I should have heeded it. Instead, I committed to a feverish publishing schedule, posting nearly every day. I was riding high on the steroids that are the first part of the treatment. I had…

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The initial step of treatment involved a very high dose of steroids to reduce inflammation. Not only did it relieve my symptoms, it gave me a huge boost of energy. I felt the need to sleep only a few hours of night, and had tremendous optimism and energy for new projects. It felt like I was living my best life.

I was also, I recognize now, in a manic state brought on by my medication. While I did some good work that I’m proud of (including many of the posts I wrote here), I also made some stupid decisions and unrealistic plans. I knew eventually I would come back to earth and have to grapple with life with a chronic illness. I’m now in the process of figuring out what my new normal looks like.

I’m going to take the last two weeks of the year off from posting to spend time with my family and figure out my next steps. While I don’t know where I’ll go from here, it means a lot to me that people read these posts and get value from them. Thank you, and have a wonderful holiday season.

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Do you ever cook something great and then totally forget about it? That was short ribs for me. I hadn’t made these in such a long time, but my wife started requesting them because they’re one of her favorites. This is rich fare, perfect for the colder weather we’re getting now. The great thing about this dish is the final result is incredibly decadent, but they’re actually really easy to make. I like Ethan Chlebowski’s recipe:

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As always, the puzzle is available for everyone, and there’s a detailed video solution for paid subscribers.

It’s White to play. Good luck!

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1. Game of the Week is not a brilliancy prize. In fact, you’re more likely to have your game chosen if you share a loss. These often have more to teach us than our wins.

2. The player whose game is selected for Game of the Week will get a free month’s paid subscription. Just to sweeten the pot a little.

3. I will only consider submissions in the comments section of this post for Game of the Week. It’s just easier for me to have them all in one place.

4. As always, the video and Lichess Study analysis are available for everyone, but only paid subs can submit games.

This week’s game comes from . This game really highlights the importance of scanning for any hanging pieces every move, as well as avoiding FPS (Fancy Play Syndrome).

On with the game!

Video Review

Lichess Study

At the same time, sometimes there really is something blocking you that you could change. Today I’ll talk about the top five things that I see blocking most players.

1. You don’t play chess

When I started asking my students and readers more questions about how they actually worked on chess, I discovered something surprising: many of them don’t play chess. Sometimes I had to do a double take: “In addition to all the studying you told me about, you’re also playing games, right?” Sometimes the answer was no.

Out of all the chess activities, playing is the most intimidating. It’s a direct confrontation with another person. For a lot of people, that’s very uncomfortable. So they study, watch videos, read books, anything to avoid that confrontation.

Yet it’s also the most important. If you want to get better at chess, you have to play chess. No other form of practice is as relevant or as important. And as always, how you do it is just as important as what you do. To get better, you need to play with focus and intensity.

2. You don’t review your games

Part of the value of playing is getting experience in the trenches. But another big part is getting fodder for review.

As with playing, how you review is just as important as that you review, perhaps more so. Many players fall into one of two camps:

1. The excuse makers

2. The self-flagellators

Excuse-makers always have a reason that their mistake wasn’t really a mistake, or that there was some extenuating circumstance. They seem to want to convince you that they’re already the superior chess player that they’re trying to become. The problem is that their play and results don’t back this up.

The self-flagellators go the opposite direction. They beat themselves up mercilessly for inaccuracies that would flummox a grandmaster.

The two groups are more similar than they seem. Neither are taking a clear-eyed look at their games. It would be better to be neutral, but best of all is to be curious. To see your mistakes not as threats to your ego or proof that you suck, but as the best clues about what you need to work on. If you can truly embrace this mindset, game review stops being painful and starts to get really interesting.

3. You study material that’s too hard

We probably all know someone who talks a big game about studying Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual. Great book, but most appropriate for players 2400+. There is a temptation to believe that studying more advanced material will accelerate your improvement, but more often than not the opposite is true.

If you are learning concepts that are too advanced, you will probably misapply them. There’s also the opportunity cost: time spent studying material that’s too advanced is time you are not spending studying something that is appropriate for your level.

The other big reason people study more advanced material is to appear stronger than they are. Few players are comfortable admitting that they are mostly studying hanging pieces or basic tactics. And if you do this, there’s a good chance your progress will outstrip the guys working on Dvoretsky.

GM Jacob Aagaard, who’s worked with world champion candidates, emphasized the importance of training the basics.

4. You work on too many things at once

Another thing that often surprises me when I ask new students what they’re working on is just how many different things there are, both on a daily basis, and over the course of a week. They might be trying to upgrade their openings, games, and calculation all at once. And they might be trying to work on all of these things every day.

Fundamentally changing any part of your chess game is hard. Not only do you have to learn new concepts, you have to change thought patterns and reinforce the new patterns to the point where they’re effective under the pressure of competition. For that reason, it’s best to focus on one project at a time. If you feel like rook endgames are holding you back, by all means work on those. But don’t also try to swap out your whole opening repertoire at the same time.

Likewise, for most players, it makes sense to focus on one thing per day. Some quick basic tactics, and perhaps spaced repetition of opening lines, are good to do every day and can be combined with other forms of training. But beyond that, it’s hard to do more than one thing at once unless you’re really a chess professional who spends multiple hours studying every day. If you’ve got an hour or less per day for chess, which realistically is true of almost everyone, it’s far easier to focus on one thing. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of your time switching between tasks.

5. You freak out when things go wrong

The kicker with all of the above is that you have to be consistent. Chess improvement takes place over months and years, not days and weeks. Many people do the right things sometimes, but don’t string together the consistent periods of focused study that would actually lead to improvement.

Of course it’s possible that there’s a problem with your game or your training plan that you need to change. But if so, this should emerge over months. One bad day or bad tournament doesn’t necessarily mean much. Be thoughtful about reviewing your games and habits, but don’t overreact to a single result.

What do you think? Do any of these apply to you?

Yet, as with any form of chess training, how you do it is as important as what you do. If you solve puzzles with a bad thought process, that’s the process you’re practicing and reinforcing.

Today I’ll go through my thought process for solving puzzles, which I call ACED: Align, Calculate, Evaluate, Decide.

Align

The first step is to align yourself with the position. In other words, to get your bearing, recognize the main elements, and determine what you’re trying to accomplish. This is especially important in a puzzle, because in contrast to a game where you have an ongoing narrative and some preexisting ideas about the position, here you’re dropped into a completely unfamiliar scenario.

A good place to start is the material imbalance. Material isn’t always the most important factor, but it often is, and it tells you a lot about what you need to accomplish. If you’re down a rook, you probably need to win a lot of material or create mating threats very quickly. If you’re up a rook, all you need to do is survive. You’d be amazed how often I’ve seen players look at a position for a long time without realizing they’re way up (or way down) material.

Counting the material also acts as an on-ramp to thinking about the position, because it’s quick and easy. Even if it doesn’t end up being the most important factor in the position, you should still be aware of it.

When it comes to looking at the other factors, there are several templates you can use. I like K-MAP for evaluation, and it works well for alignment too: King safety, Material (already did that!), Activity, Pawn structure.

Another good template is Aagaard’s three questions:

1. What is the worst piece?

2. Where are the weaknesses?

3. What is my opponent’s idea?

Ultimately, these are both good ways to start thinking about the position. Not every point or question is guaranteed to yield fruit every time, but usually at least one of them will point you in a good direction. The more skilled you become, the more intuitive the process gets.

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This week I’m doing something a little different, reviewing my blitz games. I love to use blitz as a proving ground for a new opening repertoire. The games may not be as polished, but you quickly get a sense if your opponents are ready for what you’re doing, or not. So far, most of them haven’t been!

I review two games against 2500+ opponents where I was able to get two crushing wins with the same idea of pushing the h-pawn and sacrificing a knight.

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Coup

We recently cleaned out our basement. Various things had gotten lost down there, whether to water damage or just getting lumped in with old junk. For the most part they were things I didn’t mind losing, but I was bummed out that I couldn’t find my copy of the card game Coup. The game designer, Rikki Tahta, sent it to me after I wrote a blog post analyzing the strategy from a game theory perspective. They since changed the art to a technopunk theme that I don’t like nearly as much as the original. As far as I can tell, it’s virtually impossible to find the original anywhere, for any price. So I was thrilled when my copy turned up.

Coup is a bluffing game played with cards. You get a secret role, but you can use abilities of roles you don’t have…but the other players can also call you out. It makes for a great party game, even with non-gamers. Somehow the bluffing element allows players to express their personalities, while having a little more texture, and not as much stress, as poker. Like I said, I don’t like the new art as much, but the rules haven’t changed and the game is still a lot of fun.

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As always, the puzzle is available for everyone, and there’s a detailed video solution for paid subscribers.

It’s White to play. Good luck!

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1. Game of the Week is not a brilliancy prize. In fact, you’re more likely to have your game chosen if you share a loss. These often have more to teach us than our wins.

2. The player whose game is selected for Game of the Week will get a free month’s paid subscription. Just to sweeten the pot a little.

3. I will only consider submissions in the comments section of this post for Game of the Week. It’s just easier for me to have them all in one place.

4. As always, the video and Lichess Study analysis are available for everyone, but only paid subs can submit games.

This week’s game comes from , who got a good position against a higher-rated opponent, but eventually blundered in time pressure. I talk about the importance of auditing your time usage, not only for time management, but to discover what parts of your game need work.

On with the game!

Video Review

Lichess Study

Anyone who’s actually played serious chess knows this isn’t how it goes. Even for the most talented players, the road to the top is paved with long stretches of losses, often with no apparent progress.

Today we’re talking about plateaus: what they are, what causes them, and the million-dollar question: how to get out of one.

The GOAT adult improver

In our livestream from last week, made a great point: Michael Johnson, arguably the greatest adult improver of all time, experienced numerous plateaus punctuated by short bursts of improvement. Unlike many players who make impressive gains later in life, Johnson didn’t start with a strong base of chess understanding developed at a much younger age. He played his first tournament at age 36 and his first rating was 981. Over the course of many years, he increased his rating to a high of 2134, an amazing achievement by any standard. Yet, if you were to zoom in on any moment in that stretch, chances are you’d find him on a plateau.

If the greatest adult improver of all time spent most of his time on the plateau, what can the rest of us reasonably expect?

SMART goals

One of the most popular frameworks for goal setting is SMART goals. This stands for:

1. Specific

2. Measurable

3. Attainable

4. Realistic

5. Time-bound

But as Dan pointed out, specific rating targets are unrealistic to expect on a specified timetable.

I’m currently reading a draft copy of new book. Stulberg suggests that SMART goals are most effective when you’re new to a subject, and improvement is relatively quick and easy. As you become more advanced and progress becomes more difficult, they lose their effectiveness and can even become counterproductive.

At this point, it might come better to ditch SMART goals for bigger picture goals that help you stay aligned with your values. For example, when you’re just starting out at chess, you might have success with a goal like, “Gain 100 points in six months.” But later on, you might be better served by a goal like, “Explore chess with curiosity and focus.”

If you’re on a plateau, you’ve reached a point where, by definition, progress is not easy. Therefore, a SMART goal may not the right tool for the job.

North star goals

Inspired by Ono, another livestream guest, Dan now believes in north star goals. In contrast to smart goals, a north star goal is not time-bound. It’s a big picture vision of where you want to end up. As Ono says,

“Instead, having a non-time specific ‘one day’ ambition can help you to remember why you’re studying this board game so intensely, particularly if you’re in your office hearing the white noise of a Netflix standup comedy special coming from the next room.”

Whether you subscribe to SMART goals, north star goals, or some other template, the most important thing is to work backward from your goal and break it down to daily actions that are under your control.

What’s going on during a plateau?

So far, this has all been rather tactical, but there’s also a mystery to plateaus. Why do we see this pattern of a long period of stagnation followed by sudden, apparently unexplained growth so often? What’s happening during the plateau, and what, if anything, causes someone to break out of it?

I don’t know, but I have a few ideas:

• The knowledge-skill gap: Many adult players focus on acquiring knowledge (e.g., by reading chess books) but don’t devote enough time to transforming their knowledge into actionable skill on the chessboard. On the other end of the spectrum, some players grind endless games without ever reviewing them, thinking about where they’re going wrong, or acquiring new knowledge. Getting better at chess requires both knowledge and skill, but in terms of practice time, the lion’s share has to go to building up skills. It takes much longer to learn how to use a concept effectively than to simply learn that it exists.

• Two steps forward, one step back: When learning a new concept, it’s not surprising that your game would stagnate or even take a step back. It’s like getting a new car. Your new car might be nicer than the old one, but there might be a period of time where you’re still getting accustomed to how to drive it, and you’re actually a worse driver.

• Consistency: What both of the above have in common is that you can expect a period of stagnation or even decline before seeing positive results. For many players, they might abandon the plan before ever getting to that point.

How to break through a plateau

This is the million-dollar question, but it’s made very difficult by the tension between two apparently sensible statements:

1. If what you’re doing isn’t working, you should try something else. What got you here won’t get you there.

2. Given that plateaus are the norm, it would be foolish to abandon a plan before it has a chance to work.

I believe the best way to resolve this tension is to commit to a sensible strategy, but vary your tactics. The core things you have to do to improve at chess aren’t really that complicated…

…but few people do these consistently over a period of months or years (maybe that’s another reasons for plateaus).

If you’re consistent with these basics, you can experiment around the margins. Try learning a new opening or doing guess-the move training with a player whose games you’ve never looked at before. You might stumble upon a technique that really works for you, or at worst, give yourself a breath of fresh air.

There is one specific adjustment that has come up so often that I feel it’s worth mentioning. In my discussion with GM Jacob Aagaard on doing tactics, we agreed that up to around 1600, doing a large volume of basic puzzles is key. After that, it makes sense to mix in some more difficult calculations. I’ve noticed that a lot of players are struggling with plateaus in precisely that 1600-1800 region, so if that’s you, mixing in some more difficult calculation training might be something to consider.

Wrapping up

I have a confession to make: I believe, if I really had to, I could achieve a big rating gain in a short amount of time. But, speaking rationally, this is probably just me falling victim to the same illusion as everyone else. Maybe we’ll find out in 2026!

I quickly realized some adjustments were necessary from the initial challenge. For less experienced players, 3+2 was too fast, so I recommended adjusting the daily challenge to two games of 5+3 for players rated under 1600. Additionally, many players had their own schedule restrictions or favorite time controls, and I encouraged them to adapt the challenge to fit their routine.

The Data

I collected the Chess.com/Lichess screennames for all participants so I could easily access their results. I’m planning to do a more rigorous data analysis, but a few initial summary statistics:

• 26114 total games

• 12619 wins

• 12239 losses

• 1256 draws

• -576 rating points gained

Yes, that’s right, on average people lost rating points in this challenge. That wasn’t what I expected!

However, that number includes players whose initial rating didn’t reflect their real strength. For example, one player lost 1218 points. There were no comparably large rating gains. I expect that filtering for players with an established starting rating, and who actually did the challenge, will end up showing a modest rating gain on average.

To be honest, I was expecting bigger rating gains overall, but in hindsight a month really isn’t a long time to upgrade your chess. Many players did report qualitative improvements in their chess.

For example, one player said, “But much, much more importantly, I finally got used to a sensible Blitz routine that I intend to keep, and which will get me through and keep me in shape when I’m not playing a decent number of OTB classical games.”

Below, my top seven takeaways, and my own experience as a participant in the challenge…

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So far, we’ve tackled 1…e5 and 1…Nf6 (leading to the King’s Indian) in the opening updates. This week we’ll look at the Symmetrical English with 1…c5. Some people think symmetrical positions are dry, but in fact we can use our extra move to cause a lot of problems. There’s even one line where I play a move on move 3 that’s hardly ever been played before, but is fully engine approved!

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There are no free lunches, but every once in awhile, if you know where to look, there are good deals. It turns out that the freezer aisle is one of those places. Frozen fruits and vegetables are picked when they’re ripe and flash-frozen. They’re not as good as fresh, peak ripeness produce, but for a lot of fruits and vegetables for a lot of the year, they’re better than anything you could get fresh. They’re also cheap and last more or less forever.

Some of my favorite items and uses:

• Snacking: mangoes and cherries. They have a really nice chewy texture when allowed to thaw just slightly.

• Smoothies: mangoes and blueberries.

• Veggie sides: edamame and peas.

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As always, the puzzle is available for everyone, and there’s a detailed video solution for paid subscribers.

It’s White to play. Good luck!

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1. Game of the Week is not a brilliancy prize. In fact, you’re more likely to have your game chosen if you share a loss. These often have more to teach us than our wins.

2. The player whose game is selected for Game of the Week will get a free month’s paid subscription. Just to sweeten the pot a little.

3. I will only consider submissions in the comments section of this post for Game of the Week. It’s just easier for me to have them all in one place.

4. As always, the video and Lichess Study analysis are available for everyone, but only paid subs can submit games.

This week’s game comes from Carl Labanz. Carl got the upper hand against his much higher rated opponent, but the middlegame took some unexpected twists and turns, and at some point the clock became a factor.

On with the game!

Video Review

Lichess Study

As commentator Greg Olsen explained, “Philly trailed by 15. That’s a 2 score game slightly less than 50% of time (2pt success rate). It’s a 3 score game the remaining %. You want to know as early as possible how many possessions you need.”

The point is that to tie the game, you’re going to need another touchdown and a two-point conversion. You can either go for the two-point conversion now or when you get the next touchdown. If you fail the two-point conversion, you’re probably screwed either way, but by going for it immediately, at least you get that information as soon as possible. That gives you the chance to try an onside kick to get the ball back. It’s not a great chance, but it’s better than nothing. And if you waited to try the two-point conversion, you wouldn’t have known you needed it until too late.

Many commentators derided Olsen’s tweet as “analytics,” but it’s not really even analytics, which involves data and observation. It’s just logic and math. The logic is fairly straightforward, but most people don’t like it. If you scroll through the responses to Olsen’s tweet, you’ll see that a large majority disagree with it.

The top response came from lineman JJ Watt:

“Analytically, that is absolutely correct. The counterpoint would be the human element of a team’s mindset/mentality only being down one score instead of two. Right or wrong, there is some unquantifiable aspect to the belief & confidence of knowing you’re only down one score”

Watt’s point seems to be that if you stay down by “one score” (8 points instead of 9 points) your team will play harder. If this is actually true, it points to a much bigger problem than these kinds of marginal 2-point conversion decisions. If your players are so emotionally fragile that you have to avoid obviously correct strategic decisions to protect their feelings, then you have a huge problem with mental toughness. It’s amazing to me that tough guys like Watt are so willing to tolerate and even embrace this level of psychological fragility.

But to take a step back, it’s interesting to think about why so many people seem to be opposed to going for two, even though the logic in favor of it is fairly straightforward. There seem to be two things going on:

The first is results-oriented thinking. Of course, on some level, you have to be results-oriented: results are what count in the real world. But in high-variance situations like going for a two-point conversion, the results don’t tell you much. Of course, you knew all along a failed attempt was a possibility. The fact that the attempt failed in this particular instance doesn’t tell you much about the quality of the decision.

The bigger issue though is risk aversion. If you read through the responses, it seems that most people don’t think in terms of maximizing their win percentage. Instead, they bucket the game state into two categories:

1. Already over

2. Still a chance

Their goal is to keep the game in the “still a chance” category as long as possible. The main priority is to delay the moment of reckoning. What I think this ultimately comes back to and where it ties into chess is fear of failure.

I recently gave a simul at a local public library. I was doing the simul for a kid’s club, but as it turned out, there weren’t quite enough kids there to fill all the boards. We had two boards left, and I told the parents that they could play if they wanted to. As soon as I made this offer, the fear and discomfort in the room was palpable. Ultimately, only one mom was brave enough to sit down at one of the boards. The other board remained empty.

This might sound odd, but in my day-to-day life, I don’t have a lot of occasion to interact with normal adults “in the wild.” Most of my workday is writing on my computer or teaching lessons online. The rest of my day is mostly chores and taking care of the kids. When I do interact with adults in a group setting, I am often taken aback by how fearful they are: fearful of appearing different, and especially fearful of failure.

This is a good thing to remember when it comes to chess improvement. For most adults, the biggest hurdle is not learning how to play against an isolated queen pawn or whatever. It’s accepting the possibility of failure. Given that everyone has to lose thousands of games to get really good, embracing failure is absolutely essential.

In poker, there is a word for people who are too risk-averse. We call them nits. A nit is someone who’s risk-averse to the point that it limits their own opportunities. They avoid profitable plays or bets because they’re too scared.

While popular wisdom would suggest that math and strategy usually point in the direction of the conservative option, the actual math often goes the opposite way, as in the case of Sirianni’s two-point try. This is certainly true in poker, where solvers (poker’s version of chess engines) play far more aggressively than virtually any human. It’s true in chess as well, where advanced neural network engines like LeelaZero are ultra-aggressive.

And in fact, for most people, their emotions often pull them in the direction of excessively conservative approaches. Compulsive gamblers are real, but they’re a minority of the population. Most people prefer to stay in a their comfort zone.

One example from chess is a final round game when many players are tied for first going into the round. The more players in the tie, the stronger the incentive to go all out for a win, because the higher the chances that at least someone will in fact win. And yet, most chess grandmasters are uncomfortable with this “win at all costs” type of mentality. They’re so accustomed to making draws that it’s hard for them to flip the switch.

At the amateur level, it’s less about tournament strategy and more about simply showing up on a consistent basis. Playing games with full focus, going to tournaments, focusing on the real weaknesses in your game. Most people are too scared of failure to even try. Just by trying, you can give yourself a huge advantage over almost everyone.