Hey everyone, my name is Joe Anthony. I'm rated 1855. You'll see me at tournaments teaching kids from my son's high school tournament and enjoying watching people try to get better at chess. Chess is a rich game that is much more substantial to me than most "games." Therefore, anytime someone is trying to get better, I'm a big fan of that.
"But Joe, are you the best person to be speaking on what makes someone better?" .
My qualifications are these. 15-1-1 in the last year against 1600-1899; 50-1-2 all time v. <1400, My best tournament included back-to-back-to-back wins against 1950, 2002 and 2130. My best students have gone from provisional to 1596, 1446 and 1279 in nine months. And they're far from done. The 1596 played a GM at the Illinois Open, and though he never had probably even surefire drawing chances, he didn't look out of place. In their first open tournament, all three players beat players 1700 or higher.
And that's what I can help you with. I'm 15-1-1 in the last year against players rated 1600-1899. If you want to post that % against those players over a year and then say, "I had to go to Mesgen, cause Joe is just a 1855," great.
So if I've convinced you to dive in, let's go!
Talent.. it's like a cannon
Getting better at chess is hard work. Before you start the process, be aware of your talent level to weigh whether or not you're ready for the commitment. I've seen players agonize for a lifetime to be 1000. If you want to do that, great. But especially if you're going to pay for lessons, understand what you're getting into.
Natural talent level is going to determine what you need to put in to get X out. Higher talent can put you on a much higher trajectory.
Coach?
I agree with GM Boris Avrukh. The best thing you can do to get better at chess is to hire a professional coach. This coach should have a very high playing level and a great ability to express ideas. That's going to cost you $80/hour. If you have it, you should. Most don't.
Then you can step all the way down to me charging $25/hour if you come to me (cheaper online), or $5 to analyze a game of yours and send you back my thoughts. I also take a personal interest in my students' games without having to be paid to do so... if for example I see them at a tournament.
The final way you can go if you get down to $25/hour and you say, I don't want to spend that but I do want to get better.. is get ready to study.
What now?
What I'm about to provide is what you can do if you have the kind of talent that walks into the room at around 1200, and you want to get to 1600 and beyond. If you have 800 talent and you still want this, just be prepared to work twice as hard.
Books
Everyone has their favorites, and we can debate all day. Here are my recommendations
Complete Book of Chess Strategy - Jeremy Silman
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1890085014/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ilche-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1890085014&linkId=60104986432dabe6ff4d639d7217aaa7
I find this book to be a great litmus test in terms of being ready for the rest of the books. It has page after page of concise and simplified examples of chess concepts. But more important, if you can't follow this book, you might not be ready for my recommendations and should spend more time on puzzles and basic books.
If you're more like 800 strength and you need to get to 1200, I recommend chess magnet school. It's where I have my son's high school coach send all of the kids who show up, aren't really serious chess players, but tell them that they're serious about trying to be one. I think it's $26 for a year. It has it's ceiling, but it really teaches you the basics very well.
I teach my stepsons (who I consider my sons), so I didn't come into their life until they were 8 and 9. If I had them at 4 or 5, we would have been doing this.
If you can follow this book, you're ready for the following..
Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953 - David Bronstein
300 Chess Positions - Lev Alburt
Middlegame in Chess - Reuben Fine
Basic Chess Endings - Reuben Fine
Time for books tends to vary based on how much time you have and how much mental energy you have. If you have the willingness to sit down and get serious like you are in college, these books should boost your ability.
Openings
Openings are not the only thing, but they are a thing. Don't listen to someone who tells you not to study them at all. However, be wary of someone who doesn't have strong middle game skills and yet is trying to convince you that "do this, then this, then game over." You shouldn't spend more than about 15-20% of your study time on openings.
The tool? Chessbase. I think their app is like $7.99 on a smart phone and it breaks down opening moves by percentage of games in their database that WHITE won.
Eventually, if traffic and interest warrants it, I'll do a subscription with my best openings... probably for a very reasonable amount.
Tactics
Chess.com's tactics trainer is great. I forgot where I read that chess is tactical, even at the top levels, but it is. Everything is about playing to make a big tactical shot a possibility. And then, if your opponent simply defends well and makes your potential tactics too risky, you shift to playing for better endgames as your primary mindset... you always should be playing for a good endgame, but you will become more committed.
If you're serious about getting better at chess, do 50 tactics a day. However, don't spend all your time on this. A lot of tactics and setting up tactics is understanding chess concepts. I've seen players spend all their time on tactics and they never get to the tactic because they don't understand things like "getting a knight to the 6th rank," "rook to the 7th," "controlling key squares" or "good bishop, bad bishop." Your total chess knowledge is going to dictate how good your positional play is which in turn dictates what tactics you have.
The evolution of chess from the 1850s to today, if it has one central theme, can be summed up in the idea that there are resources (the games of the greats), that have been used to stagnate pure tactical play.
Endgames
Chess mentor is great for a lot of things, but especially for this. You can start at the most basic levels of endgames and work your way up. If you're a 1200 working hard to improve your middle game (where chess talent shows), and you're not finishing endgames, my bet is that a practical understanding of a) the opposition and b) centralization of the king can start to add those victories.
If you're like my best student, you can often play very "eh" middle games only to turn into a monster in the late middlegame/endgame. Very few people are like this.
Play a lot!
Look, I can tell you to read all these books and do all these puzzles and that's great. But, go play 10,000 games and you'll be amazed what your brain just registers due to good consequence/bad consequence.
A multiplier effect of playing a lot is that if you just take your losses online and in tournaments, and then analyze with a computer, you'll skyrocket the value you get out of a specified number of games.
Understand what a computer is though. When you're saying, "well, the computer liked it" and you can't verbalize a good reason why it's a good move, then you're not using a very valuable tool for what it is supposed to be used for. Computers will give you ideas of big spikes due to things that good players often don't see because they're not intuitive. But they shouldn't be used as a substitute for chess ideas.
Master games
Masters are masters because they're better than players who aren't. What better games to look at, 10 or 20 at a time, than those played by the best players.
A master I know advised, as a top bang for your time buck, to look for games by top GMs against players rated 200+ points lower, and to just go through as many as you can rapidly to get to see the max amount of games and to see how top players put lower rated players away.
Chessgames.com is great for this.
Obviously, if you have a chance to look at annotated games and you have the time, it's even better.
Maxims of my chess
Now that we have your major resources of study down pat, what should you tell yourself? What things will guide you to better chess. I'll list some now.
Forget fear
I recently was looking at games of a 1200 player and it seemed that everything he did that was passive or that he wouldn't do that was active came with him telling me "well I was afraid of this." The worst part was that there was nothing to fear. Everything he was telling me was easily defended anyway.
You owe it to yourself not to be afraid. If you play without fear and you lose because someone else is a better player, you'll get better in the future. But you'll find out what you're capable of. Don't confuse playing without fear with playing risky, bad chess.
I've seen 1200s stay at 1200 because they actually verbalize a good plan, and then say "yeah, but I didn't do that, I did this (very passive) move, because I was afraid of X." And that leaves me putting my head into my hands.
A surly expert named Frisco Del Rosario once told me, "learn to know when your opponents perceived threats aren't really threats, so you can ignore them and get on with your own threats!" If somebody lives this approach in all their games, yes, they will find out sometimes that the opponent did have real threats... but they will learn to realize their own.
Try also to remember this. There are very few players who are so good that every game is about showing how good they ARE instead of getting better (primarily). For most of us, the games we play this Saturday are primarily about making us better in following Saturdays. So who cares if you play smart chess and get bold and aggressive and lose? What, your world champion title is on the line? No. You owe it to the work you put in to take shots at your opponent. And that's why what I hammer into my students is...
Look for superseding threats! Always
There's a commonality with the players I've beaten in my life. Of the 145 documented USCF wins I have, more than half of the players think I shouldn't have beaten them. You could make a line out of most tournament halls and down the hallway of players who think I shouldn't have been able to do this or that.
I figured out why. I've beaten a lot of players who were better in a broad array of chess skills. Perhaps the player I beat had a better understanding of a wider range of chess techniques and topics. In a game where we traded down, traded down and got to a 3-pawn v. 3-pawn endgame, he would have beaten me, because he's a better quiet endgame player. But on move 17, I saw a chance to load up my pieces for a knight sac on e6 that would blow up the middle of his board, executing that move on move 18.. and before he got a chance to play a long game, the middle game got blown up.
Look at sacrifices. Look at rook or queen sacrifices for pawns even. Look at sacs of pieces on empty squares with no piece. Look at in-between moves.
Steve Tennant, a master who has beaten very strong players once told me that a prime difference between masters and players who are not masters is this... "moves that you write off as crazy and impractical.. therefore not even looking at them, I see them as possible and make them happen when I have the opportunity."
Just realize that there are two kinds of players. One player is saying, "I have a plan, you go ahead and have yours but this is mine, and mine will beat yours." The other player is saying, "I have no plan. My plan is just to try to trade down and play for a draw and pounce on you if you mess up." You can get some wins with the second approach. If you're amazingly accurate and you have a complete and comprehensive game, you can be a super GM with the latter approach. I don't think that that approach is the best way to grow chess from 1200 to 1800 and beyond.
Don't make bad threats just to make threats... but look. If you look,.. really look, there often is that Nxe6 sac for a pawn where the knight forks a queen and rook if black doesn't take it, and if black does capture with the f-pawn, you can recapture with the queen giving check and hitting the bishop on e4..
Play stronger players
I don't think that it's an accident that I've settled at 1875-ish. When I had time to devote to playing a lot, I was playing George Mandrusov (2050) and the deceased Alexander Levitan (2074) constantly. I did what I think most players can do. Find the best competition you can actually function decently against, and with good talent, you will have a decent chance to at the very least settle about 200 points below them.. and that's if they are a stretch for your ability level.
You could do everything I advise and play 1300s. I could take your twin and get them games against Al Chow, Ken Wallach and Kevin Bachler all day long, and if they can actually play into a middle game and not look lost, they will probably get better than you will.
The biggest reason is that I believe that the brain easily registers what stronger players do to you as things that you can think out against someone else in the future.
This is all great, but you gave me a lot of general stuff... I can't figure out what to do with it all. I don't have a coach and this seems too hard.
I think for the results I can get out of players, I charge a very reasonable rate. I'd also be the first to tell you if you're too good for more than a brush up. If Eric Starkman or Richard Zhang came to me and wanted a coach, I'd tell them that they're actually some of the few who are ready for that GM, and that they should seek out the best play they could if they couldn't afford that level of coaching.
But I have players whose first provisional tournaments in December were 1087, 1235 and 1207. Eight months later they are at 1279, 1446 and 1596 respectively. If I had to bet on myself over the next 8 months, I'd bet 1550, 1700 and 1800 with ease. And then, eight months after that, when the 1596 will likely be around 2000, THEN he'd get more value out of a GM, IM or Fide Master coach.
And if you hire me, I'll give you my best stuff.
If you just want to come here, I'll give you my pretty darn good stuff for free... analyzed tournament games, blitz games, ideas and general thoughts that will improve your chess.
And if you decide that my stuff is no good, I am very aware that there are better authorities on chess out there. And everyone should do what is good for them.
But I'll always be honest. And my honesty is that coaches can point you in the right direction, but the work you're willing to do will really make you better.
My next submission will be geared toward specific games, and not general ideas. So then we can really dive in. In the meantime, come here for IHSA stuff also.
