Learn from GM Evans

1. You need to get a feel for what great chess games look like. In general, the best players are the best teachers. Read a book like Logical Chess by Irving Chernev, who explains every move in 33 master games. Read it over and over. This will help you absorb many positional principles.

2. Learn tactics! Work through several books full of tactical diagrams. Solve them in your head without using a board, then write down all the main lines in a notebook. Don’t peek at the answer and you will be surprised at all the new ideas you see.

The books are seldom wrong. If your move isn’t mentioned, there’s usually a good reason. If you solved it, you’ll know you did. If you’re stumped, circle it and return later. (Once in a while you may find there is no solution; but most of the time you simply haven’t found it yet.)

3. You will need a modest amount of endgame knowledge. Read (and reread) a book like Jeremy Silman’s Essential Chess Endings Explained Move by Move or Rate Your Endgame by Edmar Mednis. Don’t worry if you can’t master all the endings in these books. Just keep going back to them on a regular basis, and it will gradually become clearer to you.

4. Don’t study openings! For people below expert level the only purpose of the opening is to get to a playable middle game where tactics abound. Find a few openings you like and learn a little about them. Nothing too deep. Then after you play a game look up the opening in a book and try to see what you did right or wrong.

Lots of times you won’t really understand what happened in your game and the book won’t be much help, but try this anyway. If you can learn the first 5-7 moves of almost any opening you will likely know as much as your opponent unless he is a real specialist. It’s really surprising how little most players know about the openings considering they don’t study anything else!

5. Play in tournaments regularly, at least 50 games a year. You will lose a lot at first, and losing will continue to be a painful problem throughout your playing career. Write down all your games. Always seek opportunities to review them, especially your losses, with your opponent or with a coach. Learn from their ideas.

If you’re still smarting from the loss, put your emotions aside and try to discover what went wrong. If your opponent won’t review the game with you, find a strong player to look at it with you. This practice, as much as any other, will lead to your steady improvement.

Source: Florida Sun Sentinel