Chess Tips, Articles and Guides to Help You Win Chess Games

Tournament Preparation: How do you prepare for a tournament? Every chess player hopes to show their best in every game, but more often it happens they perform below their abilities. Why does that happen? There could be many reasons, but most likely they did not do their best before the game started. Confucius said: “Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation, there is sure to be a failure.”

BEWARE: this may change the entire trajectory of your chess career! When you think about studying chess tactics—also known as chess puzzles—you may imagine a set of moves that transform some initial losing/neutral position to a significantly more winning one. Though that is true, the reasons you should study them are not only to help you find those winning combinations of moves. In fact, thinking solely in that way will ruin your chess improvement and strategic thought by making you more prone to find “cheap tricks” to win.

Probably one of the most important steps in improving your chess is the self-criticism. It is essential that you are fair with yourself and admit that every game you play might contain errors that have to be eliminated from your play, regardless of the result of the game. One way (and very efficient, too) to find those mistakes you still make is to analyze your own games and draw the necessary conclusions. When our students ask us what they should do in order to get better at chess, this is one of the first things we suggest them to do. Every strong player keeps track of their games, so why shouldn’t you start doing it as well?