The 4 Lichess Studies I Make For Every Student

Quick update on my Semi-Slav course: you may have noticed it didn’t come out on April 21 as planned. It wasn’t Chessable’s fault, I got sick and wasn’t able to finish the recordings on time. I’m back to work and the new release date is May 19!

Lichess Studies are one of the best tools for chess improvement. If you’re not familiar, the best way I can describe it is an interactive chess notebook that saves your work. You can add moves, comments, arrows, and many other features. Best of all, they’re completely free. But many players don’t know how to get the most out of this tool, so today I’m sharing my Lichess study setup.

These are the same studies I use for my own chess study, and set up for all my coaching clients to get them on the right track for continuous improvement.

Games

It’s a great idea to save all your games in one place. This helps create a cohesive narrative for your chess journey, since you can look back at old games and remember key lessons. It can also be fun to relive nice wins, or look at old mistakes and realize you’d never dream of making the same move now.

This study is straightforward to maintain: you just put any new games into it, along with your analysis. I like to add one key takeaway at the end of each game. I wouldn’t include casual blitz or bullet games, but certainly any rapid practice games should go here. If you play a significant amount of OTB chess, I’d create a separate study for your OTB games.

This is one study where, if you play enough, you’ll eventually run into the 64 chapter limit, but at that point it’s easy to just create a new study.

Flashcards

The idea of this study is to save important or instructive positions from your own games and to reinforce key patterns. When reviewing your games, save key positions and add them to the Flashcards study.

The most obvious starting point to look for flashcards is your biggest mistakes, but they can be any position you feel holds an important lesson. I like to follow Artur Yusupov’s advice about game review: pay special attention to the instances where you did not consider the best move (as opposed to considered, but rejected). This is a big hint that the move represents a blind spot you need to fill in.

Here’s an example of a position that recently went into a student’s Flashcards study.

In the game, White played e6, but after Nf6, both of Black’s minor pieces gained a measure of freedom. Better would have been d6, increasing the scope of White’s bishop on f3 and rook on d1, while keeping Black’s pieces restricted with the f4-e5 pawn chain. The important lesson here is to use pawn play to activate your own pieces while restricting the opponent’s pieces.

You should also include arrows and annotations to explain key ideas you want to remember. Note that you can include sequences of multiple moves.

For this study, you’ll want to adjust the settings as follows:

Study settings

• Visibility: Unlisted

Chapter settings

• Orientation: Your color

• Analysis Mode: Interactive lesson

To review chapters, you can use Preview mode, but what I usually prefer to do is to open the study in an incognito browser window (this is why this study is set to Unlisted and not Invite Only). That will automatically quiz you on all the chapters without showing you the solutions.

You can review your Flashcards whenever you want, but my favorite time is as a warmup immediately before playing. This way you make sure those key patterns are fresh in your mind.

White Repertoire

I’m a huge fan of maintaining opening files as a way to get organized with your opening preparation and facilitate continuous improvement. For amateur players, the easiest way to organize your files is to have one study for your White repertoire and one for your Black repertoire.

Within those studies, you can organize your repertoire using the chapters. For example, for an e4 repertoire, I’d start with chapters for e5, the Sicilian, the French, the Caro Kann, and one for everything else. Start with as few chapters as possible – if your repertoire grows to the point where the chapters become crowded, it’s very easy to split them into multiple chapters.

This study should be set to Visibility: Invite only. I don’t really know how your opponents would find it and look at your repertoire, but there’s no reason to take the risk.

Black Repertoire

This is the same as the White Repertoire, but for the Black pieces. A good starting point is chapters for e4, d4, and everything else.

The Routine

The point of this setup is to facilitate an efficient routine for playing and learning. With the studies in place, the routine then looks like this:

1. Warmup: Practice your Flashcards.

2. Play a game. You can use whatever time control you like, although I find 15+10 works well for many players.

3. Add the game to your Games study and review it. For fast online games, I use the OBIT method.

4. Save key positions to your Flashcards study.

5. Update your opening file to the first move you would have played differently.

6. Repeat as many times as you want.

This is the same setup and process I use to work on my own game (although I usually play blitz). Honestly, when I follow this process, it feels almost unfair how quickly I’m improving. Give it a shot and see what you think.