Your rating's not going up. What now?

“I know so much more about chess than I used to, but my rating’s not going up!”

This is one of the most common things I hear from chess players. It can be incredibly frustrating: you put in a ton of hours working on your chess, and it feels like it’s working. You learn a bunch of new ideas and feel like you understand them. But no matter how much you learn, your rating refuses to budge.

Today I’ll go over two common causes of this phenomenon and how you can address them to finally get that rating to go up.

Cause #1: You’re stuck on an earlier level

You can think of chess improvement as divided into three levels.

Level one is taking pieces. If your opponent gives you the chance to take a piece for free, do you always spot it? And on the flip side, do you ever allow your opponent to take your pieces for free?

Level two is tactics. Forks, pins, discovered attacks, etc. You can think of tactics as “tricky taking pieces.”

Level three is strategic play. Basically, everything else.

As you go up the pyramid, the ideas get more complex, but less impactful in terms of winning the game. If you blunder a piece – or fail to take your opponent’s free piece – even once per game, it will completely blow all your strategic knowledge out of the water. Likewise with tactics: if you maneuver brilliantly for ten moves, then miss a tactic, your position will probably still be completely losing.

In other words, no amount of mastery higher up on the pyramid can come anywhere close to compensating for a deficit lower down. So if you’re learning a lot, but not seeing it reflected in your results, there’s a good chance you’re missing skills lower on the pyramid.

How to know if this is you

Review your games (you’re doing this already, right?!). Try to identify the biggest deciding factor in each game. It can be helpful to put this in a spreadsheet so you can see big picture trends more clearly. If many of your games are decided by hanging pieces or tactics, that’s what you need to work on.

How to address it

For hanging pieces, Everyone’s First Chess Workbook by Peter Giannatos has some great exercise. I also love this new vision trainer on ChessMadra.

For tactics, I recommend everyone go through a good tactics primer at least once. My go-to recommendation is Chess Tactics for Champions by Susan Polgar. Once you have that grounding in all the key tactical patterns, you can continue to practice your skills with the puzzle trainers on Chess.com, Lichess, or other sites.

Cause #2: Not playing

It is tempting to try to study until you’ve mastered all the main areas of chess and only then take your skills into battle. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work.

You will likely never reach a point where you feel completely confident in your chess ability. As soon as you learn one thing, you’ll become aware of something else you don’t know. So if you’re waiting for a feeling of total confidence, you’ll be waiting for a long time. Even more importantly, playing is the best form of practice. It’s where you combine everything you’ve learned under the pressure of competition.

There’s a balance to be struck between theory and practice. Some people are all practice, no theory: they jam endless blitz games without reviewing or studying. But if you identify with the basic premise of this post, it’s more likely you’re too far to the theory side of things. Theory is valuable – you should take advantage of the accumulation of chess knowledge and the great resources for learning it – but an ideal balance is probably closer to 80% practice, 20% theory than the other way around.

To use an idea effectively in the game, you don’t just have to know it, you need to have it down so well that you can apply it fluidly while also juggling other ideas. This means that, for every new idea you learn, you are going to need a lot of practice to get to the point where you can use it effectively to help you win chess games.

How to know if this is you

Do you play regularly? Ideally OTB tournament games, but when that is not possible, reasonably slow online games where you are fully focused. If not, it is unlikely that any amount of study will allow you to improve very much.

How to address it

Play games! Register for a tournament. Or if you’d like to set up slow online training games where you can review the game afterwards with your opponent, check out The Chess Gym. We have weekly sparring games.

Conclusion

Not seeing your rating go up after learning a lot of new ideas is one of the most frustrating parts of chess, but it doesn’t mean that chess improvement is impossible or mysterious. Sometimes a relatively simple adjustment to your practice routine can unlock that improvement. If this is the boat you find yourself in, give the strategies in this post a shot.