How to get better at chess: a no-nonsense plan

8 min read

Most "how to get better at chess" advice is useless. "Study more." "Analyze your games." Sure, but in what order, and how much of each? Here's the plan I'd hand my past self, ranked by how much it actually moves your rating.

Spend 80% of your time on tactics

If you're under 1500, tactics are basically the whole game. You win when your opponent hangs a piece and you spot it. You lose when you hang one and they spot it. That's the game. So daily puzzles are your bread and butter: 10 to 15 a day, every day, no exceptions.

When one theme keeps burning you, drill it directly. Bad at forks or pins? Do 20 in a row until the shape is automatic. Pattern recognition is a muscle, and it grows fast.

Stop hanging your own pieces

The flip side of tactics: before every move, ask "what does this leave undefended?" Sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it. The hanging pieces drill exists because giving away free material is the number one rating killer below 1200. I go deeper on this in why you keep losing at chess.

Learn 5 endgames, not 50

You'll reach a winning endgame and throw it away if you don't know the technique. You don't need a 400-page book. You need the opposition and four others. I wrote up exactly which five, and why, in this post.

Openings come last, and matter least

Controversial, but true at your level: your opening barely matters. Pick one simple system, play it every single game, and stop tinkering. I'd start with the Italian Game. Full reasoning in the best openings for beginners. Don't spend more than 10% of your time here until you're past 1600.

Review the games you lose

After a loss, find the one move where it actually went wrong. Not "I was worse by move 30," the single move that flipped it. Paste the game into the review tool and the Guru points straight at it and explains why in plain English. Ten focused minutes per loss beats an hour of YouTube.

The actual weekly schedule

• 10 to 15 tactics puzzles, daily. This is the non-negotiable one.
• One drill on your worst theme, a few times a week.
• Review every game you lose, one move at a time.
• 15 minutes on endgames each week.
• Openings: pick one, then leave them alone.

Do that for a month and you'll feel the jump. The whole plan runs on aichess.guru for free, and the Guru explains every mistake out loud so you're never guessing why a move was bad.