Top 5 Tips Every Chess Player Should Know

Do you want to get better at chess?

Well, who doesn’t? Becoming a strong chess player is every amateur’s dream.

Chess is a great game to increase your cerebral capacity and appearing smart in front of your friends. As a beginner, chess may seem hard with its hundreds of moves and complex variations but once you get the hang of it, you will find yourself getting addicted to it. If you’ve already committed yourself to self-improvement, check out these tips below:

• Practice- lots of it!

No one can be a grandmaster overnight. According to Malcom Gladwell, you need to spend 10,000 hours practicing the skill, you want to master. Nothing applies better to chess than this infamous strategy, in order to get good at chess you not only need to have knowledge about different moves but you should also know how and when to apply those techniques. If you don’t have a partner to compete with, try playing against yourself and give it your best shot so you can learn from your shortcomings. If you find it to be bizarre, you can always try an online chess engine. My favorite one so far is Chessential, it allows the calculation of the best chess moves which can give a hard time to even the finest players.

• Memorize a Chess Master’s game

When playing chess, visualization skills play a key role in winning a chess match. Pick any world champion or a top-ranked player and memorize their chess game. It will not only help you re-apply those strategies in a chess match with your competitor but, it will also help you understand their thinking arrangements which enabled them to come up with the genius tricks. Learn from the best to use and manipulate the rules to your advantage and stun your opponents with your superior tricks.

• Play puzzles

Chess is all about the strategies and tactics. Excelling at chess requires you to have great pattern recognition skills. This is why practice is given so much importance. The more you play, you can recognize recurring scenarios in a better way. The ability to differentiate good moves from bad ones requires years of experience and a very keen sense of pattern recognition. To increase your mental learning capacity, buy yourself a puzzle boo. Observing hundreds of tactical positions will enable you to recognize the same patterns and apply them in real life.

• Step out of your comfort zone

Opening the match will help you master the next few limited moves but will never earn you a title or even an ‘Expert’.  If you want to get better at chess, you need to get around your weaknesses and try the moves which throw you off. You cannot only say that I am only an attacking or defensive player. High-level chess players can play any position and are good at everything. So, remember to step out of your comfort zone and learn as much as you can from your defeats.

• Take a break

Dedication and hard work play a vital role in the mastery of a skill. Players should always have a thirst for better strategies and tricks to win a game but if you take chess seriously to a point where chess is the only thing that consumes most of your day, you're likely to get ‘Chessed over’. Overloading your brain with too many tricks is actually counter-productive on the overall level of your efficiency. There is only so much that you can learn for a limited period of time. So, always remember to take the break.