What would you classify as the main skills to master in order to master chess?

Alright, so I'm not talking about (Opening, Middlegame, Endgame)

No, that's not what I mean, I don't have a lot of experience in chess (at least compared to where I aim to be,) I only started taking chess seriously two months ago and I'm pretty sure I'm on the right path

Anyway, what would you say are the main 3 or 4 or 5 skills that a chess player needs?

Example: 

To master openings, you can learn the opening by heart, or you can study it and understand every move, which I prefer, but to study it you need CALCULATION and GOOD BOARD READING as skills for instance, so if you master those two you're good and it can help you out in another situations while if you just learn the opening, you'll get stuck later on in the game for example

So what are the main skills to you, that if you master you will be able to  contain every other aspect of the game?

I think this is a very good question because once you get a good answer you can start working on that directly right? I don't know maybe I'm just stupid, let me know what you think guys!

Peace

Faridouzz wrote:

"...what would you say are the main 3 or 4 or 5 skills that a chess player needs?..."

"...So what are the main skills to you, that if you master you will be able to  contain every other aspect of the game?..."

                                          _______________________________________

Chess is a game that is full of good moves that are counterintuitive and hard to find.  There is a very important reason for that.  Chess is Siege Warfare in game form.  There are 3 strategies employed in Siege Warfare.  The  3 strategies are:

1. Restrain the enemy

2. Blockade the enemy

3. Execute the enemy

Understanding these 3 strategies goes along way to  understanding opening, middlegame, and endgame moves.

Just 2 more concepts that need to be understood:

1.Winning chess is the strategically tactically correct advance of the pawn mass (the 8 pawns).

2. The 2 chess theories regarding control of the center:

   a. Classical center control theory:  control the center (d4, d5, e4, e5) by occupying the central squares with your pawns and pieces.  Remember that pawn moves are permanent because pawns cannot move backwards.

    b. Hypermodern center control theory:  control the center by controlling the central squares with the power of your pawns and pieces.  With this method you do not create targets on the central  squares for the opponent to attack.

That is it.  But  it takes a lot of getting used to mentally not to mention becoming adept and understanding how to play chess this way.

The goal of chess study is to acquire visualization pattern memory banks in your brain

1. Tactics visualization pattern memory bank

2. Opening visualization pattern memory bank

3. Middlegame visualization pattern memory bank

4. Endgame visualization pattern memory bank.

The way to acquire them is with the right amount of study, practice and game play.

How do these two differ?

In the Ruy Lopez both examples are present.  1.e4 e5 ...e5 has effectively blockaded the e4 pawn from making any more forward progress into Black's position.  Moving further into the opening 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5.  With ...Bb5 White is restraining the d7 pawn from advancing.   It is doing that because if Black plays 3...d6, or 3...d5, White can play 4.BxNc6 bxc6 and Black has been given an exploitable double pawn complex (c7, c6, d5).  If White were to capture the N before the black pawn at d7 has moved then Black would recapture with the d pawn and Black would have a compact nonexploitable double pawn complex as follows: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.BxNc6 dxc6.  

If you have any questions please ask.

I left out the most important part.  I'm sure you see that White's restraint of Black's pawn is very important because black's d pawn is a key player in Black's fight for control for the center.  An even more important result of the restraining the 3.Bb5 is  accomplishing is  that it practically forces Black to advance his queen side pawns prematurely (...a6, ...b5) in order to neutralize White's restraining of  his d pawn. 

Anyway there are lots of Ruy Lopez opening books that go into explaining all of these factors and a lot more  as the game progresses fro opening into the middlegame and finally into the endgame.

Hmm, interesting question.

In no particular order:

1) Visualization of future positions. Including not only the pieces that have moved, but which files and ranks have become open or closed. I'm not sure anyone sees future positions as perfectly as they can see a position in front of them. It's not an either you can or can't do it skill, there are many levels of ability.

2) So called "working memory" and short term memory to have flexibility in calculations (ability to pause, backtrack a few moves, and or compare evaluations, that sort of thing). Sometimes it's useful to "pause" a few moves deep and look around for the next move. Maybe from there backtrack 1 move and think from there instead. Or, once you've reached the end of a line and rendered an evaluation, in order to compare it to other candidate moves you of course need to remember the other candidate moves and their evaluations.

3) Good analysis sense. It's not always correct or even useful to calculate until there are no more forcing moves. Sometimes you need to realize a line is strategically poor even if everything else went your way, and so you should just stop calculating it. Even when a line is worthy of long calculation, it's sometimes a mistake to do it all at once. Often you're able to compare a few candidate moves with limited calculation. If one is clearly better even though you haven't finished calculating a rival line then it would have been a waste of time and energy to have fully calculated the rival line.

4) Time management. This is another practical consideration. As far as results are concerned, It is better to allow yourself to play some inaccuracies over the course of a whole game, than to play perfectly for 20 moves, then leave yourself with little time for the next 20 moves (where you risk a fatal blunder on any move).

A combination of 3 and 4 for judging when a position is critical (the difference between the best and second best move is large), and having saved enough time to spend a long think on it.

5) Correct evaluation. Sometimes you visualize clearly, and think it's a great position to reach, only to realize after it's on the board that you under or over estimated a feature of the position. I would guess this most commonly happens due to fatigue, either from a long game, or a long think on a single move. It can also be due to laziness, or assuming because a position is similar to something seen during study, that its evaluation is identical.

Oh, I read the question differently. I thought the OP was asking for what are the tools people use during the game to do things like restrain or blockade.

Usually you work on things like calculation and visualization at the same time as you learn theory like middlegame and tactics.

I suppose you could do pure visualization exercises, like taking a random position, reading a few moves of notation, then setting up the new position from scratch to see if you visualized it in your mind correctly.

But for example solving tactic puzzles requires seeing the future position clearly, and at the same time you'll be familiarizing yourself with common patterns.

And things like rendering a proper evaluation, and knowing when and how much to calculate, are things you learn from playing and studying. Especially time management.

I get the sense you'd like to isolate 5 universal skills to work on them directly, but I think that's impractical if not impossible. The usual method is to 1)study (like books or videos), 2)play (online and/or OTB tournaments), and 3)do drills (like tactics, technical endgames, reviewing your opening repertoire).

The_Chin_Of_Quinn wrote:

Oh, I read the question differently. I thought the OP was asking for what are the tools people use during the game to do things like restrain or blockade.

                                                    __________________________________

Look at my posts #7 and #8.  Also, The main advantage of blockading an enemy pawn or piece is that they become sitting ducks because especially in the case of the pawns they cannot move.

I'm not saying restrain and blockade is bad. I'm saying I thought his question was what are the tools players use to do things like restrain and blockade. He gave as an example calculation. You have to calculate to execute a strategy over the course of a game.

"The way to acquire them is with the right amount of study, practice and game play."

Hi Fields of Force,

Several clarifying questions.   Background:  I'm an older fellow just getting back into chess after 3 or so decades completely away.   (I erroneously thought after Kasparov lost, computers had killed chess.)

Now I'm getting back into it because of my young son. And oh my gosh, chess is alive and well and exciting!

Anyways, my questions are:

1.  What is the difference between study and practice?  Or how do you define these terms?   

2.  Do you have a rough guideline on how much time to spend on those 3 areas of study, practice, and play?

3.  By play, I assume you mean over the board tournament games that are classical time controls and are rated, correct?

My goals are better than modest; I'd like to get to 2000 and when I retired 30 years ago I was a C or low B player with a record of 1.5-1.5 against Experts.   With minimal study. 

isn't practice the same thing as play?

                                                                     ______________________

Over complicating things with  so many wordy explanations is what confuses.

It's simple:  restrain, blockade and execute  your opponents pawns and pieces. 

Put Tactics, Opening, Middlegame,Edgame  visualization pattern memory banks  into your brain with practice and repetition.

I wrote a post about this on my blog.  I believe the most fundamental chess skills are:

• board vision (being able to see the board, so as not to blunder or fall into chess blindness; this is perhaps the number one skill beginners need to learn, because they get tunnel vision and 'forget' about opponent's threats)
• responding to threats (basically, asking after every move, "What is my opponent's threat?" and then reacting accordingly)
• pattern recognition (this involves learning basic motifs and then being able to apply them in different situations).

In terms of practical chess ability, I think you need to learn these fundamentals before you can get to the advanced stuff.  I mean, blockading enemy pieces like a grandmaster won't help you too much if you still hang your Queen every other game, right?

well said

                                                              ___________________________

I will answer your last question first:

My goals are better than modest; I'd like to get to 2000 and when I retired 30 years ago I was a C or low B player with a record of 1.5-1.5 against Experts.   With minimal study. 

If you are presently over 60, a more realistic goal would be a rating of 1800 to 1900.  It is a matter of stamina in a weekend 6 rd. Swiss.  At 60  2 /120 min games per day friday, saturday, sunday) is much more taxing at 60 than it  is at 25-30 years of age.  But people are different.  You could be the exception

Yes, chess is so simple you just need a few adages to play well :p

I don't care if my post was confusing, it fits the OP's question.

But often new players don't know what questions are useful, so (as often happens) the people who ignore the literal question being asked, often give the most useful answers.

Tactics. Being able to calculate several moves ahead......I would suggest  using the  tactics trainer that this site provides. It has really improved my game.