Beginners
How to Study Chess
Most players who want to improve already play a lot of chess. What they lack is a plan for the time they spend away from the board. Studying well is not about hours; it is about spending those hours on the things that actually decide your games. For nearly everyone below master level, that means tactics first, then endgames, then your own games, with openings kept in proportion.
Why tactics come first
At club level, most games are decided by tactics: a piece left unprotected, a fork that was missed, a back-rank mate. You can understand strategy perfectly and still lose in one move. Pattern recognition is what saves you, and it is built by solving many positions, not by reading about them.
The aim of tactics training is to make positions like this automatic, so that during a game your thinking time goes on harder questions. Solve puzzles that are a little hard for you, and solve them properly: find the whole line, including your opponent's best defence, before you move. Guessing the first move and checking the answer trains the wrong habit.
How to balance your study
The right mix changes as you improve. These proportions are a reasonable starting point for your non-playing study time.
| Level | Tactics | Endgames | Own games | Openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner (just learning) | 50% | 20% | 20% | 10% |
| Improving club player | 40% | 20% | 25% | 15% |
| Experienced club player | 30% | 20% | 30% | 20% |
Notice what is missing: there is no row where openings take the largest share. Memorising long opening lines is the most popular way to study and one of the least effective below about 2000. If your opponent leaves the book on move six, your memorised moves twelve to twenty are useless, and most opponents at club level do leave the book early.
A sample week
Here is a plan for someone with about five hours a week. Scale it up or down to your schedule; consistency matters more than volume.
- Monday (45 minutes): tactics puzzles at a slow pace. Write or say the full line before you move.
- Tuesday (45 minutes): one endgame topic, set up on a board and played out against the computer until you can win or hold it reliably.
- Wednesday (60 minutes): play one or two longer games, rapid 15+10 or slower.
- Thursday (60 minutes): analyse Wednesday's games using the method below.
- Friday (30 minutes): tactics again, this time a timed set or puzzle rush for speed.
- Weekend (60 minutes): openings or an annotated master game. Go through it slowly and guess each move before you look.
Beginners should replace the opening session with basic checkmates and simple tactics. Stronger players can swap one tactics session for deeper calculation exercises, where you work through a complex position for 15 to 20 minutes before checking.
Endgames: learn the positions that come up
Endgame study pays off twice. It wins you points directly, and it improves your middlegame decisions, because you know which endings to aim for when you trade pieces. Start with the essentials, in roughly this order:
- Basic checkmates: king and queen and king and rook against a lone king.
- King and pawn endings: opposition, the rule of the square and key squares.
- Avoiding stalemate when you are winning.
- Rook endings, especially the Lucena and Philidor positions. Rook endings are the most common type of endgame in practice.
Learn each one by playing it, not just reading it. If you can win king and rook against king against a computer within the 50-move limit every time, you know it.
Analysing your own games
Your own games are the most valuable study material you have, because they show exactly what you get wrong. The order in which you analyse matters.
- Write down your thoughts first. As soon as possible after the game, go through it without an engine and note what you were thinking at key moments, where you were unsure and what you feared.
- Find the turning points yourself. Look for the moments where the evaluation changed, where you or your opponent missed something. Try to work out the better move on your own.
- Then check with the engine. Compare its view with your notes. The biggest lessons are in the gaps: the moves you never considered, and the threats you saw that were not real.
- Name the mistake. Was it a missed tactic, a bad plan, an opening gap or time trouble? Keep a short log. After twenty games, the patterns in that log tell you what to study next.
Using engines properly
A chess engine is the best training partner ever made and also the easiest way to waste study time. The common error is turning it on immediately and watching the evaluation bar. You learn little that way, because you never form your own opinion for the engine to correct.
Good habits: use the engine after you have done your own thinking. When it suggests a move you did not consider, ask why it is better and play out the lines on the analysis board until you understand the reason. Do not worry about small differences in the evaluation; a move rated 0.3 pawns worse than the best move is often perfectly playable for a human. Focus on the big swings, where the evaluation jumps by a pawn or more, because those are the real mistakes.
Books worth your time
Books still offer something online videos rarely do: a structured course written by a strong player and carefully edited. A few that have stood the test of time:
- Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev, which explains every move of complete games. Ideal for players moving beyond the basics.
- Silman's Complete Endgame Course by Jeremy Silman, organised by rating level so you learn only the endings you need now.
- 100 Endgames You Must Know by Jesus de la Villa, for the essential theoretical positions.
- My System by Aron Nimzowitsch, a classic of positional chess, best read once you are an experienced club player.
- The Woodpecker Method by Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, a tactics book built around solving the same set of puzzles repeatedly to build speed.
One book worked through properly, with a board and with every line checked, is worth more than five skimmed.
Key takeaways
- Spend most of your study time on tactics until you rarely lose games to simple oversights.
- Learn the basic checkmates and the most common endings by playing them out, not just reading them.
- Analyse every serious game, first on your own, then with the engine, and keep a log of your mistakes.
- Keep openings in proportion: learn the ideas behind a small repertoire rather than long lines. Our opening principles guide is a good start.
- Start today with a set of puzzles, and see keep improving for more ideas.