Chess for Beginners

According to Johnathan Rowson in his book Chess for Zebras we can develop chess skill through a combination of playing combined with chess training, where ‘training’ means working things out by ourselves. The main skill a chess player needs is skill in making decisions so making decisions is what you need to do over and over when training (learning by doing).

The best training is the kind that pushes you up against the edges of your comfort zone, where you force yourself to take responsibility for difficult decisions.

- Johnathan Rowson in Chess for Zebras

So here’s what you can do to put his advice into practice:

• Playing and then analyzing your games afterwards
• Solving complex chess problems
• Trying to win won positions against strong analysis engines
• Blitz games (comparing your first impression of positions with the way they actually developed)

Study Schedule

Legend:

* If you run out of time during daily session, you can finish annotating your game during the study openings session

** Study strategy by going over annotated master games

*** Use Stoyko Exercises format

Virtual Chess Coach Pt I

About the Virtual Chess Coach Program

This program is geared for my improvement (a 35 year old 1278 USCF rated player), but I hope that others in a similar situation will be able to derive benefit from it as well.

I will be modeling this program on the teaching’s of Dan Heisman. Dan Heisman is one of the best chess teacher’s in the United States and if you don’t already know this, then run to danheisman.com and check out his Novice Nook articles at Chess Cafe.

Now not all of us can afford a chess coach, so we will be using books and information available on the web (Heisman’s Novice Nook Articles) to create a virtual chess coaching experience. If you can afford a coach, then there is no substitute for the hands on feedback that they can provide but I’m aiming to make this the second best thing.

Things to know before we go on:

• This program is aimed at the adult beginner / intermediate player (ELO 1200 - 1700)
• Our chess philosophy will be based around Dan Heisman (with a sprinkle of Purdy and Silman for good measure)

Absolute Beginners

For complete beginner’s to chess Heisman recommends they start with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess and then go to a basic chess tactics book like John Bain’s Chess Tactics for Students. After doing this you should be approximately 1200 ELO and then this guide will be more useful to you.

The Assessment Phase

We need to assess our strengths and weaknesses, yet we are in no position to do so (how can we assess what we do not know / understand). This is one of the weaknesses of not having the feedback mechanism a coach provides. But do not fret, there is a great book that helps you assess your strengths and weaknesses in chess, and that book is Igor Khmelnitsky’s Chess Exam and Training Guide. After going through Igor’s book, you will have an idea of which areas of your chess need to focus your improvement efforts.

Assessing Your Games

Another area where a coach can provide much needed feedback is in going over your games. Because we’ll be going at it on our own the following process is very important in order to get a close benefit to that of having a real coach.

• Go over all of your losses.
• Quickly re-play the game again making light annotations
• Go over the game in detail, and this time make extensive annotations and analysis
• Go over the game with a chess engine and compare your annotations with those of the engine

Key things to look for when annotating your game

You should jot these down as part of your annotations and include them in your chess notebook

• See where you could have improved in the opening
• Look for missed tactical opportunities (both defensive and offensive)
• Look for missed positional opportunities
• Look for missed opportunities in the endgame, if necessary refer to Mueller’s Fundamental Chess Endings
• Look for moves that caused a shift in the game based on the engine’s evaluation. (any move with an evaluation change greater than .35) and find out the root cause behind the evaluation shift, then go back to your annotations and make sure you address this and don’t forget to add this to your chess notebook.

The games you annotate and go over, should be standard time control games if possible. You should make an effort to play at least 1-2 standard games (>= G/30) per week. You can do this by either joining the Team 45 45 league, or playing ICC’s Standard Tourney or even playing at your local chess club. These games will give you more food for thought than quickly played blitz games, but if you do not have at least 1 standard game to go over, then do go over your well played blitz games (which is better than not going over your games at all).

Thought Process Before Lessons

There are certain bad habits that you should eliminate before you consider taking lessons, otherwise you would be throwing your money away. Most of these stem from careless play or hope chess .

• Do not leave pieces en prise
• Do not move quickly and without thought
• Perform a blundercheck before playing your move

Reference

The following books and websites will be used for this program:

Tactics

Back to Basics Tactics

Chess Tactics for Beginners (Convekta)

Endgames

Silman’s Complete Endgame Course

Strategy

The Art of Logical Chess Thinking

Thought Process

Everyone’s 2nd Chess Book

Play

• FICS
• ICC
• Redhotpawn (Correspondence)

Why is it that beginners fail to choose simple plans that are right before their eyes? One answer may be that beginners do not evaluate the position before choosing a candidate move. Beginners briefly scan the board, choose a move they like and quickly analyze and play this move. The problem with this thought process is that 9 out of 10 times the move they have selected is not the best move, since it is not a move that follows a plan based on the needs of the position. This thought process error occurs during candidate move selection and is a very common mistake that beginner’s must overcome in order to reach the next level. The difference between a weak player and a strong player is that the strong player evaluates the position and they then choose a plan based on this evaluation.

Dan Heisman in a Novice Nook titled ‘Evaulation Criteria’, uses the following criteria to evaluate a position (in order of importance):

1. Material
2. King Safety
3. Activity
4. Pawn Structure

Based on these evaulation criteria, not only will we know which side stands better, but why they stand better and what our plan should be. The candidate moves will show itself based on the plan we have selected.

In order to improve we need to evaluate the position during critical junctures of the game (after the opening is over, after a series of exchanges, whenever the position changes substantially). We should get in the habit of re-evaluating the position every couple of moves to ensure that the needs of the position have not changed. We then need to choose a plan based on the evaluation and select candidate moves that help us meet the goals of our plan. We should then take a close and honest look at our candidate moves and keep looking for the best move that will improve our position on the board.

Hope this helps, and I would love to hear your thought process for evaluating the position and selecting candidate moves.

Tactics Program

This tactics training program should not take more than 30 minutes per session, and it is flexible enough where you can adjust the amount of puzzles and / or the amount of time spent per puzzle as well as the session time so that you can customize it to your needs and study time available.

Week 1

Day 1 = 10 puzzles @ 3 minutes per puzzle
Day 2 = 10 new + 10 from day 1(d1) = 20 puzzles @ 1.5 min / puzzle
Day 3 = 10 new + 10d1 + 10d2 = 30 puzzles @ 1 min / puzzle
Day 4 = 10 new + 10d1 + 10d2 + 10d3 = 40 puzzles @ 45 sec / puzzle
Day 5 = Review previous 40 questions @ 35 sec / puzzle

Week 2

Days 1-4 are the same as week 1
Day 5 Repeat 40 questions from week + include 10 random questions from the previous week for a total of 50 questions @ 35 sec/ question.

Resources

Since we will be using a smaller pool of puzzles, it is very important that the puzzles selected provide the user with the most critical patterns so that you can get the most benefit out of your study time.

While you can use any book or software that contains rich tactical / strategic positions, the following two books contain 900 critical positions that will assist you in getting the most out of your training time:

• Lev Alburt’s Chess Training Pocket Book contains 300 critical positions.
• Practical Chess Exercises by Ray Cheng provides us with 600 tactical and strategic positions gathered from real amateur level games.

My game has suffered recently, but I am more determined than ever to improve…so the following quote should help me on my way: 

Settle on your objective is the rule. Such an objective may be a pawn or a point. Which one, it matters not. But aimlessly drifting from one to another, this will expose you  to a strategical disgrace.

Aaron Nimzowitsch

I need help in trying to compile which attributes chess players need in order to master an existing class level (from Class E to Expert+)based on their rating.

For example Irina Mikhailova has cataloged these attributes and states that a player rated ~2100 should know the following:

At this stage a chess player must have a successfully tested opening repertoire which includes 2 openings as White and 2 openings with the black pieces. The chess player must master tactics (60-70 per cent of a success rate solving problems of an intermediate difficulty), acquire a firm knowledge of the basics of chess strategy, ie. How a position’s evaluation is developed and what are its components, familiarize with about 15-25 common plans from the chess classic examples, know typical chess endings: evaluation, plan of play and standard tactical methods for approximately 250 endgame positions. It is necessary to acquire the skills of working with a computer and with chess software.

Knowing what knowledge is critical at each class level, can help improving chess players focus on those elements of chess knowledge that will bring the most benefit.

08.15.2007

Play Standard Game

Played and analyzed my G/60 ICC ST Tourney game

08.16.2007

Study Strategy
Reviewed through page 24 of Chess Strategy for Kids don’t mind the title…the book is highly recommended by Dan Heisman, and it ensures that you have all your chess fundamentals in place.

Key Points

Everything in chess can be explained in terms of three basic ideas:

• Material
• Safety
• Freedom

Based on those ideas when selecting candidate moves 5 good questions to ask are:

1. Who is ahead in material?
2. Is either King unsafe?
3. Who has more freedom?
4. What would you play if it was your opponent’s turn?
5. What do you play that takes advantage of the three keys to strategy?

Solve Endings

Did Endgame module 1 of Personal Chess Trainer’s endgame module (40 exercises). I had not planned on using PCT, but it has a good amount of endgame puzzles, and it uses pattern recognition as a teaching tool which is a positive.

Monday
Study Endings (30 min)
Solve Tactics (30 min)

Tuesday
Play (ST Tourney on ICC G/60) (up to 2 hrs)

Wednesday
Analyze my game (1 hr)
Study Openings (part of game analysis)

Thursday
Study Strategy (30 min)
Solve Endings (30 min)

Friday
Solve Strategy (annotated master game review with Stoyko exercise at critical points) (1hr)
Solve Tactics (30 min)

Saturday
Play G/30 (up to 1 hr)
Analyze game (30 min)

Sunday
Solve Tactics (optional) (30 min)

Resources

Strategy: Logical Chess Move by Move and Chess Strategy for Kids

Endgame:Silman’s Complete Endgame Course and Pandolfini’s Endgame Course

Tactics: Convekta’s Chess Tactics for Beginners

In an earlier post about creating a chess notebook, I overlooked the obvious: using this blog as my online chess improvement notebook.

I can post my daily training regimen, as well as benchmark my progress as I go along. Hopefully, this will help others get ideas as well as help me in maintaining a log of my training activities as well as to get feedback via comments.