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There are many way to improve your chess but some ways are better than others. For me one of the best ways to improve was to go over master games. All you have to do is find a good game collection book that is preferably annotated by the master who played the games. Then go over the games one at a time.

Another great way to improve is to analyze your own games. Whenever you play a longer game (30min or more time control) make sure that you write down your moves. There are a couple ways to learn from your own games:

1. Write down three things that you learned from your game.
2. Find the point in your opening where you went out of book and look up the correct move.
3. Write down the critical moments of the game, the things you saw during the game, and what you think went wrong. You should do this as soon as you can after you finish the game because otherwise you will forget what you were thinking during the game.
4. Go through the game and explain all of your moves, plans, and ideas. Look for better alternatives to the moves you played and when you find them try to figure out why you did not see them during the game. Do this without a computer program first and once your done use a computer to check your calculations.

The last method for improving you chess that I am going to mention in this article is doing lots of puzzles. Puzzles are really good practice and improve your chess a lot. They are pretty fun too. For tactics CT-Art is a great computer program. It has a few thousand chess puzzles of pretty high quality and is good for all skill levels. My favirote puzzle book though is "The Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book" by John Emms. Both of these and I'm sure many others are almost gaurenteed to increase your tacticle skill. But puzzles are not just for tactics. The book "End Game Challenge!" by John Hall is quite instructive. You would be surprised at how much endgame theory you can learn from that book because it is so fun to read. You can also improve your positional chess through puzzles. My favirote book for that would be "Excelling at positional chess" by Jacob Aagaard. "Excelling at Positional Chess" is my favirote book. I gained a lot of rating points after reading it and going over all of the puzzles in the book.

I hope that these tips help you, and good luck in improving you chess.

Learn more about this author, Brad Schlosser.
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