Chess Improvement Is Solved

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw40S5mGuZw

I am an Adult Improver chess coach with a formula that simply works.

There is one secret ingredient that you need for guaranteed chess improvement.

Sound like clickbait now?

It’s still not clickbait.

Now granted, my job is a little different to that of most chess coaches. My job is to take Adult Improvers who are new to the game, or those who have played for a while and gotten stuck near what they feel is the start line, and turn them into intermediate club level players.

For context: this means taking players from 0 up to around 1500-1600 FIDE or whatever that translates to in your local rating. So when I talk about guaranteed chess improvement, I am speaking within this rating band - although I suspect the formula is the same for those who “graduate” my coaching.

So since I own the secrets to guaranteed chess Improvement, do all of my students smoothly gain rating until we wave goodbye smiling at each other on graduation day?

No.

A lot of them do, but not every story is a linear success story like that.

And before I suck you into a classic TheOnoZone thousand-word-introductionTM, I’ll put you out of your misery and give you the secret sauce straight away. But I’ll warn you, some of you might not like it.

HARD WORK
Yes. The answer is: hard work. I mean really hard work. Obvious? Maybe. However, it can be more challenging to put in the hard work that chess requires, especially as an adult, than you might think at first glance.

Putting my own ego aside for a moment, let me discuss my own painfully slow and arduous climb up the rating ladder thus far.

In my first year of chess, I woke up early and read a chess book for half an hour on an aspect of chess knowledge: endgames, strategy manuals, that sort of thing. In the evening, I solved tactical puzzles for 30 minutes as a warm-up, then played one 30+0 game and then annotated and analysed that game for a further 30 minutes. I did this every single day for one year. Two to three hours a day. Probably around 1000 hours of study in a year.

That got me close to being a club player. I got to 1300 chess.com after one year. I then switched to Lichess and, with the same training, I played 15/10 on Lichess and went from 1600 to mid-1800 Lichess rapid in year two of my chess improvement. Another 1000 hours of the same training went into this.

After that, we moved countries, I started my chess coaching business, the rating I cared about became my KNSB (Dutch federation) rating, my family expanded, and lets say my training “evolved”.

After a further four years. My Lichess rapid rating (on my I don’t want to reveal my openings to my entire chess club account) peaked at 2068, although to be completely transparent my Lichess rapid rating has mostly floated around 1950 for the last year with occasional visits to the 2k club. My OTB rating is currently 1752 KNSB (~1700-1775 FIDE).

I still worked on chess over the last four years. It is my job after all, but I didn’t do so with the same strict regiment. That is changing now that I am going to the daily Accountability Training as part of The Online Chess Club, but more on that later.

For now, I really want to highlight the level of effort I put into getting better at chess in those first two years.

Because that is the climb that people now hire me as a sherpa to guide them on. And whilst I can be there for our weekly lessons and for daily motivation (in the Accountability Trainings and beyond), I can’t sit next to my students for the 2000 hours it took me to do it. I can’t force them to put in the necessary hard work.

I am sure there are people out there who could have, and undoubtedly did, make that climb by putting in less effort. And I know there are probably others still who may need to put in a little extra to get there, too. But the one thing I make absolutely clear to my students from lesson one, is that becoming an intermediate player as an Adult Improver is not an easy thing to achieve.

There is no magic secret chess improvement strategy. There are well-tested methods of improvement, of course. But one will always need to add not a sprinkle, but a hefty dollop of hard work.

With the outliers aside, if you are an adult who just began playing chess, then getting into the top 25% of Lichess rapid players is a serious endeavour that will require full dedication and a lot of chess-focused hours. It is not to be trivialised. And those who don’t make it immediately or at all, should not be looked down upon.

WHAT SHOULD I WORK HARD ON?
This is the right question. Digging a hole is hard work, but it is not going to get you anywhere. Another major part of my job as Adult Improver chess coach, is focusing beginning students onto “needle-moving tasks”. There is a lot of chess content out there and a lot of it will not really help you that much, especially in the first phase. So here is the breakdown of what you actually need to do with your + or - 2000 hours.

I call them the “Five Core Exercises” and I am building Ono’s Chess Toolkit to contain these exercises in one place. Only a few of the five exercises are live right now, but I am working hard on this (harder than I am working on my own chess improvement right now, ironically).
In subsequent posts, I am going to expand on each of these Five Core Exercises in detail. For now, I want to give a short overview of each, so that expectations are set and any beginner reading this will understand what it takes.

Again, there is no gentle way to relay this information. Most adults starting from scratch are really going to need to commit.

PLAYING
You need to play a training game everyday or close to it. Rapid games are fine. I recommend no faster time control than 15/10. This allows you to get your game in everyday without compromising too much on thought process quality.

Once a week, I recommend you play a longer time control game like the 45+10 games that we have weekly in The Online Chess Club as part of our recurring TOCC Classical League. It is important you have this long-format game, so that you can analyse your thought process when you have time to actually think in critical situations.

ANALYSIS
All that playing isn’t going to be worth anything if we don’t learn from our mistakes and change the way we think in our next game. If you could print out your internal dialogue and get your feelings on the page on each move (confident, excited, nervous), then you are hitting the gold standard for annotation and analysis.

Patterns will emerge: “I always seem to overlook my opponent’s threats when I am excited about my own ideas”. Once we identify our faulty thought processes and biases, we can start working on fixing them.

KNOWLEDGE
Is this pawn endgame winning? Do you know how to win it? There are certain things in chess you either know or don’t know. Good bishops. Bad bishops. Weak squares. Minority attacks. Isolated pawns. Opening theory.

You can’t say you are bad at German if you haven’t studied any German vocabulary yet. Similarly, you can not say you are bad at queen endgames if you don’t have any guiding principles about how to play them. It is simply an absence of knowledge. And a lack of knowledge is an easy fix.
You go to the library, you learn, and you memorise. I’ll provide a comprehensive list of resources for all learning styles to cover you until you reach club player level in Ono's Chess Toolkit.

CALCULATION
With a bit of chess knowledge, you’ll start to be able to look at chess positions and know what to do. You’ll be able to come up with a plan. The king is weak - play for an attack. That pawn is backward, I’ll try to win it. My bishop is terrible, can I improve it or trade it off. But once you know what to do, you still need to work out how you’re going to actually do it in a concrete way.

I attack the isolated pawn with my rook. They defend here with the queen. I add another attacker with knight b4. They defend with their bishop, which also attacks my queen.

Moving pieces around in your head is the actual calculating and it comes with the sub-skill of visualisation.

Gaining chess knowledge is as easy as going to the library. Building chess skills, like mentally moving pieces around a chess board, is like going to the gym. You don’t go once and expect to end up looking like Ryan Gosling in Crazy Stupid Love after your first workout. You turn up every day, and you work hard.

PATTERN RECOGNITION
There are certain tactical things in chess that you’re going to need to see instantly. These are generally tactical patterns, but can also be as easy as actually noticing your opponent just hung their bishop.

Chess is very difficult and deliberate to begin with. I recently taught my six-year-old to read. Every word was a struggle to start with. You could almost feel the strain. Trying to play chess without automatically seeing any patterns, is like sounding out each individual word and then trying to match those sounds to words you know. You need to learn to read the words without having to sound them out, you need to look at a certain configuration of letters and just see the word.

There are patterns in chess that you don’t want to have to consciously slog to spot. You need to just see them. You need to recognise them as quickly and easily as words on a page.

Training this is easy. I have built a custom-spaced repetition trainer in Ono's Chess Toolkit that progressively takes you from spotting hanging pieces to seeing simple one-move tactics on a board with almost no pieces, so the core pattern is totally isolated. Then we add distracting pieces, then we increase the difficulty of the puzzles, then we increase the length of the combinations.

This incremental pattern acquisition across 6 tactics courses each containing 4181 puzzles, I think is literally a revolution in beginner chess. You will internalise the most common basic patterns in 25,000 puzzles in just a year and a half by solving for just 34 minutes a day.

5X HARD WORK

So there you have it folks, my tried and tested method that has helped many Adult Improvers become club players over the last four years. Do five things and work hard.

In subsequent weeks, I’ll be diving into each of the five core exercises in more granular detail.

For now, know that if you consistently do these five things, if you work really hard, progress is unavoidable. It is inevitable. So keep climbing that mountain, one step at a time, for we can all move forward and experience the glory of chess improvement.

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Would you like some company on your expedition? Come take a look in The Online Chess Club. Or do you want to know what the climb is like with me as your personal chess improvement guide? You can find out in a free trial lesson.