My Annual Chess Review

What I did in 2022 and what I'm planning for 2023

2022 has been a big year. We had our first son, got settled into our new house in Nebraska, and I published my first book. In the midst of all that, I haven’t had a lot of mental bandwidth to focus on improving my own chess game. Now that the book is done and our home situation is starting to stabilize, I’m feeling the itch to work on my own chess again.

Last year I wrote a post called The Chess Improvement Checklist where I suggested five areas to check in on to see if you’re giving yourself the best chance to improve at chess. These are the five areas:

1. Do you work on chess every day?

2. Do you solve challenging problems?

3. Do you play games with real stakes?

4. Do you review your games?

5. Do you have a community?

This year I figured I could take a taste of my own medicine and see how I’m doing in the five areas.

Do you work on chess every day?

Sort of. I definitely look at chess most days, but I’m not always working on chess. I play a little blitz most days, I prepare and give coaching sessions when I have them, I do the analysis necessary for chess projects like my book and upcoming Chessable course, tweet about what I’m working on, and of course write this newsletter. But my overall focus has been more on creating chess content than on working on my own game in a structured way.

Do you solve challenging problems?

Mostly no. It’s been a long time since I had a regular daily habit of solving difficult positions. The fancy Camaratta chess table I bought myself has functioned almost exclusively as a Zoom background. 

I do still get some practice in analysis, if not exactly solving, when I review student games or prepare openings. My quick decision-making is pretty good from all the blitz I play, but when I face a complicated position and have to rev up my calculation, I can definitely feel that it’s rusty.

On a recent episode of the Perpetual Chess Podcast, Srinath Narayanan, who trains some of the biggest young Indian stars like Nihal Sarin, said that Nihal plays a huge amount of online blitz and does very little solving. So I don’t think it’s obvious that shifting all my time from online blitz towards solving would make me a better chess player. I would still like to do a little more calculation training, just because I can feel that it could be a lot better.

Do you play games with real stakes?

No. This is the biggest miss for me. My last rated OTB tournament was in February 2022. When you haven’t played serious games in awhile it’s easy to forget how different it feels. When I played for Nebraska in an event called the States Cup I had a headache for a solid day afterwards from the tension even though it was just a few online rapid games with no prizes.

In 2023 I’d like to get back to playing some OTB chess. I still won’t have time for many tournaments, but I’d like to play a few.

Do you review your games?

Yes. I’ve got my blitz routine pretty well worked out now, and I do believe blitz is a good way to improve your chess if you do it with focus. I also reviewed all my games from the States Cup and learned a lot from those. I review games when I play them, I just haven’t been playing very many serious games.

Do you have a community?

Yes, but it’s missing some key components. James Altucher has something he calls Plus, Minus, Equal:

PLUS: a real or virtual mentor who can teach you.

EQUALS: people who can challenge you

MINUS: people you can teach, because teaching solidifies learning.

I have a lot of opportunities for the Minus column through coaching and writing, but I don’t have as much in Plus and Equals. While I was working on my book I learned a lot from my co-author GM Eugene Perelshteyn, but that book is done now.

One of the best things I did for my chess was to buy a package of training games with GM Liem Quang Le. I can more or less tread water at my current level, but to have any chance in rapid games against a world top 50 player, I had to fundamentally change parts of my game. For example, I had to force myself to play much more quickly and be more practical in the opening.

Incidentally, I think this is why many players get stuck on a certain level. For most people, if you don’t have to improve to survive, you won’t. So if you end up in a situation where you can get more or less the results you want with the game you already have, you’ll stop improving. The way to deal with this is to seek out opponents who will force you to adapt. In 2023 I want to play more rapid training games against IMs and GMs.

I’m also considering getting a coach, something I haven’t done in awhile. Chess coaching is tricky. If you think of a coach as someone with more experience and knowledge whose job is to guide and accelerate your chess development, and you’re serious about improving, it seems kind of crazy not to have a coach.

The tricky part is finding the right coach for you, because they’re all different. Especially when you’re just starting out, a good coach can help you avoid pitfalls you wouldn’t have anticipated and accelerate your progress tremendously, but a bad coach could set you on the wrong path and really set you back. For the same reasons that the right coach could be so helpful – you lack the perspective to understand what you should be working on – it’s very hard for you to evaluate whether a coach is good or bad. Having said that, you can get a pretty good sense from talking to other students and maybe doing a trial lesson. For most players, if money isn’t a blocker, I do think having a coach would be helpful.

In my case things are a little simpler. I already have a lot of experience and many of my own ideas about improving at chess, so I’m not really looking for someone to design my training program from the ground up. What I have found to be very helpful is simply asking a stronger player, “How would you think about this position?” I could definitely benefit from analyzing with a stronger player, reviewing my games, and getting some help with opening preparation. For me the bigger issue is just how much of my limited chess time I want to devote to working with a coach.

Goals

Wrapping it all up, I set a few goals for my chess in 2023. I like to follow the advice of GM Jacob Aagaard: “Be gentle but draw a bright line.” That is, set the most modest goal that could allow you to accomplish your goals, but stick to it.

Outcome:

• 2800 blitz on Lichess and Chess.com

• Play at least one OTB tournament

Process:

• Calculation training 1x/week

• Rapid training games 2x/month

• Focused blitz 3x/week