Many people think of chess mastery as something unachievable. It is understandable: they constantly see high-rated players making brilliant decisions, knowing all the possible openings, and seeing tactics in no time. This creates the wrong impression that these masters were too talented initially, making them get to such a level. Of course, talent would make things easier, but it is still nothing without hard work. To become a chess master, you should invest much time for sure. But what if that is not the only requirement? Are there any more secrets?
Many people think their results depend only on how much time they had invested in studying chess. They can learn openings, solve tactics, analyze masters’ games, and all of that is, of course, extremely useful and necessary for improvement. But many players still perform in real games worse than they should have. Quite often the reason lies in non-chess skills.
Everyone knows how important it is to be good at tactical play. It helps to find beautiful combinations and avoiding blunders. Apart from that, excelling at tactics often helps compensate for other chess weaknesses.
When you have a bad position, you can exploit the opponent’s tactical inaccuracies to eventually come up on top. Contrariwise, if you have a winning position you need to be careful not to miss any tactical ideas (for both sides!) to finish the game positively. But how do you get better at it?
Back in the 18th century, the famous chess player Francois Andre Danican Philidor was underlying the importance of the pawns and “playing them well”, concluding that “pawns are the soul of chess”. In the coming years, more and more strategical concepts were put together and nowadays we have a whole set of guidelines that help us understand important positional ideas.
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.
Chess studies and mating problems are composed of positions – they have been made up and have not actually happened in a game, as most puzzles – where you will need to discover the only way for white (usually) to win or make a draw.
For most chess players a tournament is a chance to show what they’ve learned and proved those hours spent in training.
However, competitions don’t always go as planned and this usually depends on many factors, some of which will have absolutely nothing to do with chess. It could, of course, also be that your training hasn’t been consistent or focused on improving your chess weaknesses and this can all be identified after a thorough analysis of your own games. But besides adjusting your training plan, what else could you do to enhance your tournament performance? From my experience as a chess player and a trainer, there are a few things that can affect your play.
Chess training is different for everybody. Everybody wants to get better, but the goal of a training schedule is not the same for everybody. There is no universal recipe for success; each player has to create their own training program based on their weaknesses. Some players need to improve their positional skills, others their calculation. Some may need to work on their openings, while others should study and get better at the endgame phase.
Sometimes we win, sometimes we learn, us chess players like to say a lot. It can make us feel better after a loss, but this should be more than just a saying to improve our post-game mood. We should, in fact, be always learning, whether we win, lose or draw. Many players think that they can learn something only from their losses, others only like to show their wins to their trainers. Truth is, all games are equally important. There is no perfect game and play can almost always be improved at some point.
Strategy and positional concepts are an important part of the chess game and improving our understanding of them can play a major role in the overall improvement of our level. Most of the time, the strategy is what makes the difference between a strong player and an amateur. If with other elements, such as tactics or endgames, the method of training is rather clear – solving puzzles or studying the theoretical positions, we are often asked what the way to train strategy is.
