What most improvers are missing (a new GM explains)

In Part 1 of my interview with Australia’s newest GM-elect, Rishi Sardana, we covered the tournament where he achieved the GM title, the 12 years it took for him to get from IM to GM, and how he worked on his weaknesses. (the full interview video is also now out here)

In this second half, we go over his earlier years in chess and what improvers should work on at club level and towards master-level.
(The interview has been lightly edited for clarity)

---

We’ve been talking about your years as an IM, but let’s go back to the start of your journey. You were born in Australia to Indian parents, then moved to India when you were young. How did you first get into chess?

Rishi: There was a chess club at my school and a bunch of friends and I decided to sign up for it just because we would get to hang out after school and it would be fun... and none of them turned up. Their parents were like, “No, we’re not driving you to school every evening, what is this?” So I was the only one who turned up and there was me and this 7, 8-year-old kid.

When you picture a chess prodigy, a kid who was very good at chess, he was the archetype of that. You look at him and he’s serious, he’s zoned in. He played a few games with me and he smashed me, he just never gave me a chance. I’m this 10 or 11-year-old with this big ego thinking, “how did this happen? How is this little kid beating me?”

I was super angry, and I went back home and I told my dad, “this sucks. I don’t want to do this anymore.” But he encouraged me to continue. He also said, “we’ve paid a bit of money for this, so you have to continue.” But also he was very encouraging and said, “You can do this.” And I also wanted to prove to myself that I can do this and I really wanted to beat him, so I just kept working hard.

My coach at the club, he gave me a few books and ChessBase videos, Daniel King. I got really curious and started spamming through those day in and day out, just with the sole intention to beat this kid. Once that happened I was very happy and I decided this is kind of nice, I can continue and eventually I also started to fall in love with the game.

I looked at your FIDE rating graph, and saw you were rated around 1800 around age 13. Firstly, for other improvers who might be reading this and aiming for that level of 1800 FIDE, what would you say they should work on?

It’s a difficult one to answer because everybody’s journey is personal. But I’ve seen most people emphasise the wrong things, like spending a lot of time on openings. They’re always trying to play multiple openings and they’re fascinated with the concept of it because it’s the low-hanging fruit: it’s somewhat easy to learn and you always have these clickbait-y videos that tell you to learn the London System and crush your opponent in 20 moves.

A lot of games up until 1600–1800 are decided by tactics. So first of all, openings-wise just pick up one or two or one to three openings, go deeper and not wider. If you’re playing two or three openings that you understand really well, then you’ll likely get a decent position into the middlegame as well.

And secondly, focus on tactics, become a tactical genius: solve thousands and millions of puzzles. Do your Puzzle Rush every day. Get some books and make sure that muscle of yours is really strong. You should be able to spot tactics in seconds because that sort of thing really matters as an initial improver. Most games are often decided by someone blundering a piece or falling for some sort of a fork, and you have to be ready to take those chances when they come. Sometimes the tactics aren’t that obvious. Two-movers, three-movers, the tactics become a bit more nuanced over time.

From around 1800, you improved very quickly to IM, it was only three or four years. In one interview with ChessBase India you mentioned you worked with trainers in Delhi, including FIDE Master Prasenjit Dutta. What kind of work did you do with the trainers that helped you?

Prasenjit Dutta completely changed the game for me. I had a lot of issues chess-wise when he started working with me, but slowly we chipped away at everything and overcame things. As a young improver who was pretty obsessed with chess, my training was balanced as in: you do your calculation, endgames, analyse your games, the usual checklist items, and that obviously helps. If you’re working on chess every day and doing these things, you’re bound to improve up until a certain level. But I think there’s always these one or two things, these X-factors that really make a big difference.

When I was working with him, one thing that really stood out to me was that the way he taught me was very practical. In the past, I was approaching chess in a very academic way. Maybe I would read certain books and try to implement what I’ve learnt from those books in a real game, and the connect between what I learnt and what happened over the board was not as strong.

Whereas with him, he would come over to my place and the first thing we would do is just play a game. Imagine playing four training games a week with a 2350, 2400 strength player, that in itself is immensely useful. You’re constantly going to be challenged. He’s constantly going to trick you, put pressure on you, and you’re going to naturally learn a few things. Even if you do nothing else and you’re just playing tons of games with an IM as an 1800 or 1900, that’s 150 points right there.

Even the way I approached openings was quite different back then. I don’t know how well this would work in the modern, cloud engine era, but let’s say I wanted to learn a specific opening, the Petroff with White. I wanted to play the Nc3 in the Petroff where Black takes on c3 and then you long castle and that sort of thing.

And what you would do now is you would take a cloud engine and you would space bar (keep following the top engine line). But back then, essentially what we were doing was just open the database, look at 10 or 15 games by really strong players, master games in that line. And we would analyse it endlessly. So there was no concrete opening theory going on here: there was no “White plays this, Black plays this.” It’s us analysing some games and then playing more training games and getting a feel for it. There’s a board and pieces and there are two players just shuffling around and doing things the old-fashioned way.

That really improved my practical strength because the way I was working on chess also became very practical, in the moment: “here’s a position and we’re solving some problems here.”

I’m thinking of the people who are reading this who might not have access to a good coach or be able to play someone stronger. They can try and play stronger tournaments, that’s always useful. Do you think there are any other ways they could try and work on those skills that you might have gotten from playing stronger players so much?

There are a lot of players who’ve done it in a different way, so it’s definitely possible. I think you need to have a strong sense of self-reflection to improve if you’re doing it in a way that doesn’t involve playing games over and over again and optimising. Again, you can play on chess.com with stronger players but even without that, if you’re trying to improve, one of the most important things is you need to be aware of yourself as a player, what your shortcomings are.

Many people, when they’re analysing their games, they have a chess.com game review open and you see you made a mistake on move 28 and you’re like, “ok instead of this, I should have played this” and the story ends there. And that is such a common mistake.

They might get some sort of vague lesson learned or reflection after the game, but I think you really need to understand yourself well as a player if you want to improve. Especially if you’re a solo improver and you don’t have access to coaches. Coaches act as a mirror for you. They tell you what you’re doing wrong, the flaws in your decision-making. You need to be able to think about things that way on your own. And I’ve seen some people who are so good at it. It’s a skill that I admire a lot.

Even just yesterday, I was listening to Caruana’s podcast and they were talking about how he once lost a game to Hikaru at some super-tournament and he was obsessively analysing his game for four hours. Many people after a loss, they can’t do that. They can’t even look at their game, they’re so disgusted by what they did. But he’s going in and he’s thinking about why he made that decision, where his brain was going when he did that. Like what are these cognitive biases that are leading him to these mistakes.

That’s obviously Caruana, but I’ve seen so many people do it at different levels and it’s a skill that I somewhat lacked for a long time. Basically, when you analyse your game, if you’ve made a mistake, then you have to think about it in a larger sense.

For example, a friend of mine showed me a game a few weeks ago and his observation was that he has trouble keeping the tension in certain positions. In a position where you have a lot of forcing options and it’s a relatively open position, he’s constantly looking for concrete action whereas his brain doesn’t really go towards options that don’t break the tension and just maintain the status quo. A move like ...h7-h6 in a position where there’s a board full of pieces and the centre is open: he just doesn’t think about those things.

And that kind of deep reflection is really important. Once you identify a pattern like that, you can look for material and give yourself training positions and optimise accordingly.

I love that. I have a similar philosophy when it comes to learning from your own games. Calculation, you said it’s 99% of chess. For the improvers, many of them who are reading this who know they should be doing things like calculation or training where they actually have to think, what level of exercises would you recommend?

The answer to this one, I’m a little more sure about. Most people I talk to say the exercises you’re solving have to be 10% harder than your level. There are different categories of exercises. There are simple tactics you need to be doing just to keep your brain sharp and those need to be at your level or below your level. Puzzle Rush stuff you do to make sure you’re not blundering during a game, you’re alert and you have that muscle in your brain.

But when you’re solving higher-order calculation exercises, endgame studies, things like that, then they shouldn’t be too hard. If you’re asking an 1800 to solve Dvoretsky’s Analytical Manual, they’ll go nuts and they’ll probably quit chess. Even for really strong players, that book sucks the soul out of you sometimes.

What you need is a book that is slightly above your level. It challenges you, forces you to think, to go that extra step, but you know that it is solvable. It’s more instructive that way. It’s easier to learn something out of it, as opposed to if you’re solving something really hard and then everything is a mess and it’s just too much for you.

That makes sense. Listening to your stories of how you trained with your trainers, I feel like me as an IM and you now as a GM, we’ve learnt a lot through reading books and learning from stronger players and how they see positions. Nowadays, less people are reading chess books: there are even young GMs who have never read a chess book. Do you think chess books are still helpful? Which ones would you recommend to players, let’s say top three books.

Chess books are helpful for sure. I mean, cloud engines are at their peak right now and they’ve changed the way people understand chess. If you endlessly analyse with a cloud engine, then you can get a lot out of it. But a cloud engine can’t talk to you, tell you “this is what I’m thinking,” “these are the factors that I’m prioritising in the position.”

Not yet.

Not yet! I look forward to the day, it’s probably not even that far either, where we have AI-powered chess coaches who are really good. But it won’t be able to give you that foundation of how to think about things.

Whereas a chess book, my number one favourite chess book is Gelfand’s Positional Decision Making in Chess because when I read that, I could hear Gelfand think out loud in my head.
That book is essentially his internal monologue. Laid out onto a page, how he’s thinking about each move in depth, what are the options he’s considering, how much time he’s spending, which factors in the position he considers important as opposed to the ones he ignores, just the internal monologue of a strong chess player.

Same with number two, Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors.
Any Kasparov book really, I’d say number two is the tie between his book on his match with Karpov and My Great Predecessors. Again you can hear his thoughts, you can hear how he’s thinking about a chess position, absolutely amazing god-tier level stuff.

And number three for me was this book called Game Changer (Sadler and Regan, 2019).
It was widely talked about and a lot of people probably have that in their list of top-something books, so it’s quite unoriginal of me to add it there, but it did have a big impact on me. I remember I was not doing too well at a tournament in Mumbai in India. I just lost one of my games against a lower-rated player and I just decided I’m not really going to prepare for the next few games, but let me pick up a book and just chill out and read for a bit. And I picked up this book on AlphaZero and I just read it cover to cover over the next couple of nights.

The game analysis was obviously top quality, but the games themselves, there was so much to learn from them. You would remember it as a turning point, the way chess was played kind of changed after that. Everyone’s pushing their h-pawn after AlphaZero came out and certain openings became more popular, like the Grünfeld became more popular with White, there’s the pre-AlphaZero era and there’s the post-AlphaZero era. So I was really inspired and won the next six or seven games. So why this book is in my list is because it’s very instructive, but also because this happened and I associate it with a really good memory.

I’ve read the books you mentioned and they’re all great. With the audience for these books, what would you say might be the recommended general rating range for each of these books?

For each of these books, I would say 1600 and above can already get a lot out of it. Because those three books, they’re not forcing you to calculate too hard, they’re not pushing you, but they’re still giving you a wealth of knowledge.

So as long as you understand chess on a fundamental level, you understand pawn structures and weaknesses and you can see basic tactics, then you’re already in a very good position to consume those books. Someone who’s got a FIDE rating of 1400, 1500 and above and they want to break through that next level and improve their middlegame understanding, these books will really help them.

Books make chess more interesting, knowing the history and how players play. One thing I always like asking people about is playing style. You mentioned how you’re more ‘quiet’ compared to a Tal kind of player. How would you describe your playing style, and has it changed over your chess life?

So this is the funny thing: I saw myself as a quiet player because I wasn’t very good at calculation. If I’m not good at calculation, I have to be good at something, right? And this is that something. I saw it as an either/or situation. Either you’re a calculator, you’re concrete or you’re a quiet player.

But recently it was pointed out to me that it’s not as simple or binary as that. And a friend of mine told me he sees me as a dynamic player who does well in dynamic positions. He’s a bit of a nerd and a statistician and he was looking through my games and pointed out to me that I do really well in opposite-side castling positions, and I have a very good score with the Najdorf as White and Black. These two things.

I was aware that it’s an opening that I enjoy and I do well with it. But it made me think about my own style and the kind of positions I should be seeking in a game, and I realised you don’t have to be a calculating beast to be good at dynamic chess. It could also be very intuitive.

So I reflected and I realised, maybe I’m not so much a Magnus or a Karpov. If we talk next year the answer probably would have changed to something completely different, but to answer the first part of your question, yes, it does change. Right now the style that I’ve landed on is dynamic and intuitive. So I’m not a concrete player, but I can make good instinctual decisions in positions that are sharp and somewhat forcing.

I think in 2018 or 2019 I was trying to play more slow chess. The game that won me my first norm was a very quiet sort of technical endgame. I just got a plus equal out of the opening and I kept grinding for a really long time. So in 2018 in my head, I was like some sort of poor man’s Ulf Andersson. But now I see myself differently.

When you mentioned the dynamic and intuitive, there’s a book I like, Foundations of Chess Strategy by Lars Bo Hansen. It divides the world champions and top players into four types based on Logic vs. Intuition and then Facts vs. General Concepts. So you probably fit some of the world champions there as well. I have a related question from Mikhail on X: whether it’s important for players to have a clear style, tactical/positional/solid. Do you think players should have a style in mind or just be open-minded and play the game?

That’s a great question. I don’t think it’s essential because I recently asked this style question to a grandmaster and he didn’t have an answer. He just said he tries to be well-rounded, and you also have to be well-rounded because your opponents aren’t going to let you play the same type of chess in every game.

Sometimes you’re just going to have to grind in a slow position and sometimes you’re going to have to out-calculate your opponent. That’s just the nature of chess. You don’t always get the positions you want, so being adaptable is always a great policy to have. You don’t necessarily need to be aware of your style, but it still really helps to have a strong sense of self chess-wise, because then you know what positions to aim for. You can pick an opening repertoire that suits you, you can try to steer your opponent into your territory.

Whereas if you don’t really have a style then ok, you’re being objective which is great. But this gives you an additional psychological weapon. If my opponent doesn’t like to calculate too much and I love calculating, let me play something crazy in this position and mess things up.

If you do have a certain style, you can have model players and sometimes they can be inspiring. Over the years you’ve played and beaten many strong grandmasters as well. I wanted to ask, what would you say is your best chess game to date and why that game?

I think the game against Costa in Spilimbergo was really nice.

There were some skill issues, quality issues there. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I think the way I conducted it was good. Took some really good decisions in certain places and the finish was also very beautiful. It’s a game you dream of playing when you’re younger: you sacrifice some material and then you push pawns and sacrifice your queen in the end, plus it’s also now a very fun memory because it led to a norm.

Before this, I remember having a really good game in 2019 when I got my first GM norm, where I very patiently outplayed my opponent.

Stylistically, very different from the game with Costa. A very closed position and I’m having to endlessly shuffle my pieces around. Both of us had limited counterplay. We had all the time in the world to get our pieces to the right squares, but I just did a slightly better job of it than he did. And when the position opened up, it was really good for me.

So that was quite a fun memory of mine because again, when you’re young, this is how you’re told that grandmasters play, right? These strong Russian grandmasters, how the Soviets play. Very slow, very patient, building up their position and then finally striking when the moment is right. And I guess I checked all of the boxes in that game.

The Costa game I used in one of my lessons with a student too, and the pawn pushes at the end on the queenside were really cool. I have a question from YouTube: What is one piece of advice you would want every chess player to hear?

I would say “be curious.”

When I see what sets really, really talented and good players apart from the others, it’s just the constant curiosity and the constant desire to find the truth when they’re looking at a position. For example, the engine says White is winning here. They try to understand why White is winning, they’re constantly asking themselves this question, and they won’t just look at the engine eval and be “whatever, ok, White’s winning, let’s move on.” They’ll really try to dig deep and find the truth.

So always be curious about chess and pick up as much information as you can from whatever you can and it’ll all add up at some point. That’ll make chess a lot more fun as well.

Great advice. Before the last question, I want to ask some quick-fire ones. These are more casual non-chess ones, because we’ve basically been talking about just chess. First, your favourite sport?

Let’s just say cricket.

Favourite game that isn’t chess?

Since I answered cricket for the last one, I’m not going to use that. I enjoy board games a lot, so Codenames maybe, it’s fun.

That’s a good one. Favourite movie?

That keeps changing because I’m a big movie buff and the answer is always different each time. I’m a pretty big MCU fan. I recently spammed through Phase One of the MCU again and I love the Spider-Verse movies a lot. Those are some of my favourites. Not just because the story is great and it’s wholesome, but also because the animation is very beautiful and you can see the work put in by the creators into the movies.

Favourite book?

I’m actually not a huge reader, but I think one really poignant book that made me feel things was The Book Thief. I don’t know if you’ve read that before. I’ve been told you’re a big reader.

Yeah, I read that one.

It’s just quite emotional and really well written.

Favourite food?

My mom makes these Indian-style scrambled eggs at home, which I love, with onions and spices and veggies and stuff. In India like you call it Bhurji, which basically translates to scramble. The way she makes it is just the best thing. It’s my comfort food.

It’s hard to beat a mother’s cooking. If you had a day off and you had no obligations, what would that perfect day be like?

Maybe spending time with friends or family. That’s what I’m doing here. For the past seven or eight days I’ve put my obligations on the back-burner and just tried to enjoy myself. Spend some time with friends. And if I were at home then I’d love to be with family and spending time with them, spending time with my dog, my parents’ dog.

And the last question for the interview: now you’ve achieved your GM title. What are your plans and goals from here, both chess and non-chess?

It’s so difficult because so many people feel lost after becoming a GM. They don’t know what to do next. I guess the logical next step is 2550 and then 2600. Obviously your title doesn’t change when you hit these milestones, but it just feels really good. Just try to become as strong as possible, as close to my maximum potential as I possibly can and just keep enjoying the game. Trying new things and styles, new openings, those sorts of things.

And from a non-chess perspective, I’ll go back for a bit, focus on work [Rishi works as a data consultant]. I don’t have a super clear answer to this but scale up a bit and try to get some sort of clear direction on my work life and where I want to be in the next few years. I’m doing pretty well at work and it’s a nice job. I guess I want to maybe get one or two really good skills and then use them, monetise them, those sorts of things.

That sounds good. Thank you Rishi. I’m sure the people reading this can learn so much from the things you said.

Thank you for having me. Cheers.

---

Interview Part 1 on Lichess
Full interview video