Category: chess improvement

James Canty III speaking to elementary school students

I Met a Chess Master!

Published by Dawn on October 17, 2024

I met my first chess master, and he gave me some great advice!

A friend invited me to help out at an elementary school event that was featuring a chess master talking about his new chess book for kids. I had heard of James Canty III, and jumped at the chance to attend even before I knew what my role would be. As it happened, I was to sit at a table and sell the books, a fitting assignment for a chess-loving retired librarian.

Thanks to technical difficulties with the bookstore’s credit card swiping gadget, there was a good bit of downtime, and so I had the opportunity to ask James all kinds of questions. I hadn’t really prepared any, but I was kindly introduced to him as the person who runs the Ann Arbor Women and Girls Chess group, so I started–somewhat fretfully–by telling him that I was discouraged because the group had not yet reached critical mass. James asked me how I was promoting the group, and he had many concrete suggestions about how to expand those efforts, including branching out to Instagram (here’s his) and adding members to my Facebook group by combing other local chess groups’ Facebook pages for potential attendees. He even friended me on Facebook, right then and there–a chess master! He seemed to have firsthand experience of how hard this can be, saying that it would come down to my having to do something similar to cold-calling people like a telemarketer. Not a pleasant picture, but I appreciated all of these ideas and the realism that accompanied them. I understand now that when I decided to start a women’s chess group, I thought mostly about the women playing chess, not the amount of promotion I would have to do to unearth them.

[Scroll down to the end of the post for a link to ChessGoals and a coupon code for 30% off their courses.]

Of course, I also wanted to consult James about my chess, such as it is. He asked what my rating was, and I had to tell him the bizarre and embarrassing number that is visible to all on the Internet: 101! (We were talking about tournament chess, so I gave him my USCF rating, only later realizing that telling him my lichess and chess.com ratings would have shown me in a slightly better light.) James did not bat an eye or look down on me–he just breezily said that all I need is one win and then I’ll be on my way! He added that whoever loses to me will be very, very angry (because no one will expect a person with a 101 rating to be able to play).

James went on to give me advice about how to think during a game and avoid blunders. He also said that if I kept playing, improvement would definitely come. It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it that made a strong, lasting impression on me. His tone was completely matter-of-fact and pervaded with confidence. Like a newly sharpened knife, his manner cut through all of my silly agonizing about whether I could keep improving at my age and gave me a new, more positive attitude toward my chess journey. We didn’t talk specifically about the agony of being defeated, but it was clear to me that the mindset he suggested would go a long way toward easing those feelings. I was going to get better–I just needed to keep playing and think carefully about each move.

James’ book, Become a Chess Champion: Learn the Basics from a Pro, is beautifully illustrated (by Brian Lambert) and written in a clear and concise style. I particularly like the two-page spread “Questions to Remember,” which contains a fuller version of the instructions James gave me for how to think during a game. So, yes, I sold myself a copy of the book, and his inscription included the words, “Keep practicing and you will improve!” (he underlined the last three words). From my vantage point at the book table, I was moved to see that he wrote personalized inscriptions for everyone.

What an inspiring evening! I can only hope that I didn’t hurt James’ feelings toward the end of the event. I heard people asking him which chess luminaries he knew, and he mentioned that Hikaru Nakamura was someone he knew and texted with. Omg! “Does that mean I’m only one degree of separation from Hikaru?” I gushed. James confirmed with his characteristic graciousness and a chuckle, so clearly he was fine with it. He does a lot of chess commentating online, so please check him out and you will see what I mean.Thanks for a lovely experience, James!

An Older Woman’s Chess Journey is a proud affiliate of ChessGoals–if you use the link here to purchase from them and enter “dawn” as the coupon code, you will receive 30% off their courses, and I will receive a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust.

New Online Courses for Chess Novices

New Online Courses for Chess Novices

Published by Dawn on April 10, 2024

As I begin writing this, on Eclipse Day, it feels like we are in a great period for chess. The first four days of the Candidates tournament are in the books, and there have been exciting games and unexpected results in both the Women’s and Men’s divisions. I wonder if the organizers planned the first rest day strategically, so the chess action wouldn’t be, uh, eclipsed by the celestial event. Whatever the case, I am just hopeful that some non-chess players, especially women, will catch wind of the tournament and become intrigued enough by our compelling game to give it a try.

I’m in my third year as an adult chess improver, and I am gaining rating points steadily, if slowly. I am becoming mostly ok with that, but one thing I have noticed is that many of the online chess courses on offer are aimed at people with ratings above 800 or 1000, if not even higher. I have a coach and plenty of self-study materials, but like many of us, when I’m not playing I am doing other chess-adjacent activities, one of which is buying materials that seem to promise–or even guarantee–improvement. In the case of books, it took me a while to realize that I had bought a number of those that exceeded my current chess understanding and ability. Unlike most books, courses for sale often do suggest the range of player strengths for which they are appropriate, but I suspect that some of them exaggerate the lower end to gain more buyers. Fortunately the return policies tend to be generous.

Thus I truly have been overjoyed to see that within the past several months three (3!) courses have been released that really are appropriate for the novice level, and I’m eager to introduce them in this post.

GM Noël Studer’s Beginner Chess Mastery starts with the true basics, including how to set up the board, piece movement, and notation. Those familiar with these fundamentals can simply skip this section (called “Learn the Rules”) altogether, but remember that this information is there when you want to give a non-chess-playing friend or family member a marvelous gift.

The next section is ambitiously titled “How to Reach 1200 Online” (chess.com rapid). An advanced beginner may feel tempted to skip some of this section when they see that it contains subsections devoted to each piece’s strengths and weaknesses, but I recommend watching them all. I certainly found some hidden gems that I wish I had known about before now.

Noël is an excellent teacher and writer of educational material, and his delivery is crisp and conversational. He is very aware of the psychological pitfalls that a player can fall into and offers thoughtful insights about how to deal with these. I have not finished viewing the course yet–it is very comprehensive, even including opening repertoires for both colors–but I am looking forward to delving into the many remaining sections and reaping the benefits of the hard work that Noël clearly put into this.

Next, I was pleased to see that ChessGoals had released a course called “Beating Beginners: Move by Move.” (Disclosure: The link to the course in the previous sentence is an affiliate link. If you use the link to purchase the course and enter “dawn” as the coupon code, you will receive 30% off and I will receive a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust.) This course is appropriate for players rated below 800 USCF (or chess.com blitz) as well as those below roughly equivalent ratings in other time controls on chess.com and on lichess; specifics are on the course’s home page. I wondered what kind of approach would be taken by a course whose title focused on defeating others. Well, the clue is in the other half of the title, “Move by Move”: this course presents 30 entire chess games, all annotated in great detail in downloadable PGNs, and a video walking you through each game. The first opponent is rated 511 and the final one 792, so the level of play goes up very gradually as you work your way through. The mix of who has which color pieces and what openings are played has clearly been carefully crafted. If you have not listened to NM Matt Jensen’s presentation of chess information before, you are in for a treat. His extremely clear instruction is delivered in a calm and thoughtful manner, and he always provides a succinct explanation of new concepts as they arise. He frequently interjects information on the percentage of the time a certain opening or move is seen at the club level, and in addition to the actual move made he often addresses the question of whether another one might or might not have worked and why.

The other novice course released recently is “Can I Take It? A Beginner’s Guide to Capturing Pieces,” created by WFM Laura Smith and NM Dan Heisman, which is available on Chessable. This short course is appropriate for early beginners. It doesn’t explain how the pieces move, but it starts by explaining the piece values and direct attacks. The final section is on Advanced Counting. This would also be a good gift for a chess beginner in your life. I feel that one picks up much of what is in this course while actually playing, but studying these concepts in this context would save beginners a lot of the heartache associated with learning while playing.

Mantras for Chess Players

Mantras for Chess Players

Published by Dawn on December 4, 2023

Ambition without Expectations Recently GM Noël Studer published a blog post with this title, which led me once again to reflect on the need for a Buddhist mentality when you are grappling with the challenging pastime of chess. I am thinking of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: that Life is suffering, that Desire (attachment) is the cause of suffering, that there is a Way to let go of suffering, and that following the Way is the way to let go of suffering. Every time we desire things to be other than they are, we suffer. As Noël writes, “Reality minus Expectations equals Well Being.” While I know that I will never achieve this mentality perfectly, I like the way it reminds me to try to let go of that intense focus on results in the form of wins and improved rating.

You Win or You Learn One hears this a lot in the adult improver world, and it is a helpful reminder that the letter L can stand for more than loss. But I have to admit that I become impatient with it from time to time, because sometimes it seems like the only thing to learn from a game is that I can still blunder my queen or mouse slip or play too quickly when I think I see an amazing tactic that is really an amazing way to lose a piece.

Connect to Vanquish Shame I heard words to this effect on a recent podcast from The Ono Zone. The idea is from Brené Brown via Ono’s wife, Yara. I know, shame is a heavy word and might feel a bit strong to apply to how you feel about your plummeting (or not-rising-as-fast-as-you-think-it-should) rating or your latest loss. But when we try to figure out why it can be so damned devastating to lose at this silly game when losses at other games just don’t match that feeling in intensity, it seems to have something to do with chess being considered a game of intelligence. Even if we know that this is an over-generalization, it is easy for a loss to tap into feelings of shame over not being smart enough or good enough or worse. This can lead to a strong temptation to go crawl in a hole or under the covers or inside a bottle. But the only thing that will help shame is exposing it to the light of day, in the form of a trusted friend or fellow walker on the adult improver path. This is what makes the chess Twitter discussions of failure and frustration so precious. There are people who have felt just as you do, and they are always there to listen.

Progress not Perfection This comes from the Twelve Step programs and is an excellent principle to have in your quiver. But it’s not too helpful for adult improvers, who tend to decide what progress means instead of accepting it. And we often think that what it means is a bigger ratings jump—or even title—than is possible for us to achieve in the amount of time that we have decided it should take.

Anyone Can Beat Anyone Lots of people say this, but when I heard Sara Herman say it, it really stuck with me. Of course this can be taken in two ways—you can beat anyone and anyone can beat you. Adult improvers seem to me to be a glass-half-empty bunch, so we are probably inclined to think of the latter interpretation. From where we sit, we know it is highly unlikely that we would ever beat the grandmasters at the top of the chess heap. But I have found some constructive ways to think about “anyone can beat you.” One is to remind myself not to get too giddy after taking someone’s queen or getting far ahead in material some other way. Strangely, even though I think that I always feel very humble about the little chess ability I have and that I never relax, feeling certain of victory in a game, I actually do relax. I have given back that queen later in the game countless times and seen a double-digit lead in material peter away to nothing or even to a balance in the opponent’s favor. I have really tried to watch for evidence of my relaxing during a game, and I’ve noticed that I have had the opening principles of Develop, Control the Center, and Get Your King to Safety so drilled into me that when I see the opponent not doing any of this I subconsciously decide that I can beat him. Well, guess what? Anyone can beat anyone.

More Progress, Less Satisfaction

More Progress, Less Satisfaction

Published by Dawn on November 8, 2022

My rating continued to climb after my last post, going from the mid-300s to just over 500. Recently, though, I seem to be in a plateau around that half-thousand figure, and it’s frustrating. Why? Well, the first reason is due to a misconception of mine. As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the Chess Dojo training program, which is sensibly divided into rating ranges, with different assigned tasks for each range. I’m in the lowest, which is labeled 0-400. I was eagerly awaiting getting to 400 on one of the online chess platforms, chess.com. It would feel so good to “graduate” and not be in the lowliest cohort anymore. But I had neither read the fine print nor remembered that everything involving chess has to be complicated. There are a zillion different rating systems in chess. It is not like, say, batting average. Even chess.com and lichess.org, our main playing spaces, do not agree. My ~500 on chess.com is not greater than the 400 of Chess Dojo, which uses FIDE, the system of the International Chess Federation, admittedly a more legitimate standard to use. However, the fine print says that the 0-400 band covers ratings of up to 650 on chess.com.

I know, your eyes may be glazing over and you are thinking that this is too much obsessing about numbers. But the other drawback of a low rating is that it is a little lonely at the bottom. Although you can learn from facing opponents who have ratings significantly lower or higher than yours, and you should of course play them occasionally, the ideal chess opponent is someone near your level. It’s just the right degree of challenge, and both players have a chance of winning and gaining a few rating points. As I write this, there are about 65 people enrolled in the 0-400 band of the Chess Dojo training program, which has been hugely successful–more than its creators envisioned–recently attaining its 1,000th participant. But only 15 or so members of that lowest cohort have a chess.com rating below 600, like me. Why? Well, Chess Dojo lets you sign up for whatever cohort you want, and they provide such good training of the fundamentals of chess that people want to spend time at the lower levels to make sure their chess foundation is solid. That’s all good. But one of my hopes for the program was to find serious people around my rating to play with–instead of those wonderful random strangers I play online every day.

Our rating band recently had a tournament. Only six people, or about 10 percent of the cohort, entered, and during the three-week period of the tournament, two of those “graduated” to the next level up. So I played one person at my rating level and two who were considerably higher. I finished last, with 0 wins. This sounds like I am blaming my poor performance on the rating differentials, but I am not. My teacher has said that I can defeat anyone–especially those with ratings up to 1,000–as long as I don’t blunder, and that has given me some wind under my wings. I went into the tournament games thinking that I could win any game, but in each case I eventually blundered. I did capitalize on a blunder made by the opponent at exactly my level, but not enough to win. The tournament was actually a great experience for me. These were the longest games I had ever played. Although the training program suggests that people in the 0-400 band play games no longer than 30 minutes per side, the tournament games were 90 minutes per side. One of my games lasted for 2 hours and 20 minutes! This is excellent training for over-the-board tournaments, which generally have long time controls. But I think my brain needs more practice before it can correctly calculate “if he takes this, and I take that, and he takes this, and I take that. . .” for more than an hour at a stretch.

In any event, a new tournament for our band has been announced, and I will soldier on, no matter the ratings of the other entrants. If I defeat someone with a higher rating, I get more rating points, so maybe I will graduate one of these days. At least I know I’ll be playing with people who care enough about their chess improvement to pay to join a training program, and when schedules permit we meet online to do a post-mortem of the game and/or compare written analyses, essential pieces of any chess improvement plan.

Some Progress, Finally

Some Progress, Finally

Published by Dawn on September 27, 2022

Just as I was beginning to think that my chess would never improve, it did–not so much in rating points–but very definitely in my ability to look at the board and evaluate my positions. In the past, I would sometimes avoid playing because of loss of confidence following a loss. My finger would hover over the “Play” button on chess.com, never making contact, or I would stare at the lichess lobby (where one looks for available games) for minutes on end, never daring to make a selection.

Finally, I told myself that in order to make online playing less of a source of anxiety, I would have to do it often. I set a goal of one game per day, with someone within one or two hundred points of my rating, and a time control of 30 minutes. I found that lichess was not practical on weekdays because there were not enough suitable players. But there is always someone who matches my parameters on the behemoth chess.com.

The first day of my new program was a Sunday, and I amazed myself by attempting three games on lichess. I played well in the first one, leading my opponent to resign early. Encouraged, and because that game had been rather short, I tried again. This may be hard to believe given what is going on in professional chess today, or maybe it will be easy to believe for the same reason, but after a few moves in that game lichess let me know that my opponent had been found to be cheating. The game was stopped, and points were added to my rating, so I decided to play again. This third time, though, I lost.

From the beginning of my online chess playing I have always looked at the helpful game reviews provided by the apps, and eventually I myself started analyzing and annotating games without first referring to the app’s review. But I think that this particular game marked the first time that I was able to clearly analyze what it was in my emotional state during the game that led me to lose–another sign of my improvement. The opponents I am matched with in my lowly rating band often do not follow the accepted rules that beginners are told to live by early in the game: developing their pieces, bringing their king to safety, and not bringing the queen out too early. Such novices move a few pawns and then quickly and dramatically sweep their queen across a diagonal toward my side of the board. There are some early checkmates that can happen if one is not aware of the threats that this behavior poses, one of which is called “The Wayward Queen Attack.” I have studied some of these, but like most things, if I don’t experience them or refer back to my notes, I can be caught unawares when they actually happen. Thus I have tended to panic when a queen comes my way early, and on that particular Sunday morning, I did so, in a big way. Since that game, however, I have finally been able to do something that I had previously been unable to, which is to follow the advice of my teacher and others to simply stay calm and analyze what threats the queen might pose, defending against them one-by-one. Since that panicky Sunday morning, I have won at least two games simply by doing this.

It has been two weeks since I began playing daily. My heartbeat still accelerates when I first get into the game, but not nearly as much as it used to do. Also, I have adopted a new behavior when I am playing on chess.com, where the opponent’s rating is displayed in the upper left corner of the screen, so that it is possible to play without looking at it. On lichess you can hide all ratings by going to Settings and scrolling down to the last option under Display (thanks, chess Twitter, for pointing this out!). Also, I implemented the suggestion of another teacher to turn off chat in chess.com (no more “Hurry up, Bro” and worse). Recently on chess twitter someone posted three rules to follow when playing chess. The one I remember is to keep your emotions in check. For me, that goes for both negative and positive emotions. When I blunder my queen, I need to keep a cool head and remember that in other games that I have played the opponent ended up making similar blunders, so all is not lost. I also need to slow down when I think I see an amazing fork or other tactic. So many times my presumed “forking piece” was easily captured by my opponent, or my capture of their queen was actually a trade of queens that I did not intend.

Soon it will be one year since I began taking chess pretty seriously. It’s a relief to feel that I have finally seen some progress, although the over-achiever in me wishes for much more. But it is a journey, not a destination.