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)

Today is the first entry of my online training notebook, I’m still trying to figure out how I will work this out, but I plan on adding an entry with the salient topics that I covered as well as personal progress and benchmark data.

I also plan on adding a downloadable ChessBase file which will contain additional positions, games and notes.

Study Endgames
Reviewed pages 57-88 in Silman’s Endgame Course. This chapter dealt with distant opposition as well as basic K+P vs. K endings.

Below are a few keypoints from the chapter:

Opposition without a direct connection

In the diagram below notice that the corners of the rectangle have the same colored squares, in this case White has the opposition, since he is 5 (odd number) of squares away from the Black King. You can determine the opposition of two King’s without a direct connection by creating an imaginary rectangle with intersecting same colored squares.

Questions to ask in a K+P vs. K endgame:

• Is the pawn a rook pawn? (then more than likely the game will be drawn)
• Is the stronger side’s King one square or two squares in front of it’s pawn? (One square and it depends on who has the opposition, two squares is a win for the stronger side.)
• Who possess the opposition?

Endgame Puzzle

White to move. Is White lost?

Study Tactics

Did questions from the 3rd stage of studies (Queen Checkmates) #419 -442 (23) for 30 minutes with an 84% success rate.

This is a simple puzzle, but I notice that tactics that involve pinned pawns give me difficulty. Highlight for answer [1.Qh6+ Bh7 2.Qxg7#]

Purdy maintained that the best way to get better at chess was to play over annotated master level games. Below is Purdy’s method for going over games:

1. Take the side of the winner (or either side if the game was a draw).

2. Cover the moves with an index card, and when it’s your turn to move select a move based on the position on the board.

3. Uncover the move, and compare it to your move. Review the annotations and understand why the text move is better than the move you selected.

I would like to take an informal poll as to how you learn chess. Some of the options would be:

1. A good book. (feel free to write the book’s title if it has made a difference in your training.)

2. Going over annotated games.

3. Chess videos

4. Chess teacher

5. Anything else that works for you.

Hopefully this will help beginners get ideas on resources to use for training.

Anyone have any advice on how to go about training for a tournament? This would be my first tournament and it would be great to get tips on how to go about preparing for it. The tournament is 1 month away and this would be my first experience in tournament play.

A couple of questions I have are:

• As an unrated player should I enter the Open or U1400 class? (I estimate my playing strength to be approx. 1500 ELO)?
• What should I focus on during my preparation?

Any advice would be appreciated.

After a few days using the Generic Training Schedule, I have a few minor modifications to adapt it to better fit the needs of the club level chess player. The original ChessOK article was geared towards 2000+ level players who have different needs than beginners. One major difference between experts and amateurs is the importance of opening preparation at the expert class, and this focus can be seen throughout the original GTS plan. Another feature of this new version of the schedule is that the play time is spaced in such a way as to allow you to try out new ideas and openings that were covered on previous days.

In this new adaptation I have halved the opening study time and focused on endgame and tactical study time which will better address the needs of amateurs.

The end result would look something like this:

Day 1

Study Openings 1U

Solve Tactics 1U

Study Endings 1U

Study Strategy 1U

Day 2

Study Endings 1U

Solve Tactics 1U

Play 1U

Study Strategy 1U

Day 3

Study Strategy 1U

Solve Tactics 1U

Solve Endings 1U

Study Openings 1U

Day 4

Solve Tactics 1U

Study Endings 1U

Study Strategy 1U

Play 1U

In my quest for chess improvement, I have stumbled upon Markgravitygood’s excellent chess improvement blog. I recommend that you checkout his post on the generic training schedule, which is based on an article by chess trainer GM Irina Mikhailova on chessOk.

Mark’s post is exactly what I was looking for when I wrote my post on ‘My Chess Education’. I was so impressed by this training schedule, that I am going adopt it as part of my chess study routine.

Since I only have at most 2 hours per day to dedicate to chess, here is my adaptation of the schedule. If I cannot complete the daily curriculum,any topic not covered will be tackled on the next day:

Day 1

• Study openings (1hr)
• Solve tactics (30m)
• Solve strategy (30m)

Day 2

• Solve endings (1h)
• Play (30m ) either 1 G/15 or 2 G/6
• Solve tactics (30m)

Day 3

• Study strategy (30m)
• Solve strategy (30m)
• Play (30m) either 1 G/15 or 2 G/6
• Solve tactics (30m)

Day 4

• Study openings (1h)
• Solve endings (30m)
• Solve tactics (30m)