Author: Dawn

I'm Dawn Lawson, a librarian and translator. When I'm not at my day job or struggling with 19th-century Japanese, I'm doing something related to chess. I've found the online chess community in Twitter and elsewhere to be super welcoming, and I wanted to give back by sharing a record of my own experiences with this great pastime.

I’m Not Quitting Chess

I’m Not Quitting Chess

Published by Dawn on August 28, 2022

I have other hobbies besides chess, including playing an online Scrabble-like game called Lexulous. Lexulous gives players ratings in a manner adopted from chess, and as in chess, when two people play, there is a winner and a loser. But I have yet to see someone proclaim in a Tweet: “I’m quitting Lexulous.”

In the chess Twitterverse, however, it is not unusual to see posts in which discouraged players declare that they are leaving the game. There are various flavors of this. The former world chess champion Magnus Carlsen has not quit playing, although he did step down from being world champion. As people have asked, “Who does this in any other sport?” No one. Levy Rozman, known widely for his chess YouTube channel GothamChess, recently declared that he was quitting playing in chess tournaments. Interestingly, he still plays chess online and exults in the high rating he is achieving without putting tournament-level pressure on himself.

Of course, if I were to quit chess, it would not be newsworthy. I would just be another person whom the black and white armies had driven to a place of silent desperation. But I would not be alone. I saw the following question in an online chess forum: “Should I quit chess because it makes me depressed?” Another forum post says, “I get very nervous when playing, I feel as if my whole life is on the line with each move and that each loss is another failure.’”

Unfortunately, I can relate to these feelings, and I imagine that many other chess players–especially beginners–can relate to them as well. What to do? I don’t want to quit chess because it makes me depressed. I want to quit getting depressed about my chess. I want to rid myself of the feeling that “my whole life is on the line with each move and that each loss is another failure.” But sometimes I get to feeling badly enough about my game that I avoid playing, unless it is with a very trusted friend or in what I have found is a safe environment (and even there, the negative feelings can still arise). Playing less chess does not usually help one’s game, however, especially if one is an inexperienced player. Nor does playing less inure one to losing, in my experience.

Listening to chess podcasts and reading chess tweets has given me some comfort, however. I used to think that the people who played chess, especially those with online personas, must be a thick-skinned bunch who did not suffer nearly as much as I did from losing. But two prominent podcasters–Daniel Lona of the Chess Experience and Kevin Scull of Chess Journeys–are quite open about their chess frustrations on their shows and on Twitter. As reassuring as it has been to see that they suffer, too, I am sorry to learn that even if I become much better at chess, as they are, my despair may still be with me. But I will persist. Which means that I will also probably continue to ponder this issue here.

Recommendation: I already couldn’t see out how Ben Johnson managed to do all the things he was doing (most notably, the Perpetual Chess family of podcasts), and now he has added something new: the Perpetual Chess Link-Fest, a blog/newsletter in which he compiles links to good online chess content. This week’s edition happens to include links to a couple of blog posts about chess improvement.

Get More out of Lichess

Get More out of Lichess

Published by Dawn on July 31, 2022

In this post I’m going to explain a few of the more advanced features of lichess, something that my fellow chess improvers have requested. Familiarity with these will greatly enhance your use of lichess as a chess improvement tool.

As we know, studying the games you have played is crucial to your improvement, and lichess makes this possible by keeping a record of every game you play using it, whether against the lichess computer or against a human opponent. (By comparison, chess.com keeps a record of the games you play with people, but not those against the computer.) Lichess also lets you import and save the records of any games you have played without lichess–games played on other apps or even over the board, as long as you have the PGN record of the game. PGN, or portable game notation, is a standard plain-text format for recording chess games. In addition to the moves, it records other data related to the game, such as who played which color and how the game concluded. The PGN records of the games you have played on lichess and those of your imported games can be found under the Games tab in your Profile, which is reachable from the home page. The “Analysis Board” option (in the red circle below) appears when you click on any of the games listed there.

You may already be familiar with the analysis board tool, which provides a useful display of the game record with your and your opponent’s missteps highlighted. But you may not have noticed the hamburger menu that appears in the bottom right-hand corner after you choose the analysis board.

Clicking this menu reveals additional helpful tools. They are displayed at the top of the right column:

Here I will focus on two of them: “Continue from here” and “Study.” “Continue from here” gives you a chance to replay, from any point, any game that lichess has stored for you, regardless of where or with whom it was originally played. You first decide whether you want to continue it with the lichess computer or with a friend on lichess; then you indicate whether you want to play as black or white, under what time control, and whether or not the game is rated. If you choose to play against the lichess computer, you are able to specify which level to play against as well.

Being able to “Continue from here” with a lichess friend is especially useful for a situation in which I and my chess classmates often find ourselves. After our teacher has taught a segment of the lesson, we pair off to play games in lichess, but because these games are played under a very short time control to maximize teaching time, being able to revisit them in a more leisurely way can be very instructive. To do this, we simply use the “Continue from here” option to invite our classmate (or the computer or any friend in lichess) to revisit the game. Similarly, the weekly Casual Chess Cafe established by my chess teacher pairs people in lichess for fifteen-minute games, and we can revisit those games from any point using this function as well.

The “Study” feature is very robust. Here I will restrict my discussion of it to its use for annotating games, something that I discussed in a previous post. (For a very comprehensive guide to “Study,” see the website The School of Rook.) As before, you choose a saved game and select the Analysis Board option to access the hamburger menu. When you choose the “Study” option, a list of icons representing tools appears in a row right below the chessboard. The vertical arrow below points to the chat bubble, which opens a box where you can type your comment. Here, I have selected the first move of the game in the list as the one I would like to comment on.

The comment where it is input and where it appears:

I recommend using all caps for your comments for readability.

For maximum learning it is best to add your own comments first and then ask lichess for its analysis of the game, which you do by clicking on the graph icon that appears below the chessboard.

If the lichess analysis refers to a move that you have already commented on, it labels your comments with your username and its own as “lichess.”

The other two features available from that hamburger menu are “Flip board” and “Board editor.” “Flip board” does exactly what it says–it enables you to change the perspective from which the game is displayed from black to white or white to black. “Board editor” is extremely complex, and I haven’t even scratched its surface yet. But the things my teacher does with it look amazing.

From Analysis to Annotation

From Analysis to Annotation

Published by Dawn on July 10, 2022

Playing, recording, and then analyzing your games is a crucial part of improving at chess. The playing and recording used to be done by hand, and the analyzing in the form of an oral post mortem with your opponent or yourself jotting in a notebook. But now, with apps like lichess and with the pandemic limiting in-person gatherings, these activities are mostly carried out online. This means that the app you used to play your game will also conveniently record the moves and analyze them for you, even offering you the opportunity to replay the moves that it deems problematic. If replaying them proves too challenging, you can ask for a hint or to see the solution outright.

This computer analysis is a great feature, and one that can lull the beginner into thinking that she doesn’t need a teacher—it seems like the app can tell her all she needs to know. Although some of the things that it labels as blunders or mistakes are readily understandable, she doesn’t always see why the app is saying that one move is better than another, which is troubling. Eventually she gets a teacher and learns that the computer analysis is based on a chess “engine” that can calculate moves practically into infinity. Those chess players you see competing for the world championship may be able to find the moves that the engine labels as “best” or “brilliant” but the rest of us cannot. Nor do we need to, if our goal is simply to enjoy chess as a hobby.

But other than the opportunity to replay selected moves, this kind of analysis is passive on the part of the player. The app decides which moves are problematic, and you get to see the solution and nod sagely, thinking you have learned something. But have you? What happened in the game leading up to that move? If what the app labels as a mistake did not involve losing a piece, would you have caught it had you been reviewing the game on your own?

Enter annotation, something I don’t think is talked about enough in chess study materials. We review annotated games of the masters from books, but what about annotating our own? I hadn’t heard about it during the first six months of my chess journey, but serendipitously both my chess teacher and my training plan mentioned it in the same week, and that got me started.

Annotating a game online means that you go back to the app and review the game from the beginning (without using the analysis tool first) and make notations about moves that have significance for you, mistakes as well as remarkably good moves. You can also note moves about which you have questions.

Fortunately, the “create a study” feature in lichess lets us enter these comments alongside the game notation, save them, and share them. (I will explain how to do this in a future post.) Doing this made a revolutionary difference in my chess lessons. I used to painstakingly make screenshots of each position in a game that I wanted to discuss with my teacher. Now I simply share my annotated lichess study with her, and we are able to review the entire game, paying extra attention to my comments.

The app can still play a role here—after you complete your annotation. Lichess allows you to analyze the game within from your annotated study, and its comments are labeled and entered in alongside yours (in the graphic above, lichess’ analysis is in orange, mine in all caps). This gives you the opportunity to compare your analysis with theirs and enter a comment on it, as I do in the example. The computer analysis will still highlight some “inaccuracies” that only a top player would find, but you can check to see if you have found the more blatant errors. If you have missed some, you can examine them and discuss them with your teacher. But in the process you will have taken a deeper and more productive look at your game, which will make you a better player.

For me, annotation has had another great benefit. I continue to lose far more games than I win, but instead of wallowing in feelings of failure, I now look forward to the chance to go back through the game and discover where I went wrong. Recently I was able to convert a tough loss to a classmate into a chance to isolate the three places I had gone wrong by annotating them, making lemonade out of lemons. I saved them in a study and can review them as needed, including before I face that person again. No doubt I won’t be running out of lemonade anytime soon.

Doubling Down on My Chess Study

Doubling Down on My Chess Study

Published by Dawn on June 26, 2022

I went on vacation recently, which disrupted my chess playing and chess study routines. But it also gave me a chance to reflect on my chess journey to date. I’ve been studying chess seriously for about six or seven months, taking group classes and private lessons. I analyze all the games I play with a chess engine and I also study tactics. But is my self-developed training program rigorous enough? Am I improving? Because chess has rating systems by which players can measure their progress, I thought it would be easy to tell how I was doing. But getting a rating, especially your first one, can be difficult. In the Before Times, people normally got a rating by participating in official in-person chess tournaments. These opportunities are beginning to come back, but during Covid most players have had to rely on lichess and chess.com for their ratings. For reasons too complicated to go into, my rating on lichess is still classified as “provisional,” and I don’t trust my chess.com rating because I have only played 23 games there.

Because of these uncertainties about my chess progress, I decided to add another element to the mix. It is the new training program offered by Chess DoJo, “a self-described hub for chess players, improvers, and coaches” founded by three distinguished chess sensei (their word, but I like it). I have just begun to explore the training program, but its content and organization seem very promising. The program is customized by rating band, starting with 0-400, 400-600, 600-800, 800-1000, and then going up 100 rating points at a time all the way to 2400+. You get access to the contents of all of the training programs when you subscribe, although you have to choose one in which to be an active participant at any given time (that group becomes your cohort). The videos they are posting on YouTube describing each rating band are very informative; I watched How to Make 400 Using the Chess Dojo Training Program and was hooked.

After I subscribed and chose the 0-400 band, I was given access to the “Training Program Scorecard” spreadsheet, which lists the various chess activities that the sensei have determined will help you to move up to the next rating category. You check off the activities as you complete them, providing some accountability. The required activities include the kinds of things I had been doing (and more), but they are more specific and quantified. For example, in the case of tactics training, the spreadsheet says, do the first 50 exercises on tactic X in book Y, which is a refreshing change from my floundering from book to book trying to determine which exercises were appropriate for me.

The real meat of the program is, as it should be, playing games. When it comes to playing, Chess Dojo is also serious about time controls. For the 0-400 level, they insist on thirty minutes per side, which is quite a lot in today’s online chess world, where time controls of five minutes or fewer per side are the norm. They require longer time controls as your rating increases, which makes sense, because the more you know, the more possible positions you will be able to visualize, and you need time to do that. Another helpful function of the scorecard is that members of the cohort list their time zones and when they are available to play. Thus you can find opponents around your skill level who are seeking to play games with the same time controls.

But you don’t just play the games, you play and then annotate them. Annotate? I had heard of analyzing your own games using a chess engine, but not of annotating them on your own. In chess study, we use collections of annotated games, but these are games played by masters. I have begun learning to annotate my own games, and this practice is a revelation. I want to give it its due, and this is getting long, so I will discuss it another time.

Recommendation of the Week: The Candidates Tournament is under way, with eight players competing to determine who will be the challenger for the World Chess Championship 2023. There are many reports and recaps available, but my favorites are those by Matt Jensen of Chess Goals. His explanations are concise yet thoughtful in terms of explaining obscure chess terms (today it was the isolated queen pawn, or “IQP”). In addition to recapping that day’s play, Matt uses his background as a statistician to set odds for each competitor, so you always know how things stand.

Much Ado about Openings

Much Ado about Openings

Published by Dawn on June 12, 2022

Soon after you dip your toe into the fascinating waters of chess, you begin hearing or reading about “openings.” It can feel like every other chess course for sale online and every other YouTube lesson is about one opening or another. They have fascinating names, like the Queen’s Gambit (the King has one as well), the Ruy Lopez, the Sicilian Defense, the Caro-Kann Defense, and on and on. Curiosity about these names is one way that chess begins to hook you. Fortunately, you can learn about their origins and more in two books by Nathan Rose.

Wikipedia will tell you that the opening refers to the “initial stage of a chess game” and “usually consists of established theory.” Theory? That’s a bit scary-sounding for the beginner. Hopefully you will go from there to a sensible book or chess teacher. Either will set you straight on the subject of openings right away. A good teacher will say that despite the mountains of material on the subject out there, beginners should not spend much of their precious chess study time memorizing openings, which usually involve multiple “lines” (that is, if your opponent does X in response to an opening move, you should do Y, but if she does this, you should do that, ad infinitum).

My teacher, Amanda Ross, handles the issue of openings with her beginning students as follows, and it worked well for me. She teaches you the principles of opening, which are to activate your pieces (moving knights before bishops) with an eye toward controlling the center of the board; not to move any piece twice (unless there is a pressing need to do so); not to move the Queen out too far too early; and to get your king to safety. Following these principles often results in an opening called the Italian Game, or Giuoco Piano, but the important thing for beginners is that you approach it by learning the principles behind it rather than memorizing the abstract notation (e4 e5, Nf3 Nc6, Bc4). As a beginner, I was greatly relieved to be able to sit down at the board, know what my first few moves were and why, and be able to execute them rapidly. Alas, now I feel anxiety at the beginning of the middle game instead. That’s chess for you.

Amanda urged me to stick with this opening until she let me know that it was time for me to choose my own opening from a range suitable for beginners. My own opening! That sounded so grown-up and accomplished. Until this time I had watched with envy as one of my classmates opened games using something called “the London system.” As an American in the Midwest whose teacher and online classmates were (mostly) in London, accents and all, the “London” moniker made it seem fated, and that it was called a “system” gave it a certain mystique and the sound of chess mastery. Decision made. Little did I know, however, that playing the London system can subject one to annoying comments out in internet chess land. Some call it “boring.” But it’s perfect for beginners because it has a smaller body of theory than many other openings, and it can be played against any black defense. I’m not bored by it, and I will let my teacher decide when it is time to expand my opening repertoire.

Playing Chess Against the Computer

Playing Chess Against the Computer

Published by Dawn on June 5, 2022

I’ve written about playing chess with a regular partner and about playing with strangers, but there is another option: playing against the computer. The two major platforms, lichess and chess.com, offer this choice. Here I describe my experiences playing against both and compare their features. But please don’t misconstrue this comparison as a recommendation to use one in preference to the other. Chess.com is a commercial product, while lichess is free, open source, and nonprofit. Chess.com does have a no-cost option, which one could, perhaps, compare with lichess more fairly, but the free version of chess.com strictly limits the number of times in a day that you can do most activities (game analysis, puzzles, lessons), and so I don’t think it makes sense as a tool for serious learners.

Not surprisingly, then, chess.com’s play-against-the-computer feature has many more bells and whistles than does that of lichess. These are apparent from the outset, when you choose your opponent. Chess.com has dozens of bots, complete with names, pictures, nationalities, chess playing styles, and ratings. At the top of this post you see Zara, a Malaysian female rated 850 who “loves to play creative chess games and come up with her own ideas. Be careful or she’ll trick you with her unique tactics.” If you scroll down past the many bot pictures, you reach the more austere option of playing against the “engine.” The chess.com engine’s levels number from 1 to 25 and come with labels, from beginner (rated 250) to maximum (rated 3200). On lichess you can play against a bot named Maia or against its engine, which has 8 levels.

In addition to level of play, both platforms offer other options for customizing your game, including color (white, black, random) and time control. Chess.com offers many more options than these, however, and this is where playing against the computer can become an outstanding learning experience. You can select various types of assistance, including takebacks, warnings, and hints (to name just a few), or you can play in ”Challenge” mode, with no intervention. Options like takebacks and warnings were very useful to me at the beginning of my chess journey, when I was blundering and making mistakes that would have ended a game in short order had I not chosen to be warned and able to take back a move.

Chess players debate endlessly about what percentages of time they should give to the various aspects of their study of the game, such as playing, studying master games, doing puzzles, and so on. But all agree that an indispensable part of learning is analyzing each game you play, preferably right after you finish it. Both platforms incorporate this analysis ability into their play-against-the-computer option. The main difference in their functionalities is in presentation, with chess.com’s analysis being more immediately understandable and accessible. It breaks the game down into “key moments” and lets you choose to “retry” to find the best move, get a hint about it, or just display it. Lichess has a similar feature called “Learn from your mistakes,” but its presentation is not quite as user-friendly. In addition to this brief analysis of key points in the game, both platforms offer a much deeper, move-by-move analysis as well.

There is one huge difference between playing against the computer on chess.com and on lichess: even premium versions of chess.com do not save a record of the games you play against the computer, as they do in the case of your games against human opponents. Lichess saves both types of games, and you can go back as often as you like to analyze them and slice and dice them in a multitude of ways. But if you play against chess.com and exit the game without using the analysis feature then and there, it is gone for good, and you have learned nothing. But you can do a workaround in lichess to address chess.com’s failure to save the games played against its computer. Before exiting your chess.com game, you have a “Share” option, which you can use to make a copy of the game in the chess computer notation format called “pgn.” Lichess lets you import the game in that format (this takes a little tweaking), save it, and do all of the same analysis activities that you can do on games played originally in lichess.

But how does it feel to play chess against a computer rather than a human being? I find that it is less anxiety-producing than playing with a random stranger. Even though I know that I will likely never encounter that random stranger again—and can even block them if need be—the fact that they are a real person adds an edge to the experience. This means that when I sit down to play without a partner and have to decide whether to play against the computer or against a random stranger, playing with the computer feels like the easier, but more cowardly, option. Is this how it feels to others, I wonder?

Recommendation of the Week: On his Perpetual Chess podcast, Ben Johnson interviewed Stuart Margulies, one of the coauthors of the classic book Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Don’t miss this unique conversation, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the chess world as this bestselling volume was being created.

Chess and Feelings

Chess and Feelings

Published by Dawn on May 29, 2022

Early on I wrote enthusiastically in this blog about the many chess podcasts that are available. Chess podcasts perform multiple functions. They give you a way to be in contact with chess when you don’t feel like playing. Or when you want to play, but can’t because you’re driving or exercising, which are excellent times to listen to a podcast. Most important, studying chess can be lonely, especially during this pandemic, and listening to a podcast can ease that loneliness.

Recently I discovered a new chess podcast called Chessfeels, which quickly made it to the top of my list. There are so many reasons to love this one. The insightful way in which the co-hosts–clinical psychologist Julia Rios and chess teacher JJ Lang–identify themselves during the opening gives you a good idea of what they are trying to do and what makes this pod unique. JJ calls himself “a chess teacher and amateur feelings-haver,” while Julia is “a clinical psychologist and amateur checkmate finder.” The opening tells you more when Julia calls chess “the game we know and love,” and JJ pipes up, “and hate.” That really caught my attention, because I sometimes feel that the flip side of my love for chess is a kind of hate–hate that it is so hard and that terrible things can happen while I am playing, like blundering. But of course it is I rather than the game that has blundered, so hatred of the game readily metamorphoses into self-hate. Few chess books or podcasts delve into such feelings, however, misleading one to conclude that no one else shares them. Thanks to Chessfeels, we learn that someone clearly does. JJ and Julia are always trying to gain a deeper understanding of something related to the psychology of chess, and they lighten the difficult aspects of their discussions with lots of clever repartee, which is always amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Take, for example, the podcast’s second episode, in which they tackle the subject of JJ’s “addiction to Blitz.” Blitz is a very fast form of chess in which each player is given three to five minutes to play. As in the case of its cousin, Bullet, in which each player is given less than three minutes to play, the popularity of Blitz increased a lot during the pandemic as online chess playing grew. Watching these rapid-fire versions of chess has also become a popular pastime: on Twitch, many famous and not-famous players who broadcast themselves playing Blitz and Bullet for hours have garnered thousands of followers and a great deal of money in subscription fees.

JJ’s addiction is to playing, not watching, Blitz. Julia is careful to preface her remarks by saying that they are not a substitute for professional advice (as she is legally required to do), but we and JJ benefit greatly from the psychological information she imparts. In this episode, she walks JJ through the entire inventory of questions used to help diagnose addiction, and we learn that addiction grows as the stimulus and reward grow closer together in time. That is why Blitz and Bullet can be addicting in a way that classical chess (which has time controls exceeding 30 minutes per person) cannot. Other issues that the pair tackles include obsession with ratings (episode 6), burnout (episode 7), and practical techniques that you can use to counter anxiety during a game (episode 3). All are worth a listen or even two.

This is not to say that other chess podcasts don’t discuss feelings. Some do, but such discussions aren’t their reason for being. On Perpetual Chess, Ben Johnson and Han Schut interviewed a person who said he did not want to be a chess improver, just a “sustainer,” which led to a fascinating discussion about whether that was really true, and if so, why. Podcaster Dr. Keven Scull (Chess Journeys) endeared himself to me from the beginning with frequent references to his frustration and bewilderment about his difficulty in improving. Fittingly, it was his interview of Julia that brought Chessfeels to my attention.

Recommendation of the Week: It is all too easy for the novice chess player to be attracted to and bewildered by the huge number of books about chess, a great many of which, because they are above her level, are not a good use of her time. Recently I found one that is just right, A Guide to Chess Improvement: The Best of Novice Nook, by Dan Heisman. The contents originated as chess newsletter columns, but they have been edited to work seamlessly in book form, and the chapters cover all of the topics crucial for beginners, such as “Thought Process,” “Time Management,” “Skills and Psychology,” and “Tactics and Safety.”

Playing Chess with Strangers

Playing Chess with Strangers

Published by Dawn on May 22, 2022

Previously I wrote about the importance of having a training partner. But what if you don’t have one, or yours is not available when you feel like playing chess? The two major online platforms, lichess and chess.com, provide ways for you to find someone to play with. Not just anyone, but someone who meets parameters that you are able to specify. Both also allow for “quick pairings,” without parameters, as well.

Lichess has a “Lobby” on its home page. At any given moment, it displays a list of available players, by Piece Color Preference, User Name, Rating, Time, and Mode (Casual or Rated). This list occupies the top part of the Lobby. (The lower part is dedicated to variant forms of chess, such as Bughouse, which I won’t be discussing.) The players listed have used the Create a Game function to specify their parameters. As the person seeking a game, you can use the Settings function to customize your Lobby’s display to show only potential games that meet your parameters. I set mine for a time control of 10 minutes or more and an opponent whose rating is in the three-digit range. My customized Lobby lists no available games much of the time, which is not surprising for a number of reasons, including that the lichess user base numbers only around 150,000. But when I have found suitable opponents, the games have been satisfying.

This has not always been the case for me on chess.com, where I have nevertheless played a lot more games. I play more games there because I never fail to find an opponent that meets my specifications. Why? Chess.com has more than 3 million active users, many times more than does lichess. But I have had a number of negative experiences there, both in terms of the way the games are played and in terms of the communication that takes place during the games via the chat function. Many of the chess.com users that I have been paired with try to use opening traps that result in a quick checkmate. If I successfully parry those, the players often resign the minute their going gets rough. Of course, to resign is their prerogative, but my teacher has urged me to play out every game I start, and I agree with her that that is the best way to learn. The problems in the chat dwarf premature resignations, however. I have been addressed as “Bro” and “Bru” (clearly a female couldn’t be playing chess and definitely not online). Other problems have to do with the speed of play. I have my time control on chess.com set at 30 minutes, which in today’s chess world signals that this will be a somewhat leisurely game. But recently, when I took nearly a minute to make a move, the chat read, “Hurry up.” I am not a fast player, so that soon escalated to “Are you even playing?!” and less nice urgings. This led to my discovery that you can easily disable chat during a game (or for all games) and permanently block a user from contacting you. It’s tempting to conclude that my trouble finding opponents in chess.com are attributable to the low rating range in which I am playing, and that may be a factor, but a more accomplished player recently tweeted that he had a similar problem—and his time control was 45 minutes, so the opponent had to know going into the game that the play would not be fast.

What to do if you can’t find a suitable opponent on either platform? Well, both venues offer the option of playing with the computer, and you can set a host of parameters for the game, just as you can when seeking human opponents. I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of play another time.

I am particularly excited about this Recommendation of the Week: The Chess Journeys podcast recently interviewed Julia Rios. What a revelation! She is a chess lover on the verge of receiving a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, and she co-hosts a podcast, Chessfeels, with a charming chess teacher named JJ Lang. In each episode, Julia brings her professional training to bear on the issues faced by adult chess improvers and even high-level players, thus filling a huge hole in the chess podcast universe.

Get a Training Partner–Why and How

Get a Training Partner–Why and How

Published by Dawn on May 15, 2022

Earlier I wrote of the importance of getting a chess teacher, but finding a peer with whom you can play regularly is also crucial. I say “training partner,” because that is the language I have seen online, but whether you are training for a tournament or not, it will really help your game–and probably your morale–if you are able to have a regular chess date with someone as close to your own skill level as possible.

How to find such a person? It could be easy if you have a local chess club that is meeting regularly in person, but because we are still living in the shadow of the pandemic, I will assume that that is not an option. Sadly, my former local club, numbering more than 350 members, was recently deleted from Meetup after its organizer resigned and no one stepped forward to assume the reins.

Online, there are several chess communities that have subgroups dedicated to finding training partners. You will find them on Discord, a free platform consisting of servers where communities of like-minded people gather to message one another and even hold Zoom-like meetings. Its interface can be a little forbidding at first, but it is worth the learning curve. The servers with subgroups for seeking training partners include Chess Punks, Chess Dojo, and Chess Goals (search for the name plus Discord; it’s hard to find permalinks for Discord servers). While you’re there, check out their other subgroups, which are great places to congregate and discuss all things chess.

There is a downside to these rich resources, though. In my experience, the people seeking training partners have ratings far out of my range (currently the mid-hundreds). But even if you are like me, sub-1000, I have some suggestions. If you are in a chess class with players near your level, consider whether one of them might make a suitable training partner. If you take private lessons, ask your teacher. She may know someone and/or be willing to ask around for you.

I had the great good fortune of finding the perfect training partner through an online class I take. She and I play weekly, despite a five-hour time difference. After every game we open the lichess analyzer and cheerfully examine our many blunders. Recently I realized that I feel much more relaxed playing with her than with anyone else, and I wondered why. The feeling is understandable–she has become a friend, and we are close in level and take group classes and private lessons from the same teacher. But it is more than that, I thought. I finally realized that these are the only chess games that I play without a time control, except for some at home. Class and lesson games must have a tight time control, of course, but that adds a huge extra pressure, which for the beginner can be the final straw. I recently heard on a podcast that you can learn chess best in games with classical time controls (defined variously, but usually meaning at least 60 minutes per player). I agree. If you are going to learn to exercise the analytic skills chess requires–assessing your position for dangers and possibilities both after your opponent moves and before you make the move you are contemplating–you need as much time as possible, especially as a chess newbie.

If you can’t find a regular partner, or even if you have one but want to play more games, you will have to brave the Wild West of chess and play with strangers on chess.com, lichess, and elsewhere. I have had plenty of adventures out there, which I will relate next time.

Recommendation of the Week: When you’ve had your fill of chess books but still want to read something that will help your game, take a look at the five non-chess books recommended by Chess Goals, a great site that helps you attain them.

Chess and the Mind

Chess and the Mind

Published by Dawn on May 8, 2022

I wrote jauntily in my last post about losing all the games I played in my first tournament. But the fact is that absorbing day-to-day chess losses with good humor can be more of a challenge. Getting better about losing is as important a goal for me as getting better at winning.

When I began investigating the topic, I soon found that I was not alone in having difficulty coping with chess losses. Exploring the forums of chess.com and lichess.org, I found many novices who shared my distress when they lost and were plaintively appealing for help. Someone, somewhere, recommended that such people read the last chapter of Jeremy Silman’s The Amateur’s Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery. This is one of the many books I had acquired in my beginner’s enthusiasm. But I had set it aside without reading when I saw it on Ben Johnson’s list of recommended chess books. He helpfully specifies what rating ranges will get the most out of which books, and he suggests The Amateur’s Mind for people with ratings of 1000-1300. I am firmly situated in the three-digit range and expect to remain there for the foreseeable future. But that chapter was cited in the course of my informal research, and it had the spot-on title of “Developing Mental Toughness,” so I took a look.

I don’t know exactly what I expected. But what I discovered were descriptions that, if you removed the chessboard diagrams and accompanying strings of move notation, could have come directly from a book describing the kind of negative thoughts that accompany depression. All too familiar phrases, including “the unfortunate spiral into the abyss,” “a negative, defeatist attitude,” and “a deep sense of hopelessness,” jumped off the page at this reader. Analyzing one game, Silman writes of a player: “All his thoughts smacked of defeatism because Black only concentrated on the negative qualities of his position,” a sentence that could easily have come from a case study of a despondent person surnamed Black.

While Silman’s diagnoses match descriptions of depression and its attendant distorted thoughts, his prescriptions (“tips”) are, for the most part, chess-specific. However, many correlate easily with cognitive therapy strategies such as identifying inaccurate or negative thinking and reframing it. His admonition not to give up by resigning is easily translatable to life as well.

These correlations between depression and thoughts about one’s chess performance are both alarming and inspiring. Alarming because one wonders whether depressed people or people with depressive tendencies should even play chess given these psychological dangers, and inspiring because it is yet one more way that chess can be a vehicle for improving one’s play in the game of life. I will explore both ideas in a future post.