I was surprised to learn that one of the big criticisms of amateur chess players is that they study openings too much because this is one area where I hardly spent any time.

Only when I started reading books I realized how much preparation grandmasters do, and the benefits of strong opening knowledge. Essentially, you shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel in every single game you play, and you should have a body of knowledge that you can depend on for your openings.

In this post I am going to detail out my way of opening preparation for an amateur adult player that has served me well.

Picking an opening

In my opinion you have to know three openings to play all your games. One opening with white, one with black to play against e4, and one to play against d4. If your opponent plays anything else you should be able to rely on one of these openings to play against that.

I have picked up openings of my coach Mr_Penings because our styles are similar, and I have the benefit of looking up his games to see how he handled certain situations. The three openings I play are as follows:

1. English – 1.c4 with white
2. Sicilian Kan – 1.e5 c5 with black against e4
3. King’s Indian Defense – 1. d4 Nf6 with black against d4

You can pick up the same openings as your coach or based on your favorite player, and experiment and see if you have a feel for it. If you have a feel for it – you will just know it instinctively from your first game with that opening.

Now, that you have picked up an opening I will detail out how I build a repertoire in that opening.

Opening study – build a repertoire

Lichess has a phenomenal way to study openings, and one that I am so impressed with, and use so often that I can’t do without it now.

For this purpose I will use a game that I played, and an opening study that I have to illustrate what I mean.

For this post, I will share a chapter from a study that I have on lichess based on when white plays the Bowdler attack against the Sicilian. The Bowdler attack happens as follows:

1. e4 c6
2. Bc4 – and you have the Bowdler attack.

The lichess opening explorer shows you the following stats for every opening.

On the bottom right you see the most common responses that a player has played, and the win – loss percentage. This helps you see what moves you are likely to see in a game, and what the responses scored like. You can also scroll further down, and see some top games in that line. This is very helpful as you can see how top players developed their game plans in that opening, and learn from that yourself.

This is by far the most useful method to study openings that I have encountered. Earlier, I used to look at grandmaster games, but that was not all that helpful because lower rated players hardly do the same things as a grandmaster might do.

Now, let me share my study and tell you how I build on my opening knowledge using this tool. You can scroll through the embedded study below and see how I comment the various positions, and make notes for myself so I remember them in future games.

Specifically, go through these sequence of moves:

1. e4 c5
2. Bc4 e6
3. Nc3 Nc6
4. Nf3 Nf6
5. e5? Ng4

I point out this sequence because I refrained from playing Nf6 on move 4 in an actual game because I was worried about e5 but in later analysis I saw that e5 is actually a mistake! This is because Ng4 is such a strong response here that white ends up losing the e pawn!

Another very interesting aspect of this is that the opening explorer shows you how many times a move has been played. In this case it shows that e5 has been played 614 times. This is about 10% of all games that have reached this position, and you have your opening preparation right then you should have a winning position at least 10% of the times you play this position on move 5 itself!

Now, in itself this may seem trivial but think of building this type of preparation for every opening sequence you play, and very soon you will notice that you are encountering the same positions over and over again, and are well prepared for them, and are outplaying your opponent from the start.  This post has details on how you can create as study on lichess.

Conclusion

As an adult chess player – you are likely to have limited time to study openings, but they are very important to improve your results. The method that I evolved over time doesn’t require a lot of time to study, and it is simple and free. You play a game, make a few notes in your study, brush up the other moves that may have occurred in that variation and over time build a vast pool of knowledge!

1. How to improve as an adult chess player – Par 1: Introduction
2. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 2: Swindles
3. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 3: Openings 
4. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 4: Middlegames

 

 

This may seem like a strange place to focus at the beginning of this series, but I feel that my win percentage improved noticeably when I truly internalised how important it is to fight for every game, and how common swindles really are.

A swindle in chess is defined as a game where you were losing, but ultimately won by complicating the situation, and usually playing some second best moves. I tend to think of it in a broader manner in terms of just fighting for a position, and keep fighting even when you are worse off. I used to resign too soon, and for anyone who does that you are doing yourself no favors.

Why are swindles important for your results?

I think swindles are important for two reasons – a mathematical one, and a psychological one.

The mathematical reason first.

I think that any game of chess that results in a win or loss can be classified as follows:

1. You were ahead throughout the game, and you won.
2. You were behind throughout the game and you lost.
3. You were ahead at some point but you lost. (You couldn’t win a won game.)
4. You were behind in the beginning, but you won. (Swindled the game).

Our minds think of numbers 1 and 2 as a natural result, and 3 and 4 cause a lot more grief or joy than 1 and 2, so to me they are a little bit more unnatural than the first two.

You will never be able to win all of your won games. This is one of the hardest things to do in chess, and you’ll always end up blundering pieces or walking into checkmates in completely winning positions. When two players of equal caliber play it is inevitable that these things happen.

This was somewhat unclear to me when I started to improve because I used to see a lot of Youtube channels, and watch people like John Bartholomew or the Ginger GM destroying their opponents online. It seemed to me that that this the correct way to win in chess, and also the pure way to win in chess.

My notion was only broken when I started reading books and saw games from world champions and saw that even their games swung and they swindled at times! Even at the highest level – swindles happen, so it is important to understand their importance in order to increase your win ratio.

If you don’t fight for every game, and play fighting chess then you will only win games that you were ahead in right from the start. You’ll lose some winning games, and your ratio is going to be much lower than if you fought for your lost games also.

Mathematically, you can see that now you are going to win all games in the first category, most games in the second category, and some games in the third category. Whereas if you don’t fight at all – you will lose all games in the third category, and your win ratio will be much worse.

Now, the psychological reason. Playing lost positions helps you improve your game. When you swindle – you learn from your opponent’s mistakes. You learn where they went wrong, and you can then use that to improve your own game. Because these sort of games make a deeper impression than other games — you tend to internalise these lessons faster than other games, and are more likely to remember them in the future.

This game below is probably my most embarrassing swindle. In fact, I apologized to my opponent after winning the game because I had no chances, and she just made one error that cost her the game while being ahead the entire game. I have the black pieces, and have made a lot of questionable choices, and you can see that white is a good player, but just couldn’t convert it.

This was a very instructive game for me and my personal takeaway from this game was that white never used her king side pawns in the attack and tried to pry open the position. From a planning perspective this seems the most logical thing to do. Black wasn’t allowing any breaks and the material was not enough, so bring in your pawns. This was what I was most afraid of during the game, and she never did that.

There is a lot to learn from your opponent’s technique when you lose, and see how they converted a won position.

As an example – this is a very impressive win by my opponent who was several hundred rating points below me but played with very impressive calm, and technique and was in control of the game from the very beginning.

As you can see black never had any chances, and she’s done a fantastic job of clamping me down, and grinding me out, and winning the game in a very convincing manner. My biggest takeaway from this game was to make mini plans and slowly improve my position like she did. I was very impressed by how she planted the knight on d6, and then replaced that with the bishop, and just never let up. This is an area of the game where I need to improve a lot myself, so it was specially impressive to be on the receiving end. The computer evaluation shows white to be ahead 2.5 on move 15 itself, but the game lasted another 30 moves or so. It was tough playing this game because there were no chances, but I kept fighting, and while the result was not favorable – the instruction was vastly helpful for my own game.

I put this post in the beginning of the series because I believe this is a very important thing to do in order to improve your win ratio. If you don’t get in the habit of fighting lost positions, you won’t make much progress in your improvement.

1. How to improve as an adult chess player – Par 1: Introduction
2. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 2: Swindles
3. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 3: Openings 
4. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 4: Middlegames

 

 

I have consistently blogged about improving as a chess player for the last three years, and now that I have accomplished my modest goals I thought I will write a series on my methods that I am sure will be of use to other adults as well.

A little bit about my current playing level so you can see if it makes sense for you to read further because I’d imagine you don’t want to read a series written by someone lower rated than yourself.

1. Lichess Peak Classical Rating: 2045
2. USCF Peak Rating: 1605
3. FIDE Peak Rating:  1254

A little bit about my chess life

My earliest memories of chess are playing against my uncle and crying when I lost to him. He started losing on purpose every once in a while, and when I figured out that he was losing on purpose I used to cry. So, it was a really bad deal for my uncle – I used to cry when I lost against him, and I used to cry when I won!

Image credit: Riccardo Cuppini

My grandfather played chess, and all his five sons play chess, so chess came very naturally to me. I don’t quite remember when I started playing chess, but I feel like I have always played it. I played for my college team for my first year. In the tournament at Delhi University – I remember playing six games – winning one, drawing one, and losing all others. This along with the fact that I joined my college’s debating team in the second year, and was far more successful there than in my chess meant that I gave up playing chess, and focused on the debating society. I think I stopped playing chess altogether at around the age of 20.

I picked it up again when I was 33 or so and exclusively played correspondence chess online. I enjoyed the stress free nature of correspondence chess, and I was quite happy doing that. At that time I happened to talk to a colleague about chess, and he told me he was around 2000 rated when he played as a kid, and I asked him about what work he put in and that he must know a lot of theory. He told me that he didn’t and that you don’t need theory to go to that level.

That was really when I started playing 15 minute games with the intention of improving my chess, and the more I played the more I was drawn into the game. I steadily ranked between 1550 – 1650 in the 15 minute pool on chess.com and in 2015 I decided to make an effort to improve my game as evidenced by my online rating. I found some success but was stuck at the same range for two years or so.

I realised that chess is a very difficult discipline and not only do you need to put in the hours – you need to know where to put them in, and have a structure to your learning method. I truly started improving when I got a coach and the one lesson per week with him along with the effort I put in helped me progress steadily.

I also felt that there was no guide or book available to adult players to guide them through this improvement process, so I decided to write one myself based on my experience and the methods that I used which helped me improve.

I think this method can be used by just about everyone who is willing to put in the work, and coming from an amateur it should be more relatable than the books written by professionals who were very good from a very early stage in their life.

I had two goals starting my chess improvement journey – the improvement itself, but also not forgoing the joy I got from the game. If I had to spend hours training on tactics then that would have worn me out and turned me away from chess. Similarly, playing for hours without seeing any improvement would also mean that I would have been turned away from chess. I wanted to balance work and play, and I believe I have been very successful in this. In fact, the more I learned about chess, the more I appreciated it as an art form, and from playing in tournaments to reading chess books – my life has been vastly enriched because of my hobby.

In this series I will describe my methods, and techniques to you with the hope that you will be able to emulate them and improve your own game, and develop a deeper passion for the game. This series will consist of the following posts: 

1. Introduction
2. Swindles
3. Openings
4. Middlegames
5. End Games
6. Tactics

1. How to improve as an adult chess player – Par 1: Introduction
2. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 2: Swindles
3. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 3: Openings 
4. How to improve as an adult chess player – Part 4: Middlegames