5 Habits of Chess Players Who Improve FASTER

Over the last 20 years I've coached thousands of chess players and I've noticed that the ones who improve the fastest tend to follow the same five habits. Let's start with this example. It is black to play. How would you play here as black? And hopefully you did not say I'm going to capture on a 3 because your king is in check, therefore you're going to need to cover. And here's an interesting detail. One of the very common questions that people ask me is Igor, I have a hard time calculating more than 2-3 moves ahead and visualizing these lines. How do I improve in that component? And my reply is that's more than enough, right? Because a much bigger issue is playing automatic moves unthinkingly, not thinking one move ahead. That's the biggest issue. In this game, a 2300 rated player... Play queen to d7, which makes sense in general, but unfortunately, it's a very common thing that you play a move, and then you look at the position and you think oh, wait a second, I've messed up, because now bishop b5, the queen is pinned and captured. So, always make it a habit to never play moves totally unthinkingly, but just asking about the one next move that your opponent is going to play. Moving on to the next very common situation in chess. Your opponent has just played a move that puts pressure on you, maybe creates some threat. How do you handle that? The usual default reaction is to defend. Think about this position for a second. It is white to play, black has just developed the bishop, pinning your knight down to the queen. And what would most players play? Bishop e2, neutralizing the pin and thinking like, cool, my position is now safe, all is good. But strong players think differently. They think... They don't think like, my opponent attacked me, I defend. Strong players think, my opponent attacked me, I'm gonna punch back. They are default aggressive. They're always on the lookout for attacking aggressive options. In this current position, is there any way for white to create counter threats? And for sure you have plenty of forward moves that will create a counter threat. You've got pawn to d5 attacking the knight, you've got bishop b5, you can pin their knight, they pinned your knight, you're gonna pin their. In the game I played pawn to d5, it's actually the same game that we have just seen before from a black perspective. Black played knight to e5, attacking your knight once again, and now I played queen a4 in the game. So in this position also, if you ask yourself can I counter attack, You can once again see there is Bb5+, checking the king, there is Qa4+, we already know, right? So when you're on the lookout, you see plenty of those counter-attacking opportunities that you previously completely missed, you haven't thought about them at all, because you will default to that usual way of thinking, if my opponent attacks me, then I defend. Right? So this is how you level up very easily. It's just a new habit, a new pattern of thinking. But there's also one more thing to learn from this example, because another question that you may have that students ask me all the time is, Igor, I can find tactics while solving tactical drills, but I rarely find them in my actual games. What's the issue? It's because you need to know the trigger. Like during tactical puzzles, you know for sure, you know for a fact that there is a combo, And you're on the lookout for those forced moves, checks, captures, threats. But in the real game, nobody tells you that it is time to lock in and to start looking for a combo. But in fact, there is a sign, and that sign is a tension. When pieces begin attacking each other, your pieces and your opponent's pieces. When you see that kind of a situation... That is a trigger that it is time to think about tactics and calculation. You've probably heard that rule about thinking about checks, captures, and threats, right? And it's a nice thing in general, but nobody told you how exactly to apply this. And here's the rule, when there is tension, this is when you start looking at those checks, captures, and threats. And in this case, white's got a much stronger move compared to queen a4, which was played in the game, it's knight takes e5, which is a brilliant sacrifice of the queen. And the idea is after that you have one more forced move check, Bb5, and now black has nothing else to do but to cover up with a queen, giving up the queen, now you take it with a check, attack the king, this bishop on d1 is hanging, and you're getting a winning material advantage. This brings us to the next question. What can you do if you don't have any counter-attacking ideas while your opponent is still attacking you? Such as in this case, it's black to play and white advances these pawns on the king side, clearly he's going to keep marching forward, expose your king and checkmate you. How are you going to handle that? Now, you may think about this for a second, and you may notice that I'm talking a lot about these positions when your opponent is putting pressure on you, because they are the most challenging. These are the positions where we tend to blunder, go down, make mistakes, and lose games. If you know how to handle that, the rest will be a piece of cake. All right? Now, how do players usually handle things like that? They see that g5 is coming, he's going to attack your knight, attack this pawn, open up your king. Oh my god, that looks so scary. And we play a move like that. Just a defensive move, trying to keep everything consolidated. And at first glance, this looks like a good idea. We noticed our opponent's threat and we kinda stopped that. But in fact, there are a number of downsides into this approach. So first off, you might have heard a knight on the rim is dim, or grim, however you like it more, and now this knight on h7 is not doing anything, right? We voluntarily took our knight from a nice position to a passive bad position, right? You might have heard about positional play, putting your pieces to good positions, but now it's like the positional play in reverse, right? You're putting your pieces to bad positions. Now, we don't want this. Also, another thing is, We are not pursuing any plan of our own, which in turn liberates your opponent to do whatever they want and to keep coming at you, to keep attacking. Now, maybe I can play g5 anyways and just sacrifice this pawn, you know, but open up this h-file and attack you then. Or maybe he will say, okay, this knight no longer controls the center, so I'm going to go there, knight to d5, threaten right here, and threaten to capture with the queen on d6, and he can keep creating threats there in the middle of the board. Or he can keep coming at you on the king side. Again, since you're not doing anything to challenge your opponent, your opponent can keep realizing his plan and you'll keep struggling. And here's a better approach. Do not defend unless you have to. It's kind of a chess version of do not fix what's not broken, and how do you know whether you have to defend or not? Well, you have to play it out in your mind and see what's going to happen if you simply ignore your opponent's threat. Let's say you play whatever move, like whatever you want to do, maybe rook to c8, putting this rook to an active position, or pawn to b5, launching this pawn attack on the queen side yourself, and white plays g5. What's going to happen in that case? Yes, it looks scary at first, but nevertheless, if we try to calculate it a little bit further and understand whether it's dangerous or not. Now, if you take right there, that's pretty bad, probably, because, yeah, then the knight is attacked, the h-file is open, and he can easily checkmate you right there. We don't want this. All right, then it means that the knight has got to go. Where should the knight go? Usually, we tend to move our pieces forward. This is at least what we should do, right, to make our pieces more active and to put pressure onto our opponent. So let's say we move the knight right here, captures on h6. Again, looks really bad at first, right? The g-file is now open. And if you recapture, that's going to be total disaster indeed. Your pawn is going to attack you, but you don't have to recapture, right? You can play pawn to g6 and keep the position locked. All right, now what? How can white attack you now? Hmm, that's actually a lot more challenging for white as well. Now this h-pawn is blocking the way for white himself. Also the other pawn is also blocked by your knight, can't come forward and open files. All right, the g-file is now blocked by your pawn on g6, which is doing a good job blocking the position there, so all in all the position on the king side is now totally locked. And your knight on h5 is doing a good job in the future, you can always jump forward whenever there is a suitable opportunity and start creating threats. But for now you have just locked the position right there, and you can keep expanding on the queen side or putting a rook right here, and you can execute your own plan. So far we were talking a lot about your opponent trying to attack you or you trying to fight back but there is a big caveat here and let's think about this position for a second. It is white to play and you may think about this and then we'll discuss it together. This position illustrates one of the key differences between weaker players and advanced players in how they treat those attacking moves, because when I'm pointing you towards being default aggressive, looking for those attacking moves, there is a big problem here. Very often people see that and they're going to, oh, I have this one mover, I can attack the queen, and they eagerly execute the move. But there's a big caveat here, as I mentioned earlier. Now, here's my definition of an attacking move. An attacking move is the one that forces your opponent to defend, to retreat, to worsen their position, to do something they don't want to do. Right? That's the whole point of the attack. You're compelling your opponent to do something they don't want to do. Now, in this case, if you go knight to f5 and attack the queen, if you're rated 400, maybe you can cross your fingers and just hope for your opponent to blunder their queen. But as you climb that rating ladder further, you can't realistically hope for your opponents to just blunder pieces left and right, even though sometimes they will. But as you become more and more advanced, your opponents will not do that. And after knight to f5, does this move force your opponent to retreat? To worsen their position, to do something ugly? I mean, not quite, right? The queen can come forward. And it is a better square for their queen. So did you achieve much with this move, knight to f5? I mean, not quite. You kind of pushed the queen in the right direction. And it also, from here, also points towards your king a little bit. Moreover, if white keeps being careless and says, okay, I'm gonna just checkmate black along the last rank, you know, black will say, well, wait a second, your king actually is left alone. And they can play Rxb4, take advantage of the fact that this pawn is pinned by their beautifully placed queen, which you yourself helped black to place right there, and now his three pieces are going after your lonely king, and white will be checkmated within a couple moves. And don't get me wrong, attacking moves are the best and you should aim to attack, but you need real attacking moves versus one movers such as knight to f5. By the way, how do you find attacking moves? You focus your attention on opponent's half of the board and ask yourself how can I go forward onto my opponent's side and make threats. With that being said, besides knight to f5, are there any other attacking moves that you have here? Yeah, there's also pawn to b5 trying to challenge his king. And now black captures, what are we going to do? Well, we've got knight takes b5, recapture with a check. Notice that we've got the rook standing on the last rank, therefore the king cannot come there, meaning it will force the king to come forward. Is this something black would not want to do, generally speaking? Of course! Black definitely would never wish to make a move like that, and this is exactly the point of the real attack. We're forcing our opponent to do something they don't want to do, that worsens their position, in this case makes the king terribly exposed, and now we've got all sorts of discovered checks, or even this rook to a8, and white is winning. In the actual game black refused to take on b5 because that would be losing and instead they took on d4 trying to eliminate white's active knight. By the way, this is a really high level game played between two former world champs. Spassky is playing white, this long-term rival of Fischer, against Petrosyan playing black, very stubborn playing in general, but in this particular game he missed a beautiful tactical shot, queen takes d4, sacrificing a queen with a check leading to this beautiful pawn checkmate. If you like these kind of ideas and you want to get my complete collection of all the most important rules and principles to get better at chess put together in a single system so that you actually know how to apply them in your own games, then you may click the link below the video to my training bundle where you'll get it all. And if you want to know how to study chess efficiently, watch this video next and I'll see you on the other side.