Bad Habits In Chess
15/04/2023 - Actualizado: 01/05/2023
Our training is what helps us improve day by day, it is the strength that grows little by little practice by practice, but there are also some bad habits that go in the opposite direction of our improvement, that do not bring us much benefit for our improvement.
Today we are going to look at some of these bad habits that we all have or have bad had at some point, and how we can find a solution to them, either to help us in our training or to eliminate them so that they do not hold us back.
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Bad Habits
Playing a Lot of Blitz Games (Online)
Playing a lot of Blitz games for long hours is one of the bad habit that we must avoid. If we play Blitz from time to time, for example once a week, with the purpose of having some fun, it is not a problem, the problem comes when it almost becomes an addiction, where we play Blitz games every day without stopping.
In Blitz, due to the short time we have to play our game, there is no room for reflection, analysis and understanding of the position, but we play in a much more superficial way, most of the time by intuition.
The problem with playing this way is that our brains gradually get used to thinking superficially and become lazy when it comes to deeper analysis.
One way to take advantage of Blitz games is to test our openings and what is being played against them, or rather to quickly gain more experience with the openings that are in our arsenal.
To reduce the number of games we play, we need to set a limit on the number of games we play or the amount of time we play Blitz, start reducing the time and then the days we play until we only play Blitz for one day.
Focusing Only on Openings
Focusing too much on chess openings when we are in the process of learning is other bad habit, when we are still club players, can be negative for our growth in chess.
At these levels we need to focus on improving our understanding of chess, which is certainly more difficult than the openings, where you just learn a few lines of theory and some tricks.
We must focus on reviewing our games to improve where we make the most mistakes, studying model games of the great chess masters, endgames, strategy, tactics, etc.
We must concentrate on improving all areas of chess. Once we already have a basic knowledge of all areas, we need to focus on two things, what we do best and what we do worst among all the topics we have already studied, which are usually related to what we like the most, whether it is dynamic positions, endgames, closed positions, etc. We need to focus on these two things. We need to focus on these two things in order to train what we do best so that it remains a strength and what we do worst so that it ceases to be a weakness.
It is enough to know and understand the main ideas of our openings. At the professional level the openings gain much more importance, because the players already know and understand chess, their mistakes are usually not tactical or basic mistakes as at our level.
Playing Many Games Online Without Reviewing Them
Now, thanks to online chess sites, the vast majority of the games we play are played in this way, online. We play many games that we leave unreviewed.
When I talk about reviewing them, I don't mean that we switch on Stockfish and let the machine do all the work, but that we review them with our own knowledge, that we review them as if we were playing them again and write down what we could have done better. After our own analysis, we then use Stockfish to add to our notes or to correct us if our analysis has any errors.
I know this sounds like a lot of work, but as I said before, almost nobody cares about reviewing their online games, so if we do this work, we will have a great advantage over others and we will improve at a much faster rate.
It is not necessary to review the games at the end of the game, but we can set aside a day to review them (weekends for example).
Training with Little Time
It is also an important factor when we train, if we start training just before an important tournament starts we will see little or no good results, to be effective training must be done months before an important event, our brain does not assimilate the subjects well when it has too much pressure on top, the more time we have the better results we will reap.
When there is little time left before the important tournament (a week before), we need to slow down the pace of the training during that time, just review some things and practice simple tactical exercises. We need to be as fresh as possible on the big day; some exercise or physical activity is a good idea for these days.
What other bad habit could be holding back our best results?
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