Useful Advice on Plateauing in Playing Strength

Advice to a 9-yr old student and his Dad:

This last week I received a phone call from a pleasant Dad, seeking some advice for his son who is 9 yrs old and already rated over 1400. This young chess player has done very well already, but has been ‘plateauing’ lately – a common occurrence in improving chess players’ careers –but one that can be quite challenging to overcome if one doesn’t understand what to do. He’s been struggling to improve, and even sometimes goes backwards in rating. I was very happy to share some thoughts on how to ‘break through’ this period, and thought that perhaps some others would be able to benefit from these suggestions. (Do please let me know if you find this info helpful.)

1.       It’s important to understand that it is ‘normal’ for an improving player to ‘plateau’ and sometimes go backwards. The ‘curve’ of increasing rating vs. study is not usually a straight line, but instead a series of ‘jumps’ and ‘plateaus’ that sometimes even dip a bit – each jump representing a ‘breakthrough’ in grasping some more concepts and being able to implement them. It is VERY important to simply continue putting in the CONSISTENT study habit to ‘break through’!

2.       I recommend for serious chess players to put in 4-5 days a week, a minimum of 30 minutes per day of study (not counting practice/play time). Of this time, I recommend a player to spend 25% of the time on solving tactics/puzzles (to increase speed of seeing good opportunities), 25% on expanding knowledge of the endgame (usually the weakest area of developing chess players), and the other 50% primarily on books/software that develop middlegame understanding/planning, mixed in with some opening study (see below on opening study).

3.       It is MOST important, in my opinion, that students do NOT just ‘memorize’ opening patterns and moves. Instead, I highly recommend that a student study the opening by FIRST playing serious games (at least 30 minutes/side) and AFTER the games reviewing the opening moves to learn what should have been done instead. The reason for doing this is to make sure that the student is UNDERSTANDING ‘Why’ certain moves are played and what the PLANS are for the opening. Doing this will greatly assist young players in being confident in the opening and especially the middlegame as they will understand what the real strategy in a position is. I personally spent very little time on learning openings, beyond what I just mentioned, until I was playing over the 1700 rating level.

4.       For this particular student, it turned out that he is quite solid at tactics, but very weak when it comes to planning, and also has some trouble finishing off winning positions. I recommended the following study tools to help in this case:

a.       Silman’s Complete Endgame Course – great book that is divided by rating level into what is important to understand – for all levels from beginner to advanced master

b.      Mednis’ “Practical Rook Endings” and “Practical Bishop Endings” because they very clearly and concisely give the Principles of endgame play, rather than just many individual positions.

c.       CT-Art 3.0 and “Total Chess Training” software package for tactics and middlegame studies on software.

d.      How to Reassess Your Chess by Silman – a book that is very good for understanding how to create a plan in any situation – how to ‘break down’ a position into it’s positional elements, and then combine these into formulating a good plan. Somewhat ‘idealistic’ in its approach, but VERY good for helping a student start thinking along the right lines for creating good plans.

e.      Fritz (software) to help analyze the games played and find tactical opportunities that were missed.

f.        For later on, I recommended the Lev Alburt books, “King in Jeopardy” for learning how to build strong attacks against the king, and several others in the Comprehensive Chess Course series by Alburt…I’ve found most of these books to be very useful, especially for this level of 1200-1700+

Finally – I have found it to be MOST effective to study regularly, play serious games as a ‘test’ to implement and try out what is being learned, and then be sure to use these games to analyze very carefully and learn from them.

Comments

[Kaicheng Hu]

Thank you, Elliott! What a wonderful article and lecture! I have read it three times. I also asked Jiayi to read it.

Merry Christmas and happy new year!

Kaicheng

[Desika Nadadur]

Elliot,

Very nice article! I have printed it for my son Sudarshan to read.

Thanks,
Desika

[Desika Nadadur]

Elliot,

Very nice article! I have printed it for my son Sudarshan to read.

Thanks,
Desika