorized.  I signed up for lots of free courses including tactics and openings I play (London, Slav, French to start then more recently Semi-Slav, Scandinavian, Italian, Scotch)...the trouble is that these courses don't work for me! I try to push through them too quickly and the opponent's "correct" moves all blur together into a fog. I wasn't learning the right responses to the opponent's moves and was just guessing my way through the quizzes. Not their fault; I'm just not ready for that level of detail yet, I think.  My opponents tend not to play that many "correct" moves in a row - chessable's default free option makes you learn lines all the way through; if you pay then you can have LESS depth in the lines, which is an interesting paradox :)
4. Chesscup.com for a daily quick 3 minute and 5 minute tactics exercises.
5. lichess.org For playing games against real people and doing puzzles/lessons. The tactics competitions there are amazing - the other people seem SO good at them! My favorite feature here is that I can get computer analysis of all my games for free, not just one per day as chess.com does.

I haven't yet walked through any master level games, though most resources I read said that is important. I'll get there at some point.

YouTube Svengalis That Mess With Your Head

Adult Chess Improver Luka says with simple principled play you can get very far with chess. Don't get hung up studying and memorizing openings - game analysis will show you are probably not losing games in the opening! There's is a BIT of learning to do, and he illustrates that with the Italian game.

Another key idea for training is to have a go-to set of difficult puzzles, say 100 of them. Aim to solve them from start to finish TEN times. You will be training your long term memory and pattern recognition. This is different to going to puzzle web sites where you see different puzzles every time. Both methods have purpose: you use the first to build your skills to use in helping with the second.

Andras Toth - already discussed above. 

Chess Vibes - I LOVE his teaching videos. This list covers "why you're stuck at rating X" - it's usually blunders :)  This other list is his tactics/strategy collection and will give you a lot of basic skills - 35 top principles, 10 uses for your bishops etc. It's a lot of rules-of-thumb stuff that is the bread and butter of chess.

Books

I found many podcasts, websites and other resources that recommended books - here's the ones that everyone seemed to agree on.

Polgar 5334 Problems - a lifetime of mate in two/three problems

Sillman Endgames - you start with the first couple of chapters only and read on as you improve. Start with ladder mates, queen + king, rook + king and get gradually more complex. Everyone seems to pick this book!

Logical Chess, Chernev - Chernev walks through master level games and explains every move.

Simple Chess, Stean - A strategy guide.