5 Reasons You're Not Improving

Last week, I wrote about plateaus. Once you get past the beginner stage, plateaus are the norm for everyone. They don’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything wrong. You might just need to keep going.

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?