What took you to your next level?
What about for players below 1200, such as myself?
I think what took me to the next level (from very basic beginner to beginner/mediocre player) was no longer playing against the computer on easy levels and actually to start playing games here against real people. That, and studying and learning different aspects of chess from reading books and these forums.
Teaching chess took me to my next level.
Years ago, I started giving chess courses for intermediate tournament players rated around 1400-1600. The need to break the subject down into logical pieces for my students, and to look at chess tactics and strategy from a new perspective, dramatically improved my own grasp of the game. Two years after beginning to teach these courses, I won the Atlantic Provinces Championship for the first time.
I began calculating variations instead of relying on intuition. That gave around 800 rating points in a year.
Switching teachers and looking at chess in a totally different way changed me... I was stuck at 1800 for a few years (maybe 3 or 4), with an occasional jump and fall back to and from 1900. My new teacher (I won't say who, but I will say that they're one of the 24 players in the US Championship) has sent me from 1800 then, to 1900, and I'm well on my way to 2000!
What about for players below 1200, such as myself?
It's pretty much the same things as 1200-1400! Just double check all of your moves, to see if it will be in danger. Always have a purpose behind every move!
Endgame study and tactics and being honest when annotating your own games. That's it, end of list.
Back when I first started chess, I was always thinking. "What exactly can I target in my gameplay to make my rating go up?" That was when I was 1200!
Now that I'm 1700. I hope to share with everyone else how to (at least try. Not 100% guarantee rating increase)
From 1200-1400 is basic learning not to miss a hanging piece/putting yours on safe squares.
1400-1500 is learning a bit more about sequences that will work. IE (What happens a couple moves later, after you just made the first)
1500-1600 Is purely tactical. Playing aggressive and smashing your opponent's bad moves.
1600-1700 is learning about making your pieces work to 100% of the efficiency, also not making weird pawn structures! Remember, a pawn can be a winning piece in an endgame!
1200-1700 Progressively learn some things about openings! Study them and try to learn your basic objective. Don't get preoccupied on weird things that go outside the basic plan!
This is what helped me gain my rating. The orders of my ideas may differ with each person! But try and remember every key of learning, combining those makes you a better player!
Hope this can help anyone who reads it.
If you have any questions, just drop me a message.
Do what the Russians do. Study endgame. What took me from 1200 to 1900 was a great understanding of endgame, and decent tactical skills. I had limited opening knowledge/opening principles.
So just to clarify, I went to 1900 (USCF) with just the absolute minimum opening knowledge required to "play" certain openings (I.E., I only learned one line and one variation of the french, so I would almost always be out of book by move 6)
The most important thing to learn by far is tactics and calculation ability (looking 4 moves ahead instead of 2)
At least it wasn't bullet for me. I think just working harder to find the right moves, but then it just dropped again.
Also planning ahead (even making rough plans) instead of random moves helped me a lot
For players under 1400, and specifically myself, I found the book "Pandolfini's Engame Course" to be most beneficial. After working through this book, I realized how many drawn games I resigned on, and just how many won games I had drawn or lost because of some missing endgame strategies.
Then, what I also found to help me move up is reviewing my own games here on Chess.com. By studying my own games, I find that I don't get beat by my opponent as much as I beat myself. That is to say that I can see better moves that I should have made during the actual game, and I can see errors or reactionary moves that I made that cost me the game.
Once these basic fundamental things are on their way, then learning and recognizing more openings will only help. That way, you'll understand just how your opponent was able to completely shut you down rather than scratching your head and wondering how it happened.
I am currenly in the 1300's in live chess, but I've been over 1400 many times - a number that I keep flirting with.
I read Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. I think it improved my game, but that was before I was on chess.com, so I have no real way of knowing.
Several things helped improve my games over the last year:
First, I started reading books extensively on one aspect of chess at a time. First, Tactics and then Endgame play. In time, I began to see improvements overall in my gameplay when I outlasted my opponents (some USCF Experts and one USCF Life Master).
NExt, i started playing stronger poeple consistantly, both OTB and online. In doing this I had no choicebut to elevate my playing substantially.
Finally, I began doing post mortems of my games with people and analyzing board positions from my games with guys at the coffee shops and parks I played with as well as a couple indiiduals who also coach players in their spare time.
Currently, I am looking into certain openings I like to play and trying to find the tactical oportunities behind inaccurate opening moves, seeing if I can unleash a combination early in the game to reach a decisive advantage and attempt to win from there. The results are mixed but overall, once the information becomes ingrained, I should see my rating increase as well.
CHess Pocket Training Handbook by GM Lev Alburt is also great in that the tactics are not arranged by theme (just like if you play one game to another the tactics might not be the same), there are only 4 to a page and if you take the pages out, you can look at the problems and not see the solutions, taking in 2 pages a day (8 exercises) will take just over a month to cover the whole book.
The other book that has helped me is Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual by Mark Dvoretsky. Taken from actual games, this book covers many concepts that even masters and GMs have a dificult time understanding as well as Moderate rated students. Often considered to be one of the best boos ever written on chess endgame theory and play.
Both are reasonably priced as well (I think at most the paper book for Dvoretsky is no more than 29.99 USD)
The most important thing to learn by far is tactics and calculation ability (looking 4 moves ahead instead of 2)
It depends on what you mean by "calculation ability".
The ability to visualize the board clearly in your mind and look several moves ahead is not nearly as important (or as useful) as the ability to select the correct candidate-moves to analyze.
There is no advantage in spending half an hour carefully analyzing the wrong candidate-move. On the contrary... if you initially choose two or three perfectly good candidate-moves to analyze, you will likely get an advantage (or at worst, hold the balance) regardless of which one you end up selecting to play on the board.
Back when I first started chess, I was always thinking. "What exactly can I target in my gameplay to make my rating go up?" That was when I was 1200!
Now that I'm 1700. I hope to share with everyone else how to (at least try. Not 100% guarantee rating increase)
From 1200-1400 is basic learning not to miss a hanging piece/putting yours on safe squares.
1400-1500 is learning a bit more about sequences that will work. IE (What happens a couple moves later, after you just made the first)
1500-1600 Is purely tactical. Playing aggressive and smashing your opponent's bad moves.
1600-1700 is learning about making your pieces work to 100% of the efficiency, also not making weird pawn structures! Remember, a pawn can be a winning piece in an endgame!
1200-1700 Progressively learn some things about openings! Study them and try to learn your basic objective. Don't get preoccupied on weird things that go outside the basic plan!
This is what helped me gain my rating. The orders of my ideas may differ with each person! But try and remember every key of learning, combining those makes you a better player!
Hope this can help anyone who reads it.
If you have any questions, just drop me a message.
Your face did :)
Then, what I also found to help me move up is reviewing my own games here on Chess.com. By studying my own games, I find that I don't get beat by my opponent as much as I beat myself.
A while back I was going through some of my earlier games from here, and I couldn't believe some of the dumb moves I had made. Some of them cost me the game, while others were luckily ignored by my opponent and I managed to pull out a win. Probably the hardest to get over is when I missed a mate in 1. Luckily, though, I've never lost a game where I missed a mate in 1 and ended up mating one or two moves later.