Adult Improvement in Chess: My Experience

I believe my progress can be attributed to three key practices:

• Playing slow time control games
• Engaging in challenging tactics exercises
• Analyzing my games and making adjustments accordingly

However, there were also activities that I found to be waste of time:

• Watching chess streamers purely for entertainment
• Playing thousands of bullet games
• Memorizing long opening variations

Let me explain why.

The Importance of Slow Thinking

I was over 40, when I participated in my first over-the-board (OTB) chess tournament last year. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. Why?

For beginners or even intermediate players, proper thinking is impossible without sufficient time. If you don't practice a solid thought process, your chances of improvement are minimal. When you make a mistake and analyze it afterwards, the goal is to do something differently next time, right? But if you don't have a structured thought process, what exactly do you change? It's unlikely that you'll encounter the same position again unless it's an opening or a theoretical endgame. To make a meaningful change, you need a process to refine.

In a classical time control OTB tournaments, you have the luxury of time. Typically, you get 2-3 minutes per move on average, and during critical moments, you can spend 10-15 minutes on a single move. This allows you to thoroughly calculate forcing moves, evaluate the resulting positions, and consider multiple candidate moves before selecting the best one. It also gives you time to perform a final blunder check by considering all of your opponent's potential responses.

At first, this might feel like hard work — because it is. But over time, it becomes more automatic. Personally, I find it deeply satisfying to play a game without blunders. And when I do mistakes, it's easier to trace them back to their root cause.

Tactics Beyond Your Comfort Zone

I believe that calculation is the skill most closely linked to your chess rating. While intuition can guide you in selecting candidate moves, you can't rely on it alone and expect great results. Intuition plays a role in identifying potential moves, but calculation is essential to ensure they actually work. Despite this, many players don't train calculation skills effectively. Why is that?

Most players understand the importance of tactics and regularly solve chess puzzles. With puzzles readily available online, many are gamified, starting with easy problems that gradually increase in difficulty, often with a time limit. This can be addictive, but the issue is that these puzzles often focus on positions where the most obvious solution is correct. As a result, they rely more on pattern recognition than on calculation. While pattern recognition is useful for spotting simple tactics, it falls short in more complex situations where deeper calculation is required.

I use easy puzzles as a warm-up, but I then move on to intermediate or hard puzzles. Intermediate puzzles are those I should be able to solve if they appeared on the board during an actual game. I set the difficulty level so that I solve about 95 % correctly within a time frame similar to a real game — 30 seconds to 3 minutes. These puzzles require calculation, but not too much.

Then, there are the hard puzzles. Here, my target success rate is around 75-80 %, and I take as much time as needed — sometimes over an hour. These puzzles push me far beyond my comfort zone, often involving messy positions or endgames requiring exact moves. They can be defensive puzzles or require finding a quiet move amidst complications. Sometimes, the most obvious solution fails due to a minor detail, or the position seems so dry that it's hard to find any tactics.

Analyze and Adjust

After a game, you often feel like you know where you made mistakes. However, it's uncomfortable to confront these errors, which might lead you to avoid analyzing the game. I struggle with this too, but it's worth the effort.

Simply knowing where you went wrong isn't enough. The goal is to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Since you're unlikely to encounter the exact same position again, finding the correct move in that situation won't help much.

To get the most out of your analysis, I recommend the following:

• Immediately after the game, write down your thoughts during the game while they are still fresh. This helps you later when you do a more thorough analysis.
• Focus on a few critical positions where you made a mistake or played a dubious move. Analyzing every move is unnecessary.
• Try to find the correct moves in those positions. You can use a computer or setup the position on a board and calculate variations manually.
• Compare your thoughts during the game with the calculations needed to find the correct move.
• Ask yourself questions to identify the type of error you did: Did you miss a move for yourself or your opponent? What kind of move was it? Did I visualize the position incorrectly? Was your evaluation of the position inaccurate? Did you skip a step in your though process? Did you make an incorrect assumption?
• Finally, ask the tough question: Why? The answer may not always be chess-related. It could be an attitude issue, for example: "I thought I was winning easily, so I didn't consider my opponent's tactical resources."
• Once you've identified the problem, find something to adjust in your thinking process or an area to emphasize in your training.

This kind of analysis is challenging but invaluable. It helps you identify your weakest areas and work on strengthening them, which is crucial for improvement. In fact, I would argue that consistently playing decent moves instead of bad ones has greater impact on your overall playing strength than playing great moves instead of good ones.

The Trap of Chess Entertainment

Entertainment has its place, even in chess. However, it is important to distinguish between time spent on chess-related activities as entertainment and as training. Otherwise, you might spend a lot of time on chess with little to show for it.

I love to watch chess streamers and YouTube channels, but I'm selective about who I watch. Some content creators make a living from chess-related content, and there's often a conflict of interest. Their income depends on attracting a large audience, which means they're incentivized to produce entertaining, not necessarily instructive, content. If your goal is to improve your chess skills, this isn't what you need.

Here are some YouTube channels that I have found instructive:

• Chess Thinking! with NM Dan Heisman
• Dr. Can's Chess Clinic
• ChessCoach Andras
• Daniel Naroditsky

A good rule of thumb is that to improve, you need to engage your brain. Hearing phrases like "pause the video and try to find the best move" is a positive sign. I always pause. If I'm too tired to calculate, I stop the video and return to it, when I have energy. Otherwise I'm just wasting valuable learning material.

Watching top level games can be either training or entertainment, depending on how you approach it. If there's a bar showing the computer evaluations, or a list of the best moves, it's likely entertainment. But if you're actively trying to calculate the next moves, it's more likely to be training. Some learning opportunities also arise when strong players comment on games and analyze them without computers. For me, the most valuable part is hearing how they evaluate positions, as this can help me see where I might have misjudged.

Bullet Games: A Risky Addiction

Playing bullet games is addictive — a red flag in itself. Playing bullet is often an emotional decision rather than a rational one. The problem with bullet games is that their low quality allows bad moves to go unpunished. Repeating this thousands of times only reinforces misconceptions and bad habits.

Bullet games can be harmful. (Image credit: https://pixabay.com/fi/photos/luoteja-kuoret-bullet-kuoret-2166491/)

Some argue that top GMs play bullet all the time, so it can't be harmful. But the reality is that they're already so good that they don't have many misconceptions left to reinforce. Plus, they can often calculate during a bullet game. They didn't become great players by playing bullet; they did it by playing thousands of slow games. The GM title is earned in classical time controls — there are no GM titles for bullet, blitz, or even rapid chess.

Additionally, most people don't analyze their bullet games, so there's no feedback loop other than the game's result, which isn't enough to learn anything substantial. A proper feedback loop requires playing, analyzing, and training. Playing produces games to analyze, analysis reveals areas for improvement, and training addresses those areas. By only repeating the playing step, you're likely to draw incorrect conclusions.

I admit I struggle with playing too much bullet. I've tried to replace it with tactical training whenever possible, or simply doing something else.

The Drawbacks of Learning Long Opening Variations

Learning long opening variations can boost your confidence, and it is relatively easy to do so. It doesn't require much thinking, just memorization — something you can accomplish with spaced repetition services, for example. But this takes time away from other chess training, so how useful is it in practice?

Based on my limited tournament experience, it's not that important. In only one game did we follow a deep opening variation, where I misplayed on move 18. But that move didn't decide the game. The position was only slightly worse for me, playing with the black pieces, which is normal. A few moves later, my opponent gave me a chance to gain a clear advantage with a tactic. I saw the tactic but miscalculated the resulting complications and didn't play the move. Eventually, I blundered a pawn, then another, and lost. The tactical mistakes, not the opening, cost me the game.

And that game featured the longest theoretical line I've ever played. The next longest was somewhere around 10 moves. In many games, we were out of book much earlier. So, instead of learning long opening variations, it's probably better to understand the typical ideas in the openings you play or in similar structures. It's also useful to know ideas from openings you don't usually play. For example, in one of my games, I successfully borrowed an idea sometimes used against the King's Indian Defense to counter the Modern Defense.

In my experience, it's more important to know the openings broadly than deeply. Exceptions exist for sharp openings where exact knowledge is crucial. But in most cases, you can choose openings that avoid deep lines or require knowing only a few. If you know that your opponent is a "memorizer", it might even be a valid strategy to play a non-theoretical but decent move in the opening. Dropping 0.17 points in computer evaluation won't ruin you game if puts your opponent out of their comfort zone.

Conclusions

If you're an adult looking to improve in chess, I hope I've offered some valuable insights. I've discussed the importance of playing slow time control games, solving challenging tactical puzzles, and analyzing your games. Everyone has a unique background, with different strengths and weaknesses, so I can't guarantee that following the same approach will lead to a 180-point rating increase. However, I wish you the best of luck on your journey.

There are also additional training activities that I plan to incorporate into my future regimen:

• Review annotated master games: The goal here is to learn new concepts that I can apply to my own games.
• Study theoretical endgames: While I know the basics, I believe that the endgame phase will become increasingly crucial as I approach a 2000 ELO rating, where games are less likely to be decided by a middlegame blunder.
• Play training games: I don't get enough material for analysis from OTB tournaments alone. I'll be looking for opportunities to play slow time control games, either online or at my local chess club.

I once thought that making significant progress as an adult player was unlikely, but my recent success has inspired me to dream of one day achieving the title of National Master (NM) or Candidate Master (CM).