How I would study chess if I could start over

0:00 Hi everyone, Stephan here. Today I'm going to talk about something I've been meaning to record the video about for a long time and that people have been asking me for for years. So, first a bit of background. I've been playing chess for 9 years. I played my first game in 2016 and then shortly after that I began studying chess, if you could call it that. I got serious about improvement maybe half a year later. Although I was in no position to devote a lot of time to chess in 2018 or 2019 actually I started devoting a lot more time to chess and I had some success. My rating went up to 1900 and then a few years

0:47 later I crossed 2,00 but my study was it wasn't well structured. I didn't know what I was doing and I was focusing on the wrong things and I didn't get the desired results. So today I'm going to talk about how to study chess and what I would do if I were starting all over again and actually what I'm doing now. What I think is way more efficient than what I've been doing for almost 9 years now. I I've had a lot of experience coaching for the last seven years as well. So, I had uh an insight into how average adult improvers learn chess. As a small disclaimer, this video really does not apply to kids. If you're

1:35 10 or 11 or 12, just, you know, play tournaments and and you're going to get better. But for us who need structured training and who have to invest a lot of time to improve, I think this may be helpful. Now, as an underlying theme of this video, I'm going to recommend one way to learn chess that covers all five sections of the game you can see on the screen. But to make things easier, I'm going to explain all five of these starting with openings and then ending with strategy. As you can see, they are divided by whether they are or if they're studying is finite or infinite. And I think

2:21 that's very important both from a psychological perspective and in regard to time. The next thing I want to say is everything I'm going to recommend can be done for zero money. People often ask me how much do you spend on chess? How much should I spend on chess? Should I invest in this or that? You you shouldn't. If you want to study chess, you can do it for free. You can't. There's absolutely no reason to invest any money. So, so let's start. Firstly, there are two finite segments of the game that you simply need to get out of the way. People often ask me, well, why do you focus so much on openings? Why do

3:07 you study openings all the time? I don't. And the proofs in my games, I often get out of book very early. The fact that I've recorded many videos on YouTube doesn't make me an expert on those openings. Not by a long run. So, I don't focus on openings. What I do is during tournaments I prepare for games and I study specific variations and I can safely say that the majority of my knowledge comes from game preparation. So openings are something you need to get out of the way. Uh I think that whether you play uh the Italian or the Spanish or the whatever d4 or c4 or knight f3 or the nimsilars it doesn't matter. You need to choose repertoire. you need to

3:52 uh decide what you're going to play. You need to stick to that and in time you're going to gain enough experience. Of course, what I'm talking about here is tournament chess. So, you need to get your eper up to a level where you don't blunder in the opening. Now, of course, that depends on your level of play. If you're 800, then whether you know five or 20 moves of theory, you're likely going to lose to an experienced player. So depending on your current strength, uh just choose a repertoire and get it up to a point where you can get out of the opening without losing. I think that's a great starting point. And what I like to tell my students is you need to be ready for everything your opponent could play. What I do is I I create a less study uh and I have my repertoire

4:41 there. You can you can use Noctti for that. You can use Chessbook. You can use whatever app you want. But leases will suffice in majority of the cases. Just have everything there. Everything that can happen needs to be in one study. And that way as you play, as you get unexpected scenarios, as your opponent deviates from the theory you've you've prepared, you're going to build on that knowledge. Now, of course, you can use additional resources that that are going to help speed things up, such as Noctti. When it comes to openings, as I said, they they are finite, but it helps to have additional resources to make this finite study easier. So, I like to use I

5:27 like to use Noctti to create repertoars and to play them out against Noctti. So, as you can see here, I have I don't even know how many, probably 30 different repertoire. So, you import what you plan to play. Let's say my anti-Kings gambit repertoire. And you play it out against Nocti. Select the difficulty, select which side you'd like to play, and that way you gain practical experience instead of just learning theoretical lines. Once again, you don't have to do this, but it helps a lot. If you want to visit visit Nocti, follow the link in the description and use the code hanging pawns to get a 64% discount. Okay, so once you're done with your repertoire, I would recommend that you that during tournaments you revisited.

6:14 If you see that you have black against a guy who constantly plays the English, then of course you go over some lines, you go over his your opponent's games and you prepare something specific that's going to be more useful than just you know learning repertoire by heart. That that's in my opinion a waste of time. Now the second portion or the second segment segment of chess is endame. I've divided them into theoretical and complex end games or endame strategy whatever you want to call it. Same as openings theoretical end games are finite. So get any book you it doesn't even have to be a book. You can literally use Wikipedia or free YouTube videos and go over the basics. You need to know the

7:00 opposition triangulation the rule of the square. You need to know the Lucina the filidor. You need to know how to mate with bishop and knight. You need to know some 30 or 40 basic end games, mostly rook end games and and you're good. You learn those, you're good. You can do that in a week. So, openings and theoretical end games when you're devoting time to chess, you can you can just you can do them and be done. Imagine you're in school or in or in the university and one thing you have to do is write a paper on something that's finite. You can do that and then you have four exams to study for. That's infinite. You can you can study for for years and then take the exam. So what I

7:46 like to do is get the paper out of the way. Then I'm done with that. It's done. Now I can devote my time to study. So that's theoretical end games. Then the next three portions endame strategy or complex end games calculations calculation and strategy those are infinite and you can never get good enough at them. You can never invest enough time into studying them and getting better at them is a continuous process that's never going to end for as long as you play chess. Now, endgame strategy and calculation and strategy can be done using one very simple technique.

8:32 I'm going to talk about what I've been doing wrong first. So, when I first started out, I got Litian's u books on calculation. There are three books recommended by a friend of mine and I would do tactics on and off from that book. I would, you know, watch YouTube videos. I got Sheresvki's endgame strategy. I went through a bit of that. Uh I didn't really invest proper concentrated effort into any of that. And as a result, eventually I got better at strategy as I as I read things and looked at games. But my calculation was always sort of lacking. And out of the

9:17 three segments, calculation needs to be understood differently because it has two different things you need to focus on. Firstly, improving your pattern recognition. That comes with time. As you analyze games, as you read books, as you play games, you're going to be learning new patterns over and over again. But the second part is more important. Being able to calculate well requires a well-trained muscle and we need to train that muscle constantly. If you train for 3 months, play a tournament, you'll do great. Then you stop training for 3 months, you won't calculate as well. It's not the knowledge that sticks. It's

10:03 your ability to calculate well under pressure, which as I said is a ma muscle you develop. If you don't train it, it's going to become weaker. So, calculation is something we have to constantly do. It doesn't matter how many games we've seen. It doesn't matter how many positions we've solved. Nothing matters. It matters that you do it consistently and you get better over time. The muscle gets stronger. I have a good analogy actually. I I I'm a rock climber and when I burned my hand last year in January, I had to take a break for 3 months. My fingers became so weak that when I got back to training, I felt like well, not like a beginner because my technique had improved, but

10:50 my calculation or the strength in my arms, my back, and my fingers was lacking. And I and I felt like in one of those dreams where you're running or fighting through water and everything is slow in slow motion and you are completely unable to perform. So calculation is just like that. It's a muscle you have to train it. Now for these three parts people have endless theories, have endless tips, endless videos, endless whatever. You don't need to do any of that. What I would recommend that you do that I think works perfectly to train both endame strategy calculation and strategy or positional play whatever you want to

11:36 call it is analyze games that's all you need to do there are plenty of free databases less to start with you can also use chessgames.com and here's what I would do you've chosen your repertoire so let's say you play Um, you play the karakhan as black, you play d4 as white, or you play e4 as white, and you go into the Spanish. Who's your perfect player? Who plays those openings? Well, in this case, Karpov is is a great example. He played the the Spanish with white against e5. He played the kakan as black. So, take a book of annotated games. This is Karpov's selected games. A great book. It's it's pretty old, late7s, but

12:26 it's it's good. There are some mistakes in in the analysis, but it's going to suffice for our level. And what you do is you don't read the annotations for the game. You get the raw PGN of the game from wherever chessgames.com or Leess or ChessBase and you analyze the game on your own playing for Carpov. So you model yourself after a player who who plays your repertoire. You get a book book of his annotated games. So you make sure that once you're done analyzing, you can check your analysis and compare it to the annotations without having to rely on an engine alone and you analyze the game for hours and hours and hours. Now, I'm

13:13 going to break that down into a few useful segments. Firstly, you don't move the pieces when analyzing. You recreate tournament conditions. You do it over a real board. you guess the move for your side. So, let's say it's let's just put some position on the board. Um, okay, here this is my game against Starvich. But in any case, let's say you have this position. It's black to play. You analyze it on your own without moving the pieces and then you guess the move for black. If your move is correct, great. Move on.

13:59 If it's not, if you uncover the next move and see that the player had played something different, you need to figure out why. In some cases, rarely, your move is going to be better. In many cases, your move is going to be flawed. And okay, here the move is obvious. Queen C7. But I'm going to give you a slightly more radical example where in this position it was black to play. It was my turn and I played knight G4. An awful move. Uh, and I would say that the best move, knight BD7, which you can see in the road to GM series, I've covered this game, isn't hard to find. So, if I were analyzing this game, if this was a Karpov game and I wanted to play knight G4 and Karpov played knight BD7, I would

14:46 invest quite some time to figure out why. if I didn't understand it immediately. Then what you can do once you finish the entire game and the entire game by that I mean opening. So you're analyzing a game in the opening you play in your repertoire. So you're getting better at the opening end game if there was one. So you're going through one type of end game or another. It's going to be complex. It might transpose into a king and pawn end game whatever. and the middle game. Meaning you're improv you're improving your calculation. You're improving your strategic play and very importantly you're impro you're improving your decision making when it comes to you know when to calculate.

15:32 Once you've done that for the entire game you take the book open up that game read the annotations and see the reasoning behind behind the moves made in the game. Now this is the Karpov book has wasn't actually written by Karpov. So let's take another example. This is lessons on uncompromising play by David Navara. An excellent book. Get it if you if you want. Uh a great book. So Navvada annotates his own games. So you can let's say you're analyzing Navara Wesley so from 2019. You finish analyzing the game, then you get to read David Navara's thoughts during the game, his own analysis, what he had missed, what

16:19 he deemed important, and you get to compare that with your own notes and analysis. Why is that good? Well, it's like having a coach. You have a 2700 player telling you where you went wrong. And imagine doing that a 100 times. It's inevitable that your level of play, your level of strategic understanding, your level of endgame technique, your level of of opening knowledge, and your level of visualization and calculation, being precise at calculating gets closer to that of the player whose games you're you're looking at. So, I think that's enough to learn chess properly. And I wish I had been doing this for the last nine

17:05 years. Of course, it takes time. One game on average should take four or five hours. I mean, if you if you're playing tournament chess, a 90 plus 30 game lasts 3, four, 5 hours. So, why would analysis take less time? It shouldn't. It should take just as much or longer. Why? Because while we can focus, we're not in time trouble. Maybe we have time to explore additional possibilities. Maybe we're stuck in some positions. I was analyzing some games where I had no idea what to do and I would spend an hour on one position and maybe that's suboptimal considering that we're trading for tournament games but still. So in short what I would recommend that you do is get openings and theoretical end games out of the way. Again you you

17:52 can do that completely free or you can use additional resources like Nocti and then and then start analyzing games. Now, one final thing I like to do when analyzing games for positions that I haven't understood, for positions that I had gotten wrong, for positions in which the player whose game I'm I'm analyzing had played something different. I like to play those out. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use Noctti to create a theme and I'll import every position I've messed up and play it out against a humanlike AI. Now, of course, ideally,

18:40 ideally, in a perfect world, you'd have another person crazy enough that they want to study chess all the time. So you would both analyze the game with them and play out the positions you got wrong with them. In the absence of a crazy human who wants to do that, well, the best alternative is in my opinion using Noctti. And I've been using it for almost every position in my own tournament games that I didn't understand like for the last year. Uh if you want to do that, follow the link to Nocti in the description. uh if if you unlock all the premium features by going premium, use the code hanging pawns to get a 64% discount. And I it's it's definitely worth it. Now, of course,

19:27 what you can also do is use a free less engine, but that that's not going to be the same. Uh engines are, you know, engines play perfectly or if you select a lower difficulty, they play very poorly and they make moves that make no sense. The best thing about Noctti is that if it's worse, if it's losing, it's still going to try to beat you. It's going to try to trick you. It's not going to play nonsensical moves, giving up material. It's going to try to find human tricks. So, this is my blueprint for for learning chess. Get games in the repertoire you play. Literally, go to chessgames.com. Select, you know, Kakan, Black Winds, select one player who has a bunch of

20:14 games in the opening or whatever opening you want to learn. Get those PGNs, put them in a less study, create a repertoire, start analyzing the games. Ideally, get one book with annotated games. I mean, you could take Shirro's fire on board or Tylenic who, whichever player you like, so you can check the analysis and compare it to the players annotations. I hope this helps. Uh, I recorded this because many people have asked for it. I truly believe that spending time on each segment of the game individually makes no sense because we have to develop an actual skill and not obtain endless amounts of theoretical knowledge and doing analysis under tournament conditions is exactly

21:01 that. We're developing a skill of playing better chess. Okay, not dividing the game into some artificial segments. A chess game is a chess game. You need to be able to play in all areas. You need to be able to calculate and know when to calculate. You need to be able to make good strategic decisions and so on and so on. Let me know what you think and stay tuned for more chess. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.