How to Improve at Chess

An honest look at what actually helps — and what mostly wastes your time

ChessOnyx · 2026-05-30 · 9 min read

Improvement Guide Beginner

There is no shortage of advice about how to improve at chess. Books, courses, coaches, apps, YouTube channels — the chess improvement industry is massive. And somewhere in all of that noise, the actual answer gets lost: improving at chess mostly requires time, attention, and honest self-reflection. Very little of it requires money.

This is not to say that paid resources are useless. Some are genuinely excellent. But the most important factors in chess improvement are free, and they are available to everyone right now.

The Single Most Important Thing: Play and Review

If you could only do one thing to improve at chess, it would be this: play games and then honestly review them. Not skim them with an engine bar running — actually sit with the positions, ask yourself what you were thinking, and try to understand what went wrong and why.

Most players skip the review part entirely. They play game after game, repeat the same mistakes, and wonder why they are not improving. The games are where the mistakes happen; the review is where the learning happens. Without review, you are just reinforcing existing habits, both good and bad.

You do not need a coach or a subscription to do this. You need time and a willingness to be honest with yourself about where your thinking broke down. That honesty is uncomfortable, which is probably why most players avoid it.

Tactics Training: High Return, Low Cost

Solving tactical puzzles is one of the highest-return activities in chess improvement, especially at beginner and intermediate levels. The reason is straightforward: chess games at lower levels are decided almost entirely by tactics. Whoever spots the winning combination first, wins. Positional understanding matters less when both players are regularly missing forks, pins, and checkmates.

The good news is that puzzle training is completely free. Lichess has millions of free puzzles. ChessOnyx has over three million puzzles available at no cost. There is no reason to pay for tactical training.

What matters more than which platform you use is consistency. Ten minutes of focused puzzle solving every day beats two hours of half-attentive solving on a weekend. The pattern recognition you are building requires repetition over time, not marathon sessions.

Opening Study: How Much Is Enough?

Opening study is probably the most over-invested area in amateur chess improvement. Players spend hours memorizing theory that rarely applies because their opponents deviate on move four. Meanwhile, their endgame technique is nonexistent and they miss basic tactics in the middlegame.

The honest answer is that most players below 1500 do not need opening theory at all. They need to understand a few basic principles: control the center, develop your pieces, castle early, do not move the same piece twice in the opening unless you have a good reason. That is enough to navigate the opening phase reasonably well against most opponents at this level.

Once you are past 1500, it makes sense to learn the basic ideas behind one or two openings — not lines to memorize, but the strategic themes that the opening is built around. Understanding why the Sicilian leads to imbalanced positions, or why the Queen's Gambit creates a positional tension early, is more valuable than knowing specific move orders twenty moves deep.

Use free resources. Lichess has excellent opening explorer tools. ChessOnyx has detailed opening guides. Read about ideas, not just moves.

Different Methods Work for Different People

Chess improvement advice often gets presented as universal truth, but the reality is more complicated. Some players improve fastest through heavy puzzle training. Others need to play more long games with careful review. Some benefit enormously from studying master games; others find it tedious and get little from it. Some players love opening theory; others find it kills their enjoyment of the game.

This is not a problem — it is just how learning works. Different people have different cognitive styles, different amounts of time, and different reasons for playing chess. A method that transforms one player might do nothing for another.

The practical implication is that you should experiment. Try puzzle training for a month and see if your tactics get sharper. Try analyzing your games carefully for a month and see if you spot patterns in your mistakes. Try studying a specific opening more deeply and see if it helps. Pay attention to what actually seems to be working for you, not just what a book or a YouTube channel says you should be doing.

The only thing that is universally true is that improvement requires engaged, intentional effort. Passive consumption — watching chess content, reading without thinking, doing puzzles on autopilot — produces much less improvement than active engagement. Ask yourself questions. Try to figure out answers before looking them up. Make predictions and check whether they were right.

The Role of Time Controls

Blitz and bullet chess are fun. They are also not very good for improvement, especially at lower levels. The time pressure forces you to play on instinct rather than calculation, which means you are not building the thinking habits that matter in real chess.

Classical or rapid games — fifteen minutes per side or more — give you time to actually think. To calculate variations. To notice that your king is unsafe. To find the resource you would have missed in a blitz game. These are the games that teach you something.

This does not mean you should never play blitz. But if your goal is improvement, weight your playing time toward slower time controls. Even fifteen minutes per side makes a significant difference over five minutes.

What You Do Not Need

You do not need an expensive chess course to improve. Most of the information in paid courses is available for free across Lichess, YouTube, and chess databases. The course format might suit some learners, but the information itself is not locked behind a paywall.

You do not need a coach unless you are playing seriously competitive chess and want targeted feedback on specific aspects of your game. For most casual players, honest self-review combined with free tools will take you further than a coach would at this stage.

You do not need the latest chess books. Books written decades ago on tactics, endgames, and positional play are still completely valid. Chess principles do not go out of date.

What you actually need is time and attention. Sit with positions. Think about why you made the moves you made. Ask whether there was something better. Stay curious about the game itself rather than anxious about your rating. The players who improve most consistently are usually the ones who genuinely enjoy the process of thinking through chess problems — not the ones who have bought the most resources.

A Realistic Timeline

Chess improvement is slow. This is worth saying clearly because most improvement content implies otherwise. Going from 800 to 1200 is achievable in a year of consistent effort. Going from 1200 to 1600 might take another two or three years. The higher you go, the slower the progress, because your opponents are also working and the gaps in your understanding get harder to identify.

This is normal. Chess is a deep game. The slowness of improvement is not a sign that you are doing something wrong — it is a sign that the game has more to offer than you have yet found. That is part of what makes it worth playing.

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