Stop hanging pieces.. But how??
From Beginner to 2000 on Chess.com
The first thing a student should do, is to familiarise himself with the power of the pieces. This can best be done by learning how to accomplish quickly some of the simple mates.
— Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals
To write my book I need to start at the beginner stage. I was also a beginner once, but it is many years ago, and I want to better understand the mind of the beginner before I write anything.
I have decided that I do not want the book to start with how the pieces move and how to checkmate. The book should help solve the biggest issues holding people from advancing to the next level. First, I turned to the Twitter brain to get some input:
The most common replies were:
Stop hanging pieces
Stop blundering
Tactics, tactics, tactics
It all seems very too easy to say “stop blundering” to the beginner and expect they will improve. Therefore I asked my brother, who picked up chess last year to try to understand what he had experienced trying to stop blundering.
He relatively quickly improved from 900 to 1450 on Lichess in rapid. The games on this level still contain blunders. Just look at this one, where Black performs a kind of selfmate (mail: click on the picture to open in Lichess):
I asked what he contributed to his improvement “I think the most important thing was to learn not to make blunders all the time and there are some patterns that repeat themselves, especially the one with the king trapped behind three pawns.”
I found it amazing that he hadn’t learned the term for a back-rank mate, but still categorized it, so I asked him what resources he had studied “I saw a little Hikaru. But doubt it was useful. Maybe a random video and otherwise I just played during my lunch break every day and a little in the evening.”
My brother stopped playing before he fully came out of the blunder phase, but by noticing patterns in his games he where able to improve without courses, tactics, and books. But it still made me wonder.
I decided to ask Ono, who writes an amazing chess blog on Lichess and coaches beginners if he can join me for a podcast episode next week. I hope he can help me get an understanding of what it is like to be a chess beginner and how he helps his students stop blundering.
What is the best advice you have read in the chess literature on the subject of stopping blunders?
/Martin
Next to checks, threats and captures... I try to keep these 4 questions in mind. Does not work always...
1. How can I lose?
2. What are the weak squares/pawns in the position?
3. What is the opponent's plan?
4. What is my worst piece and why?
It starts with board vision. Everything else comes sooner or later. Even thinking system is drawn later.
Dan's book - Everyone's 2nd Chess book go through this Beginner to next level so thoroughly.
According to him the space between Beginner vs next level is not well researched and people jump directly into tactics, mate etc - without having board vision.
I had tested some of these myself long back when coaching. Eg Knight vision exercises.
Now when teaching to my kids, I following same techniques after researching.
All other books for beginners [plenty of books out there] and next level [move by move, basic tactics etc] comes later. For adults there may have been books like Rapid Chess improvement from Michael da la maza but they come later as well.