As a chess instructor and coach, I am often asked how to improve quickly. Of course, hard work and dedication is the answer. However, I always notice a slightly disappointed look on the student's face upon receiving this news and decided to put some thought into why many beginning and improving chess players expect an easy solution to a complex problem. I started with an internet search using the phrase "easy chess improvement." I must say that I found a plethora of websites all promising rapid improvement with minimal effort. There is an old saying, "if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is." I asked a number of people, including some of my younger students, if they had heard this phrase before. The answer was a resounding yes! Well if this was indeed the case, why would so many people flock to these websites promising rapid chess improvement with very little effort? The answer lies within western culture.
There was a time when long hard work was a sign of diligence and a job well done. My first employer always said "a job worth doing is worth doing well." Of course, my first employer had me raking leaves off of his front lawn, but his point hit home with me. This was in the early 1970s. If we flash forward a decade, we find the old saying "time is money" being the catch phrase of the day. As time marched on, the idea of creating greater output (more product) in a shorter period of time became the driving force behind the global marketplace. This sentiment seemed to permeate every facet of our lives. Television commercials, for example, are fast tracked to offer the greatest amount of information in the shortest period of time. Manufacturing success is based on larger quantities of goods being produced in shorter periods of time. In fairness, society expects us to get the job done faster because it is the benchmark of the capitalist marketplace. All of this leads to a strange type of human conditioning in which we expect maximum results applying a minimal amount of effort. Once upon a time, we stopped to smell the roses. Success was once measured by the quality of the job. Now, we have no time to appreciate the beauty of the rose and quantity seems to be the key to success. Many feel that those who can complete a task quickly are successful and those who can't are not. This mindset had led to a skewed view of mastering everything from educational subjects to life itself. The self help section of bookshops are filled with books designed to skip the hard work and get straight to the rewards! Let me talk a moment about hard work.
In 2007, I was diagnosed with cancer and given a twenty percent chance of surviving. Every thought I ever had about facing death was wrong. In a single moment in the timeline of my life everything drastically changed. My first thought was not "oh my god, I'm going to die," but rather, I cannot do this to my loving wife Jennifer and the rest of my family. I resolved to beat the cancer because I would cause my family such pain. Within a very short period of time, I was receiving radiation and chemotherapy treatments for a tumor that had spread from neck to the top of my spinal column. The treatments were extremely painful and left me debilitated. I was trapped in bed alone with my thoughts, which at the time were very bleak.
I had played chess most of my life but hadn't played in a number of years because I was a working musician and had also gone back to school. Stranded in my bed I needed some way in which to occupy my mind (with thoughts other than those created by absolute pain). I started playing chess online at chess.com. My chess wasn't very good because I was extremely sick from the cancer treatment's side effects but I kept at it. I studied suggested chess books and played through master games. I used my time wisely. In short, I took the long term approach, realizing that chess required effort and those willing to put in the effort would see real improvement. Fast forward to 2012 and I now teach chess a number of public and private schools as well as in the juvenile offenders program in San Francisco. How did I come this far? By rolling up my sleeves and putting some effort into it. It all comes down to hard work.
The good news is that, as a chess teacher, I've had to read through countless books on improvement and have taken the best ideas within those books and applied it to my own program. I don't claim to have come up with an original teaching program. What I've done is simply take the best explanations and teaching methods and stitched them into a program than will save you some time. Of course, I've put this into my own words so I might approach a topic from a slightly different angle. However, no matter how it's said, an effort will have to be made on your part. You have to work to become better at chess and the more you work at it, the better you'll get.
Chess doesn't allow us a fast track to success, However, there is a way to cut down on the amount of time spent improving one's game. I've come up with a simple way to get better at chess but again, you'll have to put some time and effort into it. Yes, there is work involved but I'll break it down into small digestible bits that provide small but noticeable improvements in your game.
To breakdown the learning process into small digestible bits, we have to break the game down into phases. There are three phases to a game of chess. These are the opening, middle and endgames. Each of these phases have very specific goals. I'll explain each phase in detail later on. For now, let's just look at the overall goal of each phase. This way, you'll have a better idea of the direction you need to travel in order to reach your goal during each phase:
The Opening
If you walk into a chess shop or bookstore with a decent selection of chess books, you'll notice a large number of them are written about the opening. Of course, if you're new to chess, you might not realize that the books shelved before you have anything to do with openings. Titles such as "Seven Ways to Smash the Sicilian (complete with the image of a handgun on it's cover) don't tell the novice player much other than something called the Sicilian is in need of a good drubbing. Chess openings often have exotic sounding names that make perfect sense to chess players and little sense to those who don't play. Before purchasing any books on the opening, you need to have an understanding of opening principles which we'll cover in another section. For now let's define the opening phase of a chess game.
The Opening is the first 8 to 12 moves of a chess game. During this phase of the game, you as the leader of your army have a job to do. How well you do your job determines whether or not you reach the goal of the opening which is to get your pawns and pieces onto good squares (squares which allow your pawns and pieces maximum control of the board). Remember, your opponent is trying to do the same thing so there is a race to see who maximizes control of the board's center first (we'll talk about the center of the board and it's impact on the game in the "opening principles" section. To achieve your opening goal, you can use a few sound "opening principles" to guide your moves. We're not going to learn specific openings until much later. Why? Because you need to understand the underlying mechanics of pawn and piece placement in the opening first. Only then will the specific sequence of moves in a particular opening make sense. I'll present you with eight opening principles to guide your opening moves later on. Really, the overall goal of the opening phase is to get your pawns and pieces on squares that allow you to play a successful middle game, which we'll talk about next.
The Middle Game
This is where the fighting starts! The opening phase is where your prepare your forces for battle. Any successful battle is based on a plan of action. The leader of one army will place his troops in very specific positions to maximize their strength. This is the role of the opening. The middle game brings us to the actual battle. This is the realm of tactical play. We'll examine chess tactics such as forks, pins, skewers and discovered attacks in a later section. During the middle game, pieces are captured and removed from the board. The basic goal is to end up with more material (pieces) on the board than your opponent. In many beginner's game, checkmate occurs during this phase.
The Endgame
The endgame is a phase which is not studied by many beginners because their games often end in the middle game. The endgame is often one of the hardest parts of the game for beginners to master. Why? Because most beginner's games end somewhere in the middle game. This is usually due to a large material imbalance or a successful mating attack. Therefore, the novice player will not know how to get the most out of a reduced number of pawns and pieces.
For those of you new to the great game of chess, the endgame is the final phase in which both players are down to a few pawns and pieces. Many beginners have remarked that, since both players have a reduced number of pawns and pieces, it should be easier to work your way through the remaining portion of the game? No! Having fewer pawns and pieces means you have to be extremely careful where you place those pawns and pieces. Pawn promotion plays the key role in the endgame and for a novice player, moving a pawn safely across the board can be a difficult process (endgame play will be covered later).
Some Additional Thoughts
If you're ready to start working on your game, be forewarned, you'll have to put some real effort into your studies. However, I'll try to make it easier. By easier, I'll layout a training program that allows you to use your chess time efficiently. If you're brand new to chess, make sure you know how the pieces move, how to castle, promote pawns and capture en passant (a special pawn move). For those of you that are new to the game, you need to learn the language of chess otherwise know as algebraic notation. I'll cover that in my next posting.
If you're ready to go, grab your chess set and set it up, making sure that there's a white square in the lower right-hand corner. I suggest using an inexpensive tournament set that consists of regulation size plastic chess pieces and a vinyl playing mat (chessboard). The nice thing about the mats is that they have algebraic notation markers on their sides. The pieces and mat should run you no more than $20.00. Start with a simple inexpensive set rather than an expensive one. Most of the chess players I know use the simple tournament sets because you can use them anywhere. With that said, let's move on to the language of chess, algebraic notation. Just click on the link that says "Algebraic Notation." Now let's have some fun!
