Tag: recommended youtube

More Chess On The Brain — And Other Resources

Returning to chess many years later, I’m realizing that “modern theory” didn’t wait around while I was gone. Almost all of the books that I read back in the day were written pre-1960.

The 12th century Lewis Chessmen

I recently came across Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy: Advances Since Nimzowitsch by John Watson. (Nimzowitsch’s classic “My System” was written in 1925.) I’d heard of Watson’s book, and it happened to be available at the local used book store, so that one has been added to the library. Modern Chess Strategy was written in 1998, which for me qualifies as “new theory”.

In a lot of respects Modern Chess Strategy has been more eye-opening for me than Silman’s How to Reassess Your Chess. (Published 2010). Given the reading foundation I already have, the Silman book seemed like a lot of “I’ve already seen that idea”. Though there are a lot of people who read Silman’s book and attribute significant rating gains to having read it.

All of this is not intended as a dig at How To Reassess Your Chess. Had I not already worked through Pawn Power In Chess (Kmoch), My System, and other old classics, I’m sure Silman’s book would have opened up my mind to a lot of things that I’d previously had no idea about.

So that’s not where intended this blog entry to go…

My phone has been acquiring an increasing number of Chess apps and website links, with an emphasis on free stuff. I might be fine with paying a one-time fee for some of these sites, or making a donation, but I’m not going to sign up for several hundred dollars annually in courses and membership fees. There are some instances better database manipulation would be nice, but I have no intention of ever turning pro, so I can live with my workarounds. Chess can be an almost free hobby if you want it to be.

Listed below is online stuff I’ve been using. Note that I’m not covering all of the features available for each, just the features I’m using right now. Most of these offer games and training at the very least:

The Lichess app, Lichess.org, and Listudy: The Lichess app is where I spend most of my chess time. All free, no ads, free studies about nearly any chess subject. You can even personalize studies if you choose to. Or create your own study with the subject you’re focused on. Terrific resources. Lichess.org is the web version which offers some different functionality. Listudy is maintained by a different group of people I think, and offers some training and studies.

Chess.com: Monetized through and through. Some good free stuff available but if you’re not willing to pay a monthly fee then many or most of the useful things are behind a paywall. For me that’s a hard pass.

Chessbook: I’ve been using this for spaced repetition opening training. The free limit is 100 moves per side per color. That worked fine when I could fit all of my white openings with only a few lines each under the limit. I’m now to the point where I can practice a subset of the current white opening that I’m working on, so I’ve broken the opening into smaller modules that I can save and swap out when I want to work on something else. Again, workarounds.

PGN files: Mostly freely available from virtually every site. Games, openings, studies, you name it. This is (I think) the most common file format for chess content. Many websites and apps will allow you to export your study/opening/game to a PGN file, which you can save and share with other sites or friends. I’m still learning the syntax for writing directly into a PGN file — it hasn’t been a priority yet so it hasn’t happened.

Scid vs PC: A PGN Database handler, among other things. I’ll be using this a lot more in the future. You can import games/ openings/ studies, etc in PGN form. It allows for chess engine plug-ins. It’s free in contrast to many other options. I haven’t had the time to really explore this yet either, but I think it’s going to get a lot of use.

Chessable: I’ve started using Chessable a little more lately. They offer free courses, with a whole bunch more courses behind a paywall. There are a couple of free openings courses that I’m working through, but I don’t know what my long-term relationship with that site is going to look like. I do think there’s some functionality I haven’t really looked at yet, so maybe I’ll be singing a very different tune later.

QChess.net: Pretty new, and I only happened across it last week. There’s a searchable database and an opening trainer, among other features.

Chess Tempo: Has both an app and a web presence. I’ve been using its Advanced DB search to look for particular players playing particular openings. It offers many other features as well that I haven’t delved into yet.

And that’s what I’ve found in the first couple of months. I know that I’m missing a bunch of quality sites and quality content creators. This blog post will likely need a revisit at some point.

As for me, I’m not playing a ton of games, and I started out with a relatively not-awesome Lichess Rapid rating, but my win rate remains high and I’m gaining a significant amount of rating each month. I’m sure there’s a plateau coming eventually but I haven’t hit it yet. “To Infinity And Beyond!” …. No, of course not. But the journey is fun.

Returning To Chess As An Adult Learner

Before home internet. That’s the last time I would have been considered an “active” chess player. At that time the resources for learning were either books or people. Back then I was a member of the local chess club, and I had a small handful of books including Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, Pawn Power In Chess by Hans Kmoch, Nimzovich’s My System, and a massive encyclopedia of openings that probably dated from the 1970s.

I recently got the bug again. I did some internet reading, and started watching a few Youtube videos. I loaded the Lichess app onto my phone (totally free and no ads!), and after a couple of games against bots decided to try some rated 10+5 games (10 minutes + 5 seconds added per move).

To backtrack just a bit — when I played at the club a zillion years ago many of the players were better than I was. Everyone had favorite openings and pretty much stuck to them. My openings were mostly sharp, tactical, and study intensive because I liked games like that. (Ruy Lopez or Sicilian Dragon as white, Sicilian Dragon as black when I could get them. I was trying to attack and channel Fischer and Alekhine.) Overall though, the whole experience was pretty controlled and genteel.

When I recently started playing online I discovered I was playing against a large percentage of people who would substitute traps, straight aggression, or just insane crazy moves in place of what I’d call an “opening”. Initially I had trouble with it and it’s taken a little while to adjust, but by now I’ve figured out that if I just play it cool and “sound” — most of that stuff blows up at some point and I’ll have a superior position. But it’s wild, at the level where I am there’s a lot of rock fights.

So now I’d be considered an Adult Learner. Or Adult Improver if was ambitious and trying for a high rating. What that means to the community is that I have interest in the game but I also have a very definite ceiling as to how far I could reasonably advance, mostly due to lack of a malleable brain and a finite time available for commitment. Which is fine with me, I’m having fun with it. I enjoy the learning and I enjoy the competitiveness of playing the games. I do want to improve but I don’t have any illusions of ever getting to be better than the level of a respectable club player.

I’ll close with a few things that have been helpful for me getting back into the swing of it after a very long time away.

For Youtube: I watched all of the Chessbrahs Building Habits series. Building Habits is pretty universally recommended and it helped me feel much more comfortable and confident. I watched a number of Gothamchess videos (Levy Roseman). Lately it’s been Daniel Naroditsky, who to my mind does the best job of teaching more advanced concepts and getting deeper into the positions and potential positions in his games.

For general books: How To Reassess Your Chess: Chess Mastery Through Chess Imbalances by Jeremy Silman (4th ed). By far the most recommended book I’ve seen and for good reason. It covers some of everything. I can do without some of the writing style, but it was a very good refresher for a lot of concepts for me with a few new ideas sprinkled in. Lots of people say they get better after reading this book. His endgame book is very highly regarded as well. I own it, but I haven’t gotten deeply into it yet.

I also feel more comfortable when I have openings to refer to as a templates for piece and pawn placement. For me, even learning 5-7 moves into a smallish numbers of common openings helps me not wind up all twisted going into the midgame. My pieces tend to wind up better deployed if I have the framework of an idea to work around.

I always played e4 (Kings Pawn) back in the day (The Fischer influence, again). Returning to chess, I was looking for a repertoire that wouldn’t require a ton of study and matched what I think I want the games to broadly look like. I landed on A Simple Chess Opening Repertoire For White by Sam Collins. It includes some openings I had already independently decided I was going to use, such as the Alapin Sicilian against …c5 and the Italian Game against …e5 . There were a few of other commonalities as well. The overall theme of the book is sound openings requiring limited study where I can still start with my preferred e4. The repertoire is based around white steering the game into Isolated Queens Pawn (IQP) structures, where the white advantage is to come from superior familiarity with the ideas of the position. The IQP approach is newish to me, but I happened to spend part of a week in a cabin in the woods with the book and no internet, and I’ve now worked through most of the main lines presented. I think the framework has promise.

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Thoughts about the blog:

I used to write about games fairly frequently here. Given that chess currently has my interest I’d imagine I’ll be posting about the subject as well going forward. I can also see my sourdough baking getting more attention. We’ll see what else gets my attention next — I was feeling in a rut, and today’s chess post is fresh air.