My First Year in Chess: The Adult Beginner Diary
Firstly I want to say that I was completely overwhelmed by the response to my first article: My First Six Months in Chess. I didn’t expect anyone would read it. But it was really touching to read so many positive comments on the post itself and on the forum as well as the many personal messages I received from people who related to the post and took something from it. Thank you to everyone who read that article and reached out to me. Reading the responses provided me with a great deal of motivation to keep improving and to write this follow-up article.
Before I dive in, I want to note that this article is a little more personal than the last. I’m guessing my experience reflects the struggle many adults face in finding the time and energy for chess. By sharing part of my non-chess life and how it relates to chess, I hope to motivate and connect with other adult improvers in some way. Chess is a solitary pursuit, but we are not alone on this path.
So with that out of the way, how has my second six months in chess been? Frankly it started off disastrously.
The motivational boost I got from the response to my first article was especially timely as things changed for our family shortly after publishing it. Our financial situation changed and as a result of that, I had to spend more (very enjoyable) hours caring for our son.
I was also feeling the pressure to get going on the house build to get us somewhere warm for winter and had to push forward with plans to start our vegetable box business early. I wrote in my first article that I believe nobody doesn’t have the time to do something, you just don’t want to make the time. In hindsight that was quite a privileged thing to say. I lost my routine and I lost my way a bit.
An Overview of My Study
That said I still often had the energy for my evening game and I began analyzing immediately afterwards as I no longer had my morning hour to do this. I formulated a plan to get the most out of this activity as it was pretty much the only chess I could do.
At times I could get creative to fit in a bit more study. I would often put my son in the carrier bag and take him for a walk when he needed to sleep. During the walks I watched lectures and videos. I tried to be as engaged and active with them as possible, pausing and trying to find the right move or assess the position before it was discussed. Eventually I stumbled across Chess Factor and worked my way through IM Alex Asteneh’s positional chess course amongst others at that time.
In the middle of September things changed. We had saved up a bit for the house, but ‘winter was coming’ and I had two months to build a tiny house from scratch. No pressure right? My son started spending his mornings at a local daycare. This gave both me and my partner time in those hours and I could get going on the house. I worked all day and chess study was shelved. I still kept my evening game and analysis most days.
Towards the end of my first chess year we got hit by a couple of extreme weather events, the first of which saw us having to leave the farm and the second of which (a freak snow melt at the same time as some record rain) transformed the farm overnight into a river. We lost the work we had done and the building materials we had saved up for, along with quite a bit of our stuff.
Chess has been a welcome distraction since then. We moved into a rental house in a village about half an hour from the farm and for most of November and December I got my morning hour of study back. I also kept my evening game and analysis.
So the second half of the year wasn't as productive as the first. But I still squeezed in some chess and I am now at the end of the year with a super comfortable morning study routine and evening game. Over the last six months my rating increased by 100 points to 1200 putting me at +400 for the year.
With the overview out of the way, I want to dive a bit deeper into what I have learnt in the last six months that helped me to improve.
Taking a Chess Break
I wrote last time that I had managed to detach my rating from my ego. However I relapsed shortly after writing my first article. I didn’t study, I played games in my evening hour, I didn’t analyse. I lost a lot of games. I dropped a few rating points and I got upset. The cycle continued until I finally tore myself away and had an enforced break from chess. I knew it was time for a break before this, but I just kept playing and my rating stagnated between 1050 and 1100. It was not a fun time for me. I wish I took the break sooner and I am sure many people reading this can relate to how hard it is to break out of a destructive cycle.
I have to give a lot of credit to my (then new) chess training partner Aman. He reached out to me after reading my first article and despite being much younger than me, took me under his wing. He helped me to take the break I needed to reset.
So I took a break and came back with a new game plan. I felt refreshed and somewhat more free from my rating again. I decided to experiment. Maybe that doesn’t quite do it justice. I would say I decided to relearn chess. I changed all of my openings picking those I hoped would lead to more positional games where I noticed I felt more comfortable. I also chose openings that would be good for my chess. I was tempted to change to d4 but stuck with e4 with the idea of maybe switching in the new year. I picked classical openings playing the french and dutch as black and the ruy lopez and closed sicilian lines as white. Switching was a bit tough. My rating (recovered from my tilt) took a temporary dive again as I got used to the new structures and positions from the changes. I trusted I was doing the right thing in the long run and I am glad I did.
To give you an example I had a 10% win rate with the ruy lopez after my first dozen or so games in this opening. But I felt the positions were instructive, comfortable and good for my chess. I stuck to it and I snuck in a few videos on the ideas and plans in the opening and my comfort level and understanding of the positions and pawn structures grew. I began to rack up wins, confidence and a new understanding.
Developing a Thought Process
If I was only going to play games and analyse I wanted to be working on something concrete in that time to improve. On return from the break I made a decision influenced by a few YouTube videos. I felt I needed a methodical thought process. I don’t exactly know how I came to this conclusion but I felt it was the right decision. I wanted to start asking myself questions during my games and I wanted a process for decision making. The process is long and initially trying to implement it was a disaster! Asking yourself a hundred questions per game will leave you in terrible time trouble regardless of the time control. But as soon as I started the process I saw in the first 20 moves I almost always had an advantage, I stopped hanging pieces so often, and I told myself that even if I lost every game on time that this was the way forward. I would get faster as the thinking process became second nature and soon I could use it without entering time trouble.
So to the thought process. I forced myself to ask these questions in the following situations even when I knew it was obviously not necessary. But I did it anyway on every move, like an insane person until the process was ingrained into my soul.
So here it is, I broke it down into scenarios and questions to ask myself:
1. Immediately after my opponent's move and before my own move:
- What does the move do?
- What does the move no longer do?
This idea came from Chess Network’s video: An Introduction to Chess Thinking. Initially I did this for every single move. I looked at and tried to list all the new squares and pieces a piece attacked when it moved and considered them. Then I looked at all the squares and pieces no longer defended and attacked after the move and any files or diagonals it opened or pieces it freed. Every time a knight moved I lost about half my clock! I figured that if I was going to try this, I should at least be able to laugh at myself, so I did. The process was brutal and losing but my hope was I would speed up and the ideas would seep into my subconscious. And it did. This is the process of learning. You are first consciously incompetent, then consciously competent and finally you no longer need to think about it - it’s just an awareness. The main point of asking these questions was to spot blunders of my own and of my opponents and it definitely helped. All right onto thought process number two.
2. Before moving
- What is my opponent's best reply to my move?
I often think I have some kind of win and then my opponent finds a defense or some counter play. Just starting by thinking one move further, even in quiet positions often helped me to see an idea didn’t work or that some prophylaxis was necessary.
3. On my opponent’s turn:
- What are the weaknesses? (Potential Targets)
- What is the worst placed piece? (Improve Position)
- What is my opponent's plan? (Prophylaxis)
This is Jacob Aagard’s three questions he uses in his training. I can’t remember where I picked this up (probably from The Perpetual Chess Podcast). The questions are meant for quiet positions to help find the right plan or move. Again like the first questions, the point is not to actually ask yourself this over and over in real games but to train your mind to see and consider these things subconsciously. But again you must first make the process deliberate and conscious before you start to do things naturally, before it seeps into your soul. So I sat in front of my computer and asked myself these questions (out loud because I kept forgetting) on my opponent's turn, every turn.
Conclusions on the thought process are as follows:
Initially I would start out asking them and forget as the game intensified and I slipped back into my old habits. So I made a new rule that I had to speak out loud (you are probably starting to see how this left me in trouble).
If, unlike me, you feel you are not ready to sabotage your next 50 games and rating by trying to implement a conscious thought process, I have an alternative! I also trained this thought process with puzzles, a few of which I was able to sneak in at odd times of the day. When the puzzle pops up it starts with the opponent's last move so ask: What does it do? What does it no longer do? Then consider the position as a whole and answer the three Aagaard questions before beginning to look for the answer to the puzzle. Do this and build good habits. Ultimately there is no substitute for trying it in a game situation but I found this training exercise to be helpful.
Initiating the Initiative
In my last article I was proud of discovering a weakness in my play alone and I am pleased to say I had another major breakthrough in my second six months. I stumbled across a random YouTube video when I was googling chess thinking, decision making and thought processes etc. The video was by GM Igor Smiroff advocating that on every move you should attempt to move a piece up the board and attack something and if you can’t you should prepare it. This seemed insane to me. But hey, who was I to question a Grandmaster? I gave it a whirl and holy shit I was amazed. I suddenly realized I had been playing ridiculously passively up until now. That was the major revelation. I was always thinking about defense, worrying about my opponents plan and generally not seeking to apply any pressure.
Now obviously there are situations that call for defense. But even in these situations I would try to find the most active defense (without falling into the ‘the counter attack conundrum’ I discussed in the last article). It was a revolution in my game. I was suddenly playing with ‘the initiative’ a term I didn’t understand until I felt the power of it. It was crazy to watch my opponents defend as I swished across the board attacking everything I could.
I would say this mindset shift contributed the most to me breaking out of my plateau. I found at the level at which I was stuck (1100ish) when I ‘moved forward and attacked something’, my opponents would very often abandon their own play and seek to defend against mine. To the point I think this issue might be chronic at that level. During analysis, many times if my opponents had continued to press their own attack the games would have been much closer but time and time again I found my opponents reacting passively. Even when I was down material I was often able to turn things around playing in this way.
I have some reservations about whether or not I am doing the right thing here. As I progress no doubt tougher opponents won’t react the same way and perhaps I will be punished for this but it has served me well up to now. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of stronger players on this though.
Getting Worse Whilst Getting Better
As I implemented my newly acquired knowledge, my new openings, the thinking process, and the more aggressive style I dropped in rating. It was hard to trust myself at times as I went about these changes all at once. My rating dropped to its lowest point in a long time. I started to question if I really had improved when I saw no difference in my results. I felt I was a much better player but my rating disagreed. So I did some research and I read that when you gain new chess knowledge and understanding and try to implement it into your games that it is common for your results to get worse. I think this happens because you are hyper focusing on the new things you have learned and forgetting other things. There is also the clock time that is consumed by your new conscious thoughts.
It was very difficult for me to continue to believe I was improving as a player despite going backwards in rating. But I felt it. I sensed I was a much better player with a much better understanding of the game. I had this feeling of superiority in games even when I lost. I felt I somehow understood more than my opponent. As hard as it was, I tried to trust myself and I was right to do so. Randomly after pushing myself to continue my rating rocketed up over 100 points in a month. I broke out of my first plateau and I hit 1200.
So I am glad I stuck to it and trusted myself. I think we can only improve by changing. Familiarity and comfort will come eventually. You might drop a few rating points along the way but you will emerge better and stronger and surpass your previous self.
The Chesspunks
The internet is a big place. Playing with Aman once a week not only helped in terms of us analyzing together afterwards but after my disastrous start to this period he also helped me stay accountable to good study practices. Unfortunately we had to stop playing together due to the time difference and my rigid schedule but we have stayed in touch.
The experience of studying with a partner was so beneficial that I wanted to find someone I could play and analyse with in the times that suited me. I reached out to Neal Bruce on twitter and was super grateful for his help promoting a tweet I put out looking for a training partner. From that post I got several offers and am happy to say I now have a few friends and training partners from the Chesspunks community on twitter who I play and analyse with when my schedule permits. When we can’t play together we message back and forth discussing games we have played and keeping each other motivated. It's a great community and I encourage everyone to get involved on twitter. Just send out a tweet with the #chesspunks and I’m confident you will be warmly welcomed. I am so grateful for the Chesspunks. The community is amazing, supportive and helpful. I feel like I belong there and am very grateful for it.
Tactics Training Adjustments: Advice from IM David Pruess
When I got my hour of morning study back in November I focused on tactics and calculation. I spent the first half hour on calculation doing about three exercises. I found a few books that were a good level for me and gave myself five minutes to solve each one. I took an extra five if I was still lost. One thing I did that helped me was to write down my answer without looking at the diagram. This way I was forced to visualize the solution after I found it. This was super difficult to begin with and I had to reference the diagram sometimes, but I got better and better at writing down the solution’s notation without looking back at the diagram.
Once a week I abandon my game in favor of the Chesspunks puzzle group. We spend five minutes on each puzzle and then discuss our lines afterwards. I really fry my brain on each exercise (probably because I know I’m going to have to share my lines and thoughts). The puzzles are way too hard for me generally, but just calculating and visualizing lines is great training. It’s also great to be able to hear and see stronger players talk about their thought process and be able to ask questions about my own. So that was the calculation.
For the second half hour I do tactics. I followed a method I’ve outlined below on a recommendation from IM David Pruess of the Chess Dojo. I’m pretty excited to share this (as although it is probably too early to tell) I feel it is helping me enormously.
IM Pruess advocates doing low rated puzzles until you find one where you just can’t see the solution after thirty seconds. When this happens he deduces that you simply don’t know this pattern. Yes you can calculate the answer, but it is not coming to you automatically because the pattern simply isn’t one you have seen before or absorbed into your subconscious. So when you find a puzzle like this IM Pruess believes you shouldn’t waste time staring at the problem and trying to calculate the solution but you should instead click the “I don’t know'' button and view the answer. You then click or play through the sequence three times, really trying to focus on the pattern and the moves. You then go back to the starting position and try to imagine the sequence without moving the pieces. Again you should do this three times. He explains that he has his students do tactics until they find three such problems to which they don’t automatically know the solution and follow the above process to learn the new pattern. By doing this his students learn three new patterns a day.
I thought this was an interesting idea but I had some reservations about the method. I don’t want to hit the ‘I don’t know’ button on my puzzles because, for me, doing tactics is just as much about training my calculation as it is about learning patterns. So if I don’t see the pattern quickly I will still try to calculate the answer and I don’t see this as wasting time. I do set myself a shorter three minute timer for these puzzles however and, in the moments where the sequence or move doesn’t pop out at me and I am forced to calculate my answer (or i get the solution wrong), I will open the puzzle in a new tab then, when I finish my 30 minutes, I will go back to all my opened tabs and engage in David’s process, clicking through the moves three times, visualizing the moves three times, and then I added a third step of closing my eyes and moving through the pattern three times again in my head. I did this on chess.com initially. I selected a different theme each day and set the puzzle rating from 400-1300. Most puzzles at this level are less than three moves which was perfect as that's normally all I was seeing in my games anyway. I recently switched to using chess tempo because it is free. I pick a theme there and set the difficulty to easy.
I really feel like I have already become much more tactically aware from this process. It has only been a month but I have already noticed a difference. I am spotting tactical opportunities much more even if the idea doesn’t work. I am simply more aware of piece geometry and opportunities even if they are not immediately exploitable.
Chess and Life
I have struggled a lot in the last six months. Moving to this farm has been hard and at times I wanted to give up.
Chess has anchored me through this process. It has been my normal. The center around which everything revolved. Some people in our lives think we are crazy doing what we are doing and at times in the last six months I have believed them to be correct. When the rain wouldn’t stop, when the tent started leaking, when my body ached from all the wheelbarrows of rocks I pushed from the river to our house to restore the walls and finally when the water came and washed it all away. But having chess meant I had one thing in my life that was the same every day, it was compartmentalized and organised and fun and I don’t think I would have gotten through the last six months without that.
The thing chess has helped me to understand is the concept of losing the battle but winning the war. We might lose a game today or a few rating points that week. But if we keep trying, if we keep studying and pushing we will improve. We will win in the long term. It is inevitable. Breaking out of my first plateau in the last six months helped me to see that. And when things didn’t go right on the farm, when we lost crops, days of work and made mistakes, chess helped me to see beyond those defeats and into the future where, through persistent work and effort, we would get everything working eventually. I think without the lessons I had taken from chess, the numerous setbacks I encountered along the way might have been too much for me and I might have given up. It sounds a bit ridiculous that a board game got me through it. But I really think it did and continues to do so.
Going Forward
I’m not sure how my time with chess will change now. There are a lot of unknowns coming in the new year.
An ideal schedule for me would be to get in an hour of game and analysis and an hour of something else. I was pretty inspired by Neal Bruce in a recent interview and have reluctantly accepted that the best way to study is to break chess into blocks (endgame, tactics, strategy and openings) and master each independently. My study this year has consisted of what I'll call ‘The Reactionary Lunatic Method’ whereby I lose a rook endgame and study those for a week. Then I get crushed in an opening and learn the plans and structures for that for a week. Frankly Neal’s way sounds better. If I do this I will begin with the endgame because I read the middlegame and the opening should be studied in relation to the endgame.
Another thing I want to get better at is implementing the lessons I take from my analysis by understanding what thought process malfunction occurs when I make mistakes. I have already found a few patterns from my analysis. Mostly this has to do with me falling into the trap of reacting to my opponents plans and not pushing forwards with my own. Another seems to be a lack of confidence and trust in myself and my own plan. I often formulate a plan, and get scared and instead play a safe move with no plan or threat at all, normally after panicking that I’m taking too long to make a move. Fixing this fear is going to be key moving forward.
I also want to get an opening repertoire down. I am comfortable with my new openings. I like them and I don’t want to change (sorry d4 you will have to wait). Martin (@saychess1 on twitter) has a great blog post I will link to at the bottom of the article where he outlines a method to create your own chessable repertoire by importing it from lichess studies. It’s a cool method and idea. I won’t get into it but rather refer you to that excellent post. I only did the branches up to move 5ish for myself but it has been a fun process so far.
And finally I am going to start playing 5+5 blitz games in place of my rapid game once a week. I feel it's not so often to form the bad habits associated with the time control and it will hopefully improve my ability to play under time pressure - something I have noticed I am terrible at. See my blitz rating for confirmation of this!
Conclusions
So that's pretty much it. A summary of my journey over the last six months. It was pretty fun. I now have a year of chess behind me. I got to go on a chess podcast, I made a few new friends, I got some nice life lessons, and I got a little bit better at chess. I hope the two articles covering my first year in chess were in some way useful to you. Thanks for reading.
If anyone wants to reach out for rapid training games or to just chat you can message me here on chess.com or reach out on twitter @TheOnoZone.
Resources
Martin’s Blog Post on Creating an Opening Repertoire:
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/saychess1/issues/how-to-make-your-own-custom-opening-course-based-on-win-newsletter-from-say-chess-791754?via=twitter-card-webview
Chess Network’s Video on An Introduction to Chess Thinking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxdZxKkdmHA&t=27s
IM Alex Astaneh’s Positional Chess Course on Chess Factor:
https://www.chessfactor.com/courses/241/description/
My Episode on Chess Journeys Podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/52kqQKG6Ewke3gRE0vGxsW
Neal Bruce’s Episode on Chess Journeys Podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4fwJKMtyJbjNxNKGWBj1Ni
Other Stuff I Have Enjoyed:
Chess Dojo Community - https://www.youtube.com/c/ChessDojo
Braden Laughlin - https://www.youtube.com/c/BradenLaughlin
64: A Chess Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/20JWGjUaacidoiKyprVfKJ
Perpetual Chess Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/5SzyXVaBZtM8CA6dtBQj7o
