GM Ben Finegold on how to get better at chess:

“Do you have any advice for about 1100 rating to focus on learning?” Yes, play lots of chess – that’s how you get better. Try to play people who are better than you, but if you play hundreds and hundreds of games, you’ll get better. So play a lot of chess and then analyze your games with a coach or an engine if possible. Engine’s cheaper because it’s free.

[…] 99% of chess advice is nonsense. 99% of coaching is nonsense, and a lot of coaches aren’t very good at chess. The way to get better at chess is to play a lot of chess and analyze a lot of chess. Just putting time in is good. Getting lessons with a coach who’s not good can hurt your chess. Reading books is almost irrelevant. Chessable courses are good if you want to learn opening theory, and you can reference it.

It’s repetition and pattern recognition which gets you better at chess. You have to look at the same stuff over and over and over again so you actually remember it, and then when you play games, you have to look at your games over and over again until you remember the ideas. Then you have to use the knowledge you’ve accumulated for your next games.

A lot of famous coaches, they show really hard puzzles nobody can solve, and they think that makes them a good coach. That’s irrelevant, that’s got nothing to do with getting good at chess. Nobody’s solving difficult puzzles while they’re playing. You’re playing blitz chess – you’re going to see mate in 7? You’re going to see some long combination that wins material? No, you’re never going to see that. If somebody gives you a puzzle that’s tactical, you solve it in 45 minutes – how does that help you in real life? The answer is it doesn’t.

What you need to do is do simple tactics, and you have to make simple tactics simpler. So like I show you a puzzle, you solve it in 5 seconds because it’s easy, and then I show Magnus Carlsen – he solves it in 0.1 seconds. So that means 5 seconds was too much. That means when you’re playing a game, you’re going to miss tactics, and that’s what matters in chess – winning and losing pieces.

When you’re 2300, which you’re not, then you can learn some more stuff. Until then, all you guys just hang all your pieces every game. And the reason I’m a Grandmaster isn’t because I play better than you, which I do, but that’s not why – it’s because I blunder way less often. When I blunder, I lose. When I play blitz chess, I play bad but I don’t make so many blunders. I just play bad. You guys play bad and make blunders.

So you guys are suspicious, and the way to not make blunders is pattern recognition and working a lot, working a lot on your game. It’s the amount of time you put in, not how you put it in. So you don’t need a coach – you can have one if you want, if you have the money. It might help you in the right direction. Like I’d be a good coach, which I am right now – I’m coaching some people because I tell them what they need to do when I’m not coaching them, like how to get better.

And it reminds me of the famous Richard Meers, who’s a Belgian FIDE Master- he told me 35 years ago, he used to teach English in a vocational school in Belgium, and he said the first day of class he tells his students the same thing: if you want to learn English, you’re not going to do it in my class. Go to England and go to the USA and stay there for a few months, then you’ll learn English.

So you have to impose yourself into what you’re doing and make it become a part of you to get good at it. So if you have a coach and you do one hour a week with your coach and then you never do any chess in the meantime, it’s meaningless. But if you do two hours a day of studying an opening or studying tactics or looking at your previous games with an engine, and you do two hours a day every day, then you’ll get really good. So getting good is easy, but doing it is tough – tough like consistently studying chess is hard because some people claim they have other things to do in their life. Terrible.