What obstructs 95% of chess players? (part-2)

In the previous article we talked about the typical problems many chess players have. You may want to refer to the first part here. In short, people read A LOT of chess books, but the benefit is MARGINAL at best. Why is this the case?

I’ll tell you something seemingly obvious, yet it will have a tremendous effect! There is a HUGE (I mean, extremely HUGE) difference between reading and studying. Unfortunately, most players don’t fully understand this, so let me explain this difference in detail:

1. TIME

How much time do you spend reading a book? Usually you will spend for one book from a few days till several weeks. Thus, reading can be quick.

Studying a text book can take a month or a lifetime! I’m not exaggerating. For instance, studying a religious book can take a lifetime, and even then you may still not fully understand it. This is closely connected with the next item.

2. REPETITION

Once you have read a book, you never read it again. It seems boring and unnecessary. When you study certain material, you try to implement it in your practice. In this case you’ll need to repeat the process several times to make sure that you understood completely before proceeding.

Once you’ve applied this knowledge in a practical application, you will develop new questions. You will then need to study this material again to find solutions for your new questions. This process may occur many times until you finally get 100% effect out of this knowledge (book).

3. YOUR ACTIVENESS

When you read a book or watch a video, the author of this material is active. He prepared some materials and is providing them to you. You go over this material, however, by yourself, without really doing anything active. This is passive learning, much the same as when you watch a new Hollywood movie – you are a passive viewer.

When you study something, you are independently active. You try and develop solutions yourself, and only after that will you compare your ideas with those of the author. You try to understand every author’s idea. If you don’t understand something – you don’t skip it, but study the material over and over again until all insight come to you.

You try to understand and remember everything. After that you go and try it in practice. You may fail, but you keep trying until you train this new skill enough to get good results.

Studying requires one to be very active.

4. LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY

As you may have guessed, reading is easy. That’s why most of people like it so much! You read something, you feel like you should be getting smarter. You digest ready-made material with little or no effort required from you. This comfortable situation makes you feel good because it is not difficult.

Studying is much harder. Here you have to face your weaknesses, admit them and then put in a hard effort to confront them. You need to spend a lot of time and effort, do unusual things and develop new habits. Inwardly you have to admit that somebody is smarter than you in this area, which is painful for a lot of people.

Reading is entertainment. Studying is a hard work.

5. MEMORISING

A few months after you read something, you only remember the most general ideas from that material.

Let’s create a little test. Have you studied any of my paid courses? Do you remember the titles of each video lesson? What rules were presented in each lesson? How many practical tasks were presented in this course?

If you only study my free lessons on the RCA blog, do you remember the lessons you’ve read two months ago? What were we talking about then?

Unfortunately, most people can only give very general answers. It means you have NOT studied these lessons. When you study something seriously, you won’t forget it later because it is learned. It becomes a part of your nature, your new habit.

In many countries people shake hands after a meeting. You never forget to do this. You don’t need to write it in your notebook – it is automatic and becomes a habit.

Studying develops new habits. Reading develops… nothing.

6. FREE/PAID

Not always, but often you can get reading material for free. More often than not, you have to pay for your study course materials.

There is some good news for you here. I’ve been an active chess coach for the past 12 years. During this period I’ve charged $0 (in other words, helped for free) and as much as $100 per hour. I’ve noticed an interesting thing: the more the student pays, the better results he/she gets.

I always try to do my best, so my coaching is the same but the students’ ATTITUDE is very different. For instance, those who paid a lot never come late to the lesson. Free students sometimes even skip the lessons.

Those who made serious investments write down all important information. Some of them even use a voice recorder, so as to repeat the lesson later on. Those who paid little never do. After an expensive lesson, a student always performs his home tasks (even when it seems unnecessary for him).

Suggestion: you may like to read an interesting article “Chess, Life and Happiness”.

In the same way, you will probably eat the dish if you paid a lot for it in a restaurant (even if the dish looks unusual for you). It seems silly to pay for something and then not use it. We avoid making silly mistakes.

After a free lesson, a student decides by himself which tasks to perform and how. So he distorts the training and doesn’t get any real results.

All in all, when you pay for something you take it much more seriously. That’s why some tricky guys download tons of free chess materials from the internet, but their real progress is miserable. It’s just fair.

7. EFFECTIVENESS

After you study something new, you can take a qualitative leap forward. You develop new (more effective) skills. You change (improve) your way of playing. You start getting outstandingly great results.

After reading something, you feel good. You may be enthusiastic. But when it comes to practice – nothing changes.You still get the same results as before. This upsets you. You want to bring your mood up again and… you start reading another exciting book…

CONCLUSION

Now that we have discussed this topic in great detail, it’s time for you to ask yourself “Am I reading or studying chess materials?” Be honest with yourself. Be objective and take all criteria (your results) into account.

P.S. Have you enjoyed this lesson?  Please share it with your friends by using the buttons below.

What obstructs 95% of chess players?

There are literally millions of chess books and tutorials that are available to us these days and all chess learners study from this same pool of material.

However, only a very small group of players (less than 5%) will experience any significant progress. The majority of players (95%) will unfortunately experience only slight advancement or, worse, no progress at all.

How to deal with such a sad situation? There are two typical approaches:

1. The players belonging to the first group are a little confused and they ask themselves the question (or send the question to me  ), “Why am I not progressing despite all of my desire and efforts?“ If you are in this group, please accept my congratulations – you have very good chances for improvement!

2. The second group of players prefers to believe in what they want to believe. They think that they are “experienced,” “advanced,” “experts” or that they “know all the chess basics already,” etc. However, there is a well-known refutation proverb, “If you are so smart, then why are you so poor?” In regards to chess, this proverb basically translates to: “If you know so many things about chess, then why your rating is so low?”

In reply to this obvious question, this 2nd group of players will start providing various lame excuses such as:

• “ I’m a good player, but only have problems with tactics (or opening repertoire or anything else)”.
• “I don’t want to memorise opening lines, because I like creativity.”
• “I have problems with concentration, and sometimes make blunders.”

Being under the delusion of their “advanced” level, such people produce a lot of lame excuses for their poor practical results. They also start blaming chess books, authors, teachers, etc.  OK, maybe a certain book was bad, but it’s quite unlikely that all of them are bad, right? So maybe the problem is not there?

All in all, if you are a 2000-rated player and honestly believe that you’ve learned all of the main strategic and tactical motifs – you are in this second group. In this case, I wish you good luck, because there’s nothing else that can help you. Yes, I’m not here to say pleasant things, but to tell you the REAL situation.

Now let’s get back to the first group of people, who wonder, “Why am I not progressing despite all of my desire and efforts?“

Please think about this question. I’ll give you the answer in the next lesson, but in the meantime your independent thinking is very important.  Perhaps you’ve learnt A LOT from chess books (or other tutorial materials). Why didn’t it bring you A LOT of a progress?

P.S.  Write your opinion in the comments. After thinking about the above question, you may read the second part here.

How to evaluate a position at the various stages of the game?

If we want to better evaluate different positions of the chess game, we would consider a lot of various factors such as development, material and positional advantage, pawn structures, weaknesses, tactics and so on.

However, in some cases, you might be a pawn up (or have some material advantage) but yet, your opponent has the initiative or better pieces’ coordination or vice versa. Have you ever been in such situations? 

If so, here is my question to you: how do you evaluate the positions, when the regular factors for the evaluation don’t help?

Remember, if your evaluation of the position is wrong, then you will choose the wrong plan to continue the game and you’ll end up playing the wrong moves. Therefore, the evaluation of the position in a correct way is very important.

That’s exactly what we’ll see today – our guest coach IM Alex Kundin has prepared a very instructive video lesson for you on this topic. In this video, he will teach you how to evaluate the position during of the different stages of the game. You can watch the video lesson below:

VIDEO LESSON ON YOUTUBE

Author information

Alex Kundin is an International Master from Israel with a current FIDE rating of 2323.
He is a former Europe youth champion and an experienced chess coach. He has an extensive knowledge about chess openings

P.S. If you enjoyed watching the video lesson, please share it with your friends. Also feel free to write your thoughts in the comments area below. 

10 ways to improve in chess

There are thousands of the chess tutorials including chess books, DVDs, courses, video lessons, etc. As I often say, it is practically impossible to follow them all to make an improvement in your game. Remember, ‘Less is more’ – that’s why I’m going to keep it short and simple for you. 

Today, I’ll give you 10 best tips to follow in order to make your training simple and yet achieve better results. Let’s get started!

1. Set a GOAL

You will never be able to hit a target that you cannot see. Yes, setting a target/goal is the first thing you have to do. It can be the target of attaining a norm, increasing ‘X’ ELO points within ‘Y’ time, beating titled players, or even becoming the World Champion! 

Be aware: set and work for one goal at a time. Overloading yourself will not be productive.

“Set your goals high, and don’t stop till you get there.” – Bo Jackson

2. Play against the stronger opponents

Please, don’t get this in a wrong way that I’m scaring you.  You cannot make an improvement unless you increase the benchmarks and fight for it.
Of course, you could keep winning against the weaker opponents but, honestly, will that help to improve your progress? It can be fun – everyone likes to keep winning without being afraid to lose or to face a stronger opponents.

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” – Jack Canfield

3. Prepare an opening repertoire

The exact definition of an “opening repertoire” is the set of openings a player is specialized in.  This might be a bit boring because there are hundreds (maybe even thousands) of opening variations today – thanks to ECO code for making it easier for us to identify them.

Suggestion: You may like to read about “Best chess openings and how to pick one for you“!

You may go through the games of top GMs who play your opening line, check the short games in your opening to know and to avoid the mistakes in the early stage of the game.

You can learn more about the opening stage, opening repertoire from our opening courses.

4. Analyze your own games

It is very important to know yourself. For this, you have to study yourself – you should analyse your own games to know your strengths and weaknesses. In fact, I’d insist that you analyze your lost games first. It can be hard for you to do so but I believe no ‘medicine’ that cures the disease is ‘sweet’. 

Only if you analyze your lost games, you will be able to find your mistakes so you will correct them and avoid repeating them. Although, you can keep analyzing your won games (to know your strengths) as secondary while, analyzing the lost games is PRIMARY.

“Defeat should never be a source of discouragement, but rather a fresh stimulus.” – Robert South

5. Have a training plan

Planning is one of the most important skills in chess. Having a neat and effective training plan (or training schedule) will boost your training, and you will make a steady progress.

If your question is “What to study?”, “How to train?”, and “How to get the best out of your training?”, you can find answers to all those question in my FREE mini-course “Chess Training Plan for Rapid Improvement”.

6. Blindfold chess

Imagination (the inner vision) plays a vital role in the game of chess. In simple words, imagination makes it possible to experience a whole world inside the mind. But how can this skill help you? Well, calculation and visualisation plays a major role in chess, too, right?

You can achieve this through the blindfold exercises – solve puzzles without a board, go through drills, and even play a game without a chessboard. It might be hard in the beginning but, remember, practise makes a man perfect!

“A strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will is required to become a great chess player.” – Bobby Fischer

7. Flip the board

This is quite similar to the previous tip. Flipping the board (reverse) helps you to think as your opponent. This way, you will virtually play against yourself and this improves your calculation/visualisation skills as well.
You may even solve chess puzzles by flipping the board. For instance, you can try to solve the puzzle from the Black side if it’s White’s turn. Additionally, an advanced training of this method would be having an ‘imaginary flip’ – trying to think from the opposite side without literally flipping the board. You usually do this as the “Anti-blunder check” when playing a game. 

8. ‘E’ for Explore!

Every chess player has his/her own playing style. A player might like to play attacking chess (like Tal/Fischer) and some have the style of playing positional chess (like Kramnik/Karpov). I’d advise you not to limit yourself to one particular style or the way of approaching a game.

Try playing different openings, different style of playing the game – just explore. This is something the World Champion Magnus Carlsen recommends, too!  If you stick to one particular opening or style, you will not learn much.

“The essence of chess is thinking about what chess is.” – David Bronstein

9. Cut yourself some slack

Too much of something is not too good. Don’t dump yourself with loads and loads of training materials. Remember, it’s not about the quantity; it’s about the QUALITY.

Relax, practise yoga or meditation, warm yourself up by solving simple chess puzzles, have your favourite drink/food when playing a tournament/game. Take regular breaks, get enough sleep (8-9 hours) – you may even do physical training.

“Your body has to be in top condition. Your chess deteriorates as your body does. You can’t separate body from mind.” – Bobby Fischer

10. Never Give Up

If you gave up, it means you never wanted it. When you feel like quitting, think about WHY you have started (your goal in tip 1).
Always fight till the end and no matter whether it is playing for a win or fighting for a draw!

“Winners are not those who never failed but those who never quitted.” – Edward Louis

P.S. Are you already following any of the above-mentioned training methods? Feel free to write your thoughts in the comments in the comments below.  Also, please share this with your friends if you liked it.

How to become a defending champion in chess?

Remote Chess Academy (RCA) is very happy to announce that its new course is almost ready – it’s called “Defending Champion”.

As you can learn from the title of the course, this course deals with one of the most important topics of the chess game – defense. The authors of this course are FM Marko Makaj (our guest coach) and myself (Igor Smirnov).

The course will be released soon, so please stay tuned!  Meanwhile, let’s talk more about this topic and have a little preview of the course.

Nowadays, many chess players face huge problems when it comes to defending the position when the opponent is attacking.
While contemplating about this topic, we’re faced with the following questions:

• How to create a solid repertoire against an attacking player?
• When to defend and when to ignore opponent’s attack/idea?
• Do you always have something ‘better’ not to resign?
• How to stop losing initiative/material?
• How to make counter-attack (instead of just defense)?
• and the list goes on..

But the main question is “How to make a perfect defense or fortress?” – like the one we’ve seen in the recent World Championship match where Karjakin showed off his extraordinary defensive skills. 

All your questions and doubts will be cleared in the upcoming course. Meanwhile, we’d like to offer you a small preview of the course to help you be prepared for the course.  You can watch the video below:

VIDEO LESSON ON YOUTUBE