Category: General

The end of 2022 coincided roughly with the end of my first full year of studying chess (although I lost a couple of months dealing with a knee that ultimately had to be replaced). Soon after I started playing, I set a ratings goal for myself of 600. It amuses me to think of this now, because when I set it I had no idea that there were many different ratings systems, which are not easily translatable to one another. I finished the year with a chess.com rapid rating of 556, and although I am as eager as always to go higher–especially to reach 660 so that I can climb out of the Chess Dojo Training basement–I am pretty satisfied with this for my first year mark. My satisfaction with it increased after I heard Daniel Lona talk with Amy Shaw about ratings on the Chess Experience podcast. They were saying that one number cannot possibly represent all the nuances of someone’s chess performance and suggested thinking of your rating as a range of minus or plus 50 from that number. Which conveniently makes my 2022 rating 506-606. Although I am now very aware of the vagaries of ratings and the pros and cons of using them as a measure of one’s chess, I am still going to set myself a ratings goal for 2023–800.

As with ratings, when I first started playing chess I don’t think I really understood anything about the various time controls. Basically I played whatever time was put before me, which usually happened to be 10 minutes or less (per side) because I was in group settings online designed for people to be able to play multiple games in a short time. It took surprisingly long for me to realize that I needed more time to think about my moves and that I might play much better given the opportunity to do so. Eventually I settled on a time control of 30 minutes per side when seeking playing partners online, and that has been a revelation. Not only has my chess been better, but the opponents with whom I am matched tend to be more serious players, that is, not all tricksters who lead with a “wayward queen attack.” Presumably that goes hand in hand with the fact that a 30 minute time control means that the game can go as long as 60 minutes. Even with 30 minutes, I am losing on time sometimes, but as a relative beginner I don’t think I need to worry about that too much. I assume that more proficiency will bring about some gains in speed.

For a number of months after I started playing, when I didn’t have a friend to play with in person or online, I played against the chess bots of lichess.org and chess.com. This felt easy and safe, I guess because no one was watching (chess.com does not even store those games in your record, although lichess.does). I can’t remember why, but one day I realized that my chess would probably improve more if I played real people instead. It may sound strange, but this takes a bit of courage. Even if you will never meet this person in the flesh and likely never encounter them again online, they are a real person, which triggers a deeper level of accountability than does a bot. I also discovered that playing people around my rating level was the most rewarding for me. Too much lower, and it is not challenging enough; too much higher, and you are so busy defending/being intimidated/dreading the loss that you can’t enjoy or learn from the superior player.

The lessons discussed above can be put more succinctly as: Play real people, around your rating, at a time control that suits your chess ability. In earlier blog posts I also recommend getting a coach and analyzing your games. I plan to keep all of these things in mind in 2023 as I continue to savor this incredibly interesting and amazingly difficult pastime. 

 

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. 

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.    

 

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.