(2025mar21) I oscillate a lot about my feelings about chess. I play a good game and I feel great, like I’m really learning something. I make some mistakes and lose a game, and I feel like the whole enterprise is a waste of time, that ultimately the classic game is all about memorizing all the mistakes you’ve made in the past and acting differently. so this then becomes an interesting metagame for me about emotional regulation, analyzing my motivations, managing my psychology. How good do I want to get at chess really? That’s a question that has to come with constraints– in the abstract of course everyone would like to be amazing at everything. But how good would I like to be at it, versus all the other things I could spend my time and energy on? I think I’d rather have a mastery of music theory than chessboard notation. Right after saying that though, I immediately found myself opening lichess.com to practice some chessboard notation… sudoku is also fun… but my main mission is to get better at writing, so what if I could design for myself puzzles that made it easier to write?
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“What’s a “threat”? That seems like an awfully basic question. But think about it for a moment. In chess, what constitutes a “threat”? Sure, most of us intuitively understand the concept, but how many of us can define it in concrete terms? At its heart, a “threat” is simply what a chessplayer would do if he was allowed to make two moves in a row. It’s devilishly simple. And it leads straight to a workable definition for the term “tactic” — a “tactic” can be (but isn’t necessarily always) a move that creates two or more simultaneous threats.” – https://en.chessbase.com/post/show-threat
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(2025mar18) been playing more chess… haven’t been super passionate about figuring out how to improve my mistakes, though when I say that out loud then I find myself slightly more compelled to, lol. but i’ve been thinking about how… ok, there’s the best that I can play, which is limited by my knowledge, understanding, calculating ability, and then there’s how well i typically play, which is not at my best, and is limited by things like my impulsiveness.
I’m also thinking about things like how… in the past I didn’t know how to do a checkmate with a rook, but now I do. from time to time I still stalemate with a queen and king, but I think I’m going to learn how to not do that.
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wordvomit about chess (0883)
I keep having more thoughts about chess in relation to my life. I’ve been playing a lot of it. I’ve been debating internally about how much care I should put into trying to get better at it. Should I study it? Maybe I should just do lots of puzzles on lichess? Let’s do one right now. And… I just solved 19 puzzles in a row. It’s satisfying to solve chess puzzles. There’s typically only one thing you need to do. It’s well-scoped. The challenge for the rest of my life is how to scope each thing like it’s a little chess-puzzle?
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The Rise and Fall of David Bronstein
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I think my goal is to get to like 1000 on Chess.com then i’ll stop, probably
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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.