How to Get Better at Chess: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide
How to get better at chess? This is a question almost every chess player asks at least once. Chess is an incredibly complex game, full of countless details, patterns, and ideas. The depth of opening theory and strategic concepts can sometimes feel almost endless.
In this article, I, Grandmaster and chess coach Valery Filippov, will break the improvement process down into clear, practical steps and show you how to build your own path toward becoming a stronger chess player. Whether you’re a complete beginner or an experienced tournament player, the principles in this guide will help you study more efficiently, avoid common mistakes, and focus on the areas that matter most.
📖 Evaluate Your Current Level
So, first of all, it’s very important to understand exactly where you are right now. So that it’s clear what goal to aim for and at what pace to move toward it. How do you figure out your level of play? The best way is to register an account on Chess.com and play at least 30 rapid games, ideally with a time control of 15 minutes per game. After those games, you’ll have a solid rating – your starting point. Again, it’s very important to play the full number of games I mentioned, not just 4 or 5. Over such a short distance, your final rating often isn’t objective. Let’s say you’re a complete beginner and you’ve played your first 5 games. In the first game, you won because your opponent disconnected (you were given about +400-500 rating points. Yes, they give a lot for the first game). And you lost the other 4. As a result, your rating landed around 1100, but since you are a complete beginner, you don’t truly match this rating. And even if you start training hard, it will still drift downward, which will negatively affect your motivation. Therefore, be patient and play those 30 games.
A second useful test for you can be chess puzzles on Chess.com. See if you easily spot mates in 1-2 moves. Are you already capable of recognizing more complex combinations? After solving about 100 puzzles, take note of your puzzle rating. This will also serve as an additional marker of your progress.
🎯 Set a Clear Chess Goal
So, after the starting point is established, let’s choose 3 goals right away: a small next goal, an intermediate goal, and an ultimate goal. A small goal is typically to gain +200 points to your current online rapid rating and +400 points to your puzzle rating.
An intermediate goal is harder to formulate – it depends entirely on your current level of play. It should be difficult but achievable through systematic training over the course of 6 months. For example, for a player rated 1000, this could be breaking the 1500 barrier, or for a player rated 1700 – reaching the 2000 mark (the higher the rating, the harder each additional 100 points becomes).
And finally, the ultimate goal is essentially your dream. That is, the goal after which you will be over the moon with happiness. This kind of goal should fire you up and motivate you. So that every time you think about it, you say – what if I actually manage to do this, and then I will be…
For example, for a beginner, this could be getting a USCF rating and participating in their first professional tournament. For a more advanced player – for instance, becoming the champion of their district or city. Or obtaining their first official title.
📈 Build a Structured Training Plan
Goals are set, and now the most serious and crucial part begins: creating your training plan. I’ll say right away, if you are an absolute beginner, the best thing is to consult a competent coach. Take at least one lesson and ask them to give you direction and concrete tools. Believe me, even if you pay $100-200 for a single session, you will still save a huge amount of money and, most importantly, time that you could have spent searching for the right direction.
A properly put-together plan will simplify your life incredibly and save a lot of energy. Because every training session you do will bring maximum efficiency and benefit. One of the main problems of modern chess is the overabundance of information. And right now, most of it is aimed at entertainment, not at real benefit. Surely, you’ve often noticed YouTube videos like “This Opening Trap Can Instantly Strike Down Your Opponent.” Or “Learn These 10 Rules and You’ll Beat Anyone.”
Unfortunately, such content is created only to attract attention and does not contribute to your development as a chess player in any way. What’s worse, you study it, you put in the effort, and there are no results. This breeds destructive thoughts like “maybe I just don’t have a talent for chess”? But the issue isn’t with you, it’s with the approach. Honestly, it’s harder than ever for beginners to navigate right now. That is exactly why I advise turning to an experienced coach. Not necessarily to me! Don’t think this is self-promotion. I will be glad to help, but remember that you always have a choice.
If you don’t have the opportunity to work with a coach, then let’s put together a training plan for you right now.
👁️Improve Your Tactical Vision
Tactical skill – how quickly and how many combinations you recognize during a game – is the most important skill in chess. Especially up to a rapid rating of 1800, it decides almost everything. You can spend a lot of time on openings, studying various setups, you can study endgame rules. But a single tactical mistake can instantly bury all your prospects during a game. That’s precisely why we must devote almost 80% of our training time to developing this skill. I am not exaggerating!
How to train tactics? It’s best to use the already familiar Chess.com website. There, you can solve all the puzzles in a row, or through the custom puzzle mode, sort them by themes. For example, only mate-in-3 puzzles, or only puzzles on pins or forks. Also, the Puzzle Rush Unlimited mode deserves special attention, where you compete with yourself and set records. This, by the way, is also an excellent way to track your progress.
♞ Learn Chess Strategy
Strategy is also very important, but try not to overdo it. Don’t dive into it too deeply in the beginning – it will suck you in like a swamp (just kidding). Study the basics – how and when to castle, how to develop your pieces after the opening, study piece imbalances. If you are a more advanced player, be sure to familiarize yourself with the book or course on Chessable “Techniques of Positional Play.” Additionally, analyze annotated games of legends like Tal, Kasparov, Karpov, and Alekhine. From those, you can also pick up a wealth of interesting ideas, which you’ll later find ways to apply in your own games.
💡 Study Openings the Right Way
Pay attention to the wording, specifically the addition of “the Right Way.” I think it’s important to put it exactly like that, because the role of openings is incredibly overestimated. Many chess lovers watch the games of top grandmasters – where, true, the opening is indeed incredibly important – and then adopt that same attitude for themselves, spending almost all their training time on openings. Often using extremely complex and professional setups that your opponents simply don’t go into. This type of training has very little, almost zero, effectiveness.
It’s far better to study openings on Lichess using the Opening Explorer and the engine. There, you can get the full picture – see what percentage of both professionals and online players use a given move, see the computer’s evaluation, and in that way filter out unnecessary variations, leaving only the most effective and frequently used ones.
Also, an additional (but not primary) helpful tool can be watching a grandmaster’s opening video lesson on YouTube. There, the main ideas and plans are explained. In 20-30 minutes, you can grasp the key strategies that will help you find your way when your opponent makes an unfamiliar move in the opening. And they absolutely will. And at that moment, without knowing the exact variations but understanding the general plans and ideas, you’ll be able to parry their move without trouble.
♟️ Master Essential Endgames
The endgame is the most difficult part of a chess game, despite involving far fewer pieces than at the start. The endgame will be our last priority, since statistically it occurs only in every fourth game (for beginners, much less often) and therefore has the least impact on the outcome. If you are a complete beginner, then you must learn how to checkmate with king and queen. This is literally a must-have. The next step – how to checkmate with king and rook. For slightly more advanced players, I would advise familiarizing yourself with the basic endgame of king and pawn versus king. More advanced topics could be “opposite-colored bishops” or any rook endgames. But please, don’t waste time learning how to checkmate with knight and bishop. In your entire life, you’ll encounter this position 1-2 times at best. And even then, if it’s an online game, you most likely won’t have enough time to execute it, even if you know the method.
🔍 Analyze Your Own Games
An incredibly important point! Remember, absolutely every game must be analyzed by you. And if you don’t have a coach who could do this work for you, then the computer is here to help. On Chess.com, there’s the Game Review mode. Go in there and slowly click through every variation the computer suggests. Analyze the opening especially carefully, because if a mistake happened at an early stage, it will almost certainly repeat in the future if you don’t eliminate it now.
I strongly advise spending 10 to 20 minutes analyzing a single game. If you have a wooden chessboard at home, play through the game there too. Move the pieces, analyze different variations. Time spent analyzing a game is twice as useful as playing time. Under no circumstances should you start a new game immediately after finishing one. And it’s also catastrophically insufficient to just run through your blunders and mistakes in 1 minute. Please, believe me, this cannot be neglected!
🏆 How Long Does It Take to Improve?
With a properly structured training plan and consistent one- or two-hour practice sessions per day, results won’t keep you waiting long. If you truly dedicate a lot of time to working on tactical puzzles, your ability to spot combinations will improve within 2 weeks. You’ll make fewer mistakes and punish your opponents for theirs more often. After a month of training, you can already reasonably expect a gain of +100 points in your online rating.
In terms of average numbers, in the first year, an absolute beginner goes from 100 to around the 1200 rapid rating mark. In the second year, they typically add another +300-400 points. Reaching an online rating of 2000 can take up to 4-5 years. But already in the second year of learning, I strongly recommend transitioning from online chess to in-person play. It’s many times more interesting, because you find yourself among people just like you – fellow chess players – which undeniably can’t help but motivate you. Also, at real tournaments, there are no cheaters. And believe me, that is the single biggest headache for all online chess players rated 1800 and above. Therefore, don’t set yourself an ultimate goal of reaching 2000 on Chess.com. Better let it be winning one of the local tournaments.
🖥️ Recommended Resources
First place. Chess.com. It has practically everything a beginner or more advanced chess player needs. Online games, puzzles, bots, and other training modes.
Second place. Lichess. It’s very easy to study openings there, and for more experienced players, I would advise analyzing their games there specifically.
Third place. Chessable. This is your chess library of courses. And also an ideal place to practice and drill the openings you’ve learned. There are courses on practically any topic, but I urge you to be selective and not buy everything in a row. Be sure to check reviews, both on the platform itself and outside it, before purchasing any course.
👨🏫 When Should You Consider Working With a Chess Coach?
I would put it this way – a chess coach is a magnificent support tool for a chess player of any level. Especially for beginners. A good coach can partially take that responsibility off your shoulders and give you a clear, correct direction. All that remains for you is to trust them and follow, while putting in the effort. You can easily learn how the pieces move and master some basic strategies on your own. There is plenty of educational content on those topics because they’re not complicated and are fairly easy to explain. But for mastering more complex patterns and deep strategic ideas, you will most likely need a mentor’s help. Therefore, if your finances allow, there are really no other reasons not to take advantage of this opportunity.
The only thing is, when choosing a specialist, I ask you to look first and foremost not at their rating or title, but at their ability to find an individual approach with the student and to be flexible and patient. These qualities matter more than any credentials.
📝 Final Thoughts
Improving at chess isn’t about finding one secret that suddenly makes you a stronger player. It’s the result of doing the right things consistently over a long period of time. Some weeks you’ll feel like you’re making rapid progress. Other times it may seem like your rating isn’t moving at all. That’s a normal part of the process.
If I could give only one piece of advice, it would be this: don’t try to improve everything at once. Pick one or two areas, work on them consistently, and only then move on to the next step. Small improvements add up over time, and after a few months, you’ll often realize you’re playing much better than you were before.
I hope this guide has helped you better understand how to approach chess improvement. If you build a structured training routine, analyze your games, and stay patient, there’s every reason to believe you’ll continue becoming a stronger chess player.
Good luck, and enjoy the journey!
♟ Article prepared by Grandmaster and chess coach Valery Filippov ♟
How many hours should I study chess every day? In this question, there’s a phrase I really like – “every day.” Try to make that your main priority, not the number of hours. Even if you can only manage 30 minutes – that’s already great. Ideally – 2 hours.
Is playing games enough to improve at chess? Definitely not! This is the biggest misconception among beginners. Devote 80% of your time to learning and 20% to playing.
How long does it take to reach a 1500 rating? Usually about 1.5 years. But it depends on how much you train. The record among my students – from zero to 1500 in 4 months.
Is Chess.com or Lichess better for playing? I would recommend Chess.com, especially if you’re a beginner. On Lichess, the starting rating is 1500. Absolutely everyone gets it, both beginners and professionals who decide to register a new account. Because of this, ratings on that platform are more chaotic.
When should I start playing tournaments? You can confidently sign up for your first tournament as soon as you hit the 1500 mark online on Chess.com!
