Good article. A lot of the comments here give bad advice though, which isn’t surprising because they show a lot of common misperceptions about chess. Jeremy Silman has written a couple of books about what is actually important. Quickly, what worked for me when I started playing on chess.com at age 40 after not playing for over twenty years. My rating at age 17 was 1450. Restarted at 1200, and barely progressed at first. If your rating is different you may need different things. Again, Silman is good on this. What worked:
1) eat. I would start playing in the morning, do okay, then lose a bunch. Finally, realized my blood sugar level was a major contributor to my elo
2) study tactics. Chess Tempo is great. Lots of good tactics books. Especially study spotting threats
3) Study basics of positions: best places to post rooks, bishops, control of center. But tactics more important.
4) don’t spend much time on openings. Learn the basics of a few common ones. Games will quickly diverge from openings. Because GM games so often depend on openings, amateurs (like me) tend to overpivot on this.
5) After playing, load your game into a chess engine and analyze what went wrong (if you played perfect, analyze what your opponent did wrong). Until about 2000, whomever makes the fewest mistakes usually wins.
Interesting you put "eat" here as your first item.
I don't care much about my rating (I play chess to escape stress; not create more of it), but over the last couple years since I started playing, my lichess rating (fluctuating between 1200-1400) appears to have a very strong correlation with my mental health.
Of course it's obvious if you think about it, but it's very odd to have this accurate of an indicator with historical data.
Of course this only really works if you don't actively study to try and get better :)
As you say, you can’t usually “measure” your mental performance. After having this experience, it also explained why I was a more productive programmer in the afternoon (after lunch) and I started eating a light breakfast. My mom wasn’t so dumb after all!
I have learned the same, my mental health strongly correlates with my chess performance. I'm not really good, think 1400 the most, but sometimes I just cruise to my high score and then sometimes I cannot win a game to save me.
I can see big life events in my rating history. (Went on vacation, new relationship, breakup, big project at work, etc). So I actually use it as a barometer. If my rating starts to drop for days on end I know I need to reflect on what's going on in my life.
The question is, is it worth it getting into chess as an adult? What is the appeal? And what additional value does it bring compared to other "productive"/mentally stimulating hobbies?
One person's take.
I use chess to relax after hours of taxing mental work, think programming, meetings or even any stress. While I learned as a child, I didn't really play, as there wasn't anyone to do so, now with chess.com, or any other online service it's super accessible.
For me, chess requires a level of focus and time management unlike anything else (Go is the same, but I learned chess). There are no motor skills required, unlike most video games or a musical instrument. As an adult learning the first time, it is frustrating because it is so much harder than for a kid. But then so is music and foreign language.
From another angle, there is a huge amount of research on chess as a model of cognition. Because chess rating is quite objective, you can measure things like speed of learning, increase in skill with age, followed by decline of skill with age, the effects of alcohol and other drugs, diet, sleep. And, of course, it is a completely classic and ongoing topic of ai research and decision theory. If you are interested in those topics, having some insight into the game is also useful.
Sounds like you don’t like chess very much. Sounds like you think everybody should have the same brain as you and are frustrated why this isn’t the case.
How do you load your games into a chess engine? Where do you play that allows you to export games? And then are you loading into another site or using a local application on your laptop as the "chess engine?"
> Where do you play that allows you to export games?
> And then are you loading into another site or using a local application on your laptop as the "chess engine?"
I assume that you are a beginner and the following is quite simplified but I believe will assist you in getting started.
Most sites allow you to save your games as PGN (Portable Game Notation). On lichess, for example, you can go into your profile page an click on the download button to Export Games. This will save your games in PGN format. You need to download install a chess engine onto your computer / device. On a laptop or desktop it is relatively simplest to first install chess software with a Graphical User Interface - google that term - I will mention just one - no affiliation - just that it's relatively simple. Arena is a free graphical user interface for chess that helps you analyze and play games, plus test chess engines. After you run Arena chess you can import the games you exported in PGN format.
There are very strong open source / free chess engines (eg Stockfish) and other chess software with or without commercial chess engines. Just remember these three things:
- The format that chess games are saved in is PGN with a .pgn extension
- There is chess software that replays these PGN with no chess engine and that's fine to review a game digitally
- There are umpteen chess-engines that will analyze your games / moves - some free, some commercial
They all have ways of saving a PGN file. I have Fritz and now I usually use playchess.com which automatically stores your games and has an easy way to launch analysis.
1) eat. I would start playing in the morning, do okay, then lose a bunch. Finally, realized my blood sugar level was a major contributor to my elo 2) study tactics. Chess Tempo is great. Lots of good tactics books. Especially study spotting threats 3) Study basics of positions: best places to post rooks, bishops, control of center. But tactics more important. 4) don’t spend much time on openings. Learn the basics of a few common ones. Games will quickly diverge from openings. Because GM games so often depend on openings, amateurs (like me) tend to overpivot on this. 5) After playing, load your game into a chess engine and analyze what went wrong (if you played perfect, analyze what your opponent did wrong). Until about 2000, whomever makes the fewest mistakes usually wins.