How to get good at chess, by someone who is not good at chess
Disclaimer: Nothing in this post constitutes chess coaching or financial advice.
Everyone’s dabbled in chess at some point. There’s an old dusty board sitting at grandma’s house that you pull out when you’re over there to parade around the horses and castles. Or maybe you opened up a chess.com account after being inspired by Beth Harmon’s drug-induced mastery in the Queen’s Gambit.
I started playing online chess regularly during the pandemic, and have amassed close to 1,500 games since. This is not a brag. In fact, it’s basically the opposite considering that my ratings (740 blitz, 1050 rapid) still land me at just the 50th and 70th percentiles of players worldwide. But it is a testament to the fact that the game is wildly addicting and fun, especially once you push into the stage where you’re moving beyond the basic rules and into the strategy. Chess has a nearly infinite ceiling. There’s always more you can improve, openings you can learn, tactics you can train.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned about learning chess:
Do: Play online. Playing over the board is fun and charming, but playing online is an exponentially better way to learn how to play chess. On sites like Chess.com and Lichess, you can start playing and quickly get a rating which will place you against opponents at the same skill level. You can play hours-long games or correspondence chess where you move once a day, or you can play rapid, blitz or bullet games which give each player anywhere from an hour to a matter of seconds to make their moves. And you can analyze your games using a powerful chess engine, or by comparing your moves to grandmasters who played the same position.
Do: Learn the rules. The number of times I have seen someone take my pawn in an unexpected situation, said out loud “what the hell?” and then remembered that en passant exists would shock you. And there are other rules beyond the game’s basic setup that might catch you off guard. Here’s a fun one: if you manage to march a pawn all the way down to your opponent’s back rank, you’re probably used to replacing it with a queen. But it doesn’t HAVE to be a queen. You’re allowed to “promote” that pawn into any other piece. And in (exceedingly rare) situations, it’s actually a strategically better choice to promote to a knight or a rook, a tactic called “underpromotion.”
Do: Take advantage of the vast landscape of incredible chess content on YouTube. Online chess has become wildly popular in the gaming and e-sport sectors, and along with big money tournaments and a bevy of streamers, there are a ton of content creators making entertaining and educational chess stuff. I love John Barthomolew’s Chess Fundamental series, which helped me engrain some key principles as a total beginner. His many other videos are fun too, but can sometimes be a little advanced. Gotham Chess (Levy Rozman) is my favorite for pure entertainment. And agadmator breaks down high level games in a way which makes them easier to digest for us mere mortals.
Don’t: Buy a 580 page book of openings to study which then sits on your shelf and gets water damaged without ever being opened. Openings are a set of pre-ordained moves that create a pattern which you and your opponent can follow as long as you’ve memorized, breaking off into different variations. They are extremely boring to learn. They are also absolutely essential to becoming a high level chess player. I guess my point here is that if you find a way to learn openings which isn’t mind numbing, comment below.
Don’t: Wait until you’re 27 to start playing chess. I doubt any children are reading this, but if you are, go pick up a board or get online. Like learning a language, the enhanced brain plasticity of younger players helps them pick up chess much more quickly. I loved this piece by the journalist Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote about his experience learning chess at 40 alongside his daughter, citing research by a number of psychologists on the subject. “If you’re talking about two novices, your daughter would probably pick things up about twice as fast as you could,” one expert named Neil Charness told him.
Don’t: Play straight up against much better players. This will only serve to demoralize you, as many of my swift and repeated defeats have done. Instead, play with odds. That’s the chess version of a handicap. You can play with piece odds (ie, the better player will take a knight, rook or queen off the table on their side to make for a more even match) or time odds (the better player has less time in which to make their moves). I’ve found a nice equilibrium with my frequent sparring partner who is a much stronger player than I where I get 10 minutes total, and he gets 1 or 2.
I’m always down for a game. Comment or message me your username and let’s play.