Episode 84 - Real Chess Training
===

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm grandmaster Noël Studer, and as always, I'm here with some chess improvement advice that should make your training more simple. The idea here is to train less but better, which means you'll spend less time on your chess training, but you're having more fun.

But more importantly, sometimes it's not always fun, right? More importantly, you're getting more improvement if you really stick to it. And today I want to talk about a super important way of training, a way that I used in my own career. And how you can do it yourself and why most training is failing you [00:01:00] in that sense.

So let's jump right in.

When you solve tactics in training, it feels easy peasy. Once you know there is a tactic, you know that there is a fork or a bishop sacrifice or a checkmate combination, it can be pretty easy. I've talked about this in the past already, but you can see that your tactics rating or your puzzle rating on the sites is way higher than your actual game.

So you sit down to play a real game and suddenly you feel uncertain. All that conviction from the tactics training is gone because you don't know, do I have to look for a tactic? When you see a tactic you don't know, is it really working? In tactics training, you know, okay, if there is something that looks like a tactic's probably going to be this one.

Or you just might have the same habits. You see something that's tempting, you just play it. You play a tempting sacrifice. And you realize once again that in the real world, when you play real human opponents, your opponent is [00:02:00] also allowed to have ideas and maybe they prepared a little trick for you. And then you go a step further and you analyze your games and you realize that you miss a lot of easy, tactical opportunities.

Do you feel like I would've seen that in training? And that is pretty frustrating. It also creates anxiety before starting the next game. That's where a lot of the anxiety for adult improvers also comes from. Because it's like, I know if I'm told there is a tactic, I can see it, but I'm so unsure that if I will see it in a real game.

So the question that lingers in your mind, it's like, will I miss something easy again this time?

And the thing is, this is not something wrong with you, it's just something wrong with your training. The main thing here is your training is not matching reality. Fundamentally speaking, chess is a game of decision making. It's really making a decision in an uncertain [00:03:00] circumstance. But how do most people train?

Most training is either spent passively absorbing information right from a video, book or course. And when you do this training that we've talked about already, this tactical training, you sit down, but you solve an exercise that you know has a solution. So it is different from a decision making process where you first have to decide is there actually a objective solution or do I just have to play a decent move?

This is really huge difference from your real games. Nobody taps you on the shoulder and says, "Hey, it's White to move and win". You have to deal with uncertainty.

What comes to mind for me is, I think there was a quote from Magnus Carlsen, I'm paraphrasing here, but like, when talking about cheating, he said even if I just once a game would be told, Hey, this is a game deciding moment like, it already would... Even his capabilities would be so much higher.

Just getting that little information is [00:04:00] super helpful and we don't get that. So we need to train ourselves to be able to make that distinction for ourselves when we play games. Or in other words, to make better decisions at the board, you need to train making decisions under uncertainty and pressure in your training.

And thinking back to my own career, I realized recently, like I was constantly forced to train my decision making under pressure. Now I didn't always like it, but I was always taught and shown tests and it was super, super useful. Because from when I was 12 years old, I was invited to national training camps in Switzerland and our coach was often Grandmaster Arthur Yussupow, former world number three.

Great coach. He has a great book series. Highly recommend. And when we would arrive on Friday evening, he gave us a brutal two hour test with a mix of positions. I think it was 12 positions. No, maybe more. I [00:05:00] think it was more than 12, maybe 18. I'm not a hundred percent sure. So it was a good amount of positions.

And we didn't know what he was looking for. There could be tactics. Sometimes it was just evaluating, sometimes it was developing pieces. Sometimes it was positional maneuvers, defending, trading a bad piece. There was really a wide variety of things. It was just game-like positions. Me and my friends didn't really love it because it's hard.

We were tired. And these positions, often when you have a test, when you have like 12 positions that have this uncertainty, it will be harder than a real game because in a real game, maybe you have three, four moments that are really, really difficult. But in a test, you have 12 in a row, so this makes it really, really hard.

But only later did I realize how much these tests helped me. Because what happened, we would solve these for two hours. Then we would [00:06:00] talk to each other, like, what did you see in this position? What did you see in this position? And in sat on Saturday morning, we would take the time and go through all of these test positions and Yussupow would give us our specific test back with the results, but also say, "Hey, in this position I wanted you to think about this. Here is why this move doesn't work. Here's why this move doesn't work." And it's incredible how much more you learn this way because first you're forced to think yourself, to take a decision.

It's so important to take that decision, to write down something. And then, you get the solution. It's much better this way than to just lie back and watch a video and say, oh yeah, it's so logical. Right? Again, there, if we just watch a video on a difficult position, once we know the solution, it seems obvious, but when we're forced to think for ourselves, we're like, oh no, this is really, really hard.

So later in my career I worked through Grandmaster Yakob Aagard's calculation book. By the way, [00:07:00] Yakob is one of the biggest experts in the world of this, just like brute for solving difficult positions. For example, grandma Shankland, who was US Champion and I think was 2750 at some point.

He is known for just solving a lot of these tests with the help of Yakob. And so I solved this calculation book and it was really, really difficult. And I would say it's one of the, maybe the main reason I went from IM to GM. 'Cause I remember I did it for three months and I didn't play a lot then.

And first it felt like my brain was like, what am I doing? I'm so bad at this, you know, it's not working and so on. And then slowly, slowly, my calculation got so much better. And my thought process, my decision making, everything just got better. And, I started playing so much better. I started being more confident as well. And so when I realized once again, oh, this was super useful. Later on, with my last coach, Grandmaster Markus [00:08:00] Ragger. I paid him to create custom tests for me. So he would take the time to specifically think about some positions that he saw, put them together in a test, send it over to me. And I just had these tests that whenever I felt like, yes, I'm ready to do real hard training, that was what I did. And then we would discuss the positions together. Like, okay, here, what did you think? Exactly? Why were you choosing this move? Why not this move?

And because he knew me, obviously, and these were specifically tailored tests, he could go into a little bit my weaknesses, try to test me for things that I usually make wrong decisions in games. So this was super, super useful.

And so it's only logical that for adult improvers the same way of training is also super useful. But here's the problem. Inside my course, The Simplified Chess Improvement System, I talk about these positions in term of step four, tactical training. The idea is that there can be tactics, but you're not sure [00:09:00] if there are tactics.

Maybe you just have to do other, just a normal move, develop a piece, whatever it is. But the problem is that when my students ask me where do I find these positions? I don't really have a good answer. Relatively few resources are out there for this. There are much more just brute force tactical books, or there are much more like just a positional book or a strategy book. But this mix is quite rare and most of them are aimed at, I would say 2200 plus. So they can be extremely hard.

For example, this book Calculation that I mentioned from Jacob Aagard, I would even say that if you're not a FIDE mastery, you shouldn't touch this book. So it's a really, really, really difficult book and most of the resources are meant for very, very strong club players, or not even just young, talented kids that want to become grandmasters.

And then there is another problem with books in general. [00:10:00] Just for this specific topic, is that the solutions often aren't telling you why your move is wrong or how you can improve your thought process. So you end up knowing the problem, like, okay, I made the wrong move, but you don't really know the solution.

And this is, again, different from just pure tactics because in tactics, there is a one real solution. So if you just get the solution, the other thing will probably be wrong. Worst case, you look at it with the engine and you can see, okay, I could have won a piece. I didn't win a piece. That's it, right?

But when the position is also about strategy or about full process, or maybe the whole point is don't waste 10 minutes on this move. You should play it in two minutes. It's not very easy to bring this across with just pure annotation and book solutions. And so, since I thought about this a lot, that this is so useful and I wanna make my students do this, but I didn't have a resource that I could fully recommend specifically for the rating range of 1500 to 2000 [00:11:00] chess.com and FIDE, I decided to create it on my own.

So this is where Real Chess Training got born. And I'm super, super happy about this because it's really something that I would recommend every single private student of mine to do this training. So this is the simple goal of this train. The goal is that when you solve this test, this will be your most powerful 45 minutes of the week. And it is also super simple. So real chess work training works this way. Every Monday, you get an email with a PDF containing six selected positions.

Again, they can be anything. Then you set a timer whenever you have time in the week for 45 minutes. You start from position one. You have to decide how much time do you spend on each of these six positions, and you write down one solution for every single position. Okay, so what would you play [00:12:00] in a real game? When the time is over, you finish and you get access to a video where I go through all of these six positions.

And I take time to not only discuss what is the quote unquote solution, but also what is the thought process? Which candidate moves could you see? Why are some of the moves that are not going to be the right solution not good?

And so the goal is that you're not only struggling, you're not only trying to improve your thought process and decision making, but you're also getting actionable feedback on if you thought about this move, then maybe, you know, this could be a problem. Or if you spend too much time on this position, you will have time trouble in the future.

So the goal here really is not to get it right or wrong, but to train your thought process and your decision making process and to slowly improve your decision making under pressure. [00:13:00] You have time pressure. But also in a moment of uncertainty, you don't know what could be the right solution.

Now I've launched this training last Friday, so when this podcast goes out, the Friday before that, and for now until April, I've already shut the doors again. This was like a very soft launch for my newsletter. And we've got a huge response. I'm super, super happy about it. And if you want to try this out in April, I will open the doors again.

So make sure to subscribe to the newsletter if you want to get informed. That's always the best way to get informed when I launch anything or there is any discount or whatever. If you want to update from my site, the newsletter is the best place to be. Right now, if you listen to this early, you can't join.

But if you listen to this from April, 2026 or later, then, [00:14:00] probably, you can just find Real Chess Training online and join us. And the goal is really to give you, I think it's even more than that, but six main improvements through that practice of these six positions. But attention, it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be quick. It's not going to be I dunno, 500 points in seven days or whatever insane stuff usually floats on the internet.

So here are the six things that I'm looking for you to improve when you join this. You wanna make your game feel a little bit less stressful because you consistently put yourself under pressure in training.

Being in that same situation during the game is a little bit less stressful. You will build trust in your own decisions. Because, again, you're forced to decide on your own without somebody telling you, Hey, there is something, or whatever. And so it's getting more normal that you actually take decisions under uncertainty, you [00:15:00] will slowly develop a better feeling for the position.

Because when you have to decide do I look for tactics? Do I look for strategy? What am I going to do? You're getting a better feeling after solving some of these tests. Which positions could actually have a tactic? And that is a skill that is super useful for your games as well.

You're learning actively. So when the positions have an interesting point, you will learn way better than if you would just watch the solution video. My goal is that the solution video in itself is already super instructive, but it will be so much easier to remember and to actually change things in your chess when you first solve and then watch.

You'll improve your time usage because you're put under time pressure, six positions, 45 minutes. You have to choose which position to think longer, which positions to just play a quick move. And last but not least, you're getting better at evaluating positions. [00:16:00] Because if you have to decide between 2, 3, 4 moves that maybe look rather similar, you need to evaluate them and then to say, which one way evaluate highest, and that's the one that I'm going for.

I've mentioned this already, but the recommended rating range for this Real Chess Training right now as it exists is 1500 to 2000 chess.com rapid or FIDE rating. And then you can find the online calculators and translate that. It should be roughly 1700 to 2200 Lichess Rapid, I think. But yeah, I'm basing it on chess.com rapid, because most of my audience are having this rating. And then, maybe you have FIDE rating, maybe you have USCF rating. Wherever you are, you might have different rating. You can find the conversion.

Now, why not For people below 1500? This is super important. When you are below 1500, chess.com rapid, nearly all of your games will be decided by [00:17:00] hanging pieces and by super simple tactics.

So actually, I want you to obsess about thinking about tactics all the time. So in this rating range, it's still useful to just do tactics, tactics, tactics. Because when you play games, it's basically does my opponent hang a piece? If I play this, do I hang a piece? Is there a simple tactic? No. Okay, let's play a move.

That's the decision process that you have to ingrain below that level. So I don't want you to be tricked and there is suddenly a positional idea or whatever. Because in your game, specifically below 1500, tactics will be what decides the game. And if you're above 2000, some of the positions just aren't as hard as they are intended anymore. And so you'll get a little bit less out of the training.

And that's it. That really is Real Chess Training. It's super simple. I'm super excited about it because it will bring so much. Again, this is for people who are ready to [00:18:00] do the hard work. Okay? This is really, really important. This is not going to be a quick fix. This is not going to be easy. This is not passive consumption.

This is 45 minutes, super intense chess workout. Probably the most intense thing you do in your chess week. But also the improvements that you get from it are just going to be different than any other chess training you do. So that's why I say these are the 45 most important minutes of your chess training.

If you're interested, make sure to check in the description of the podcast. As I mentioned, if you're listening to this in March, 2026, currently, you can't sign up, but maybe I'll put up some wait list and otherwise, yeah, from April on, I hope you'll be able to join again.

See ya inside and do the hard work. This training is really about pushing yourself. It's really about building character. It's really about making yourself [00:19:00] proud. Because when you do these 45 minutes, you know what you've done. You'll improve your game. That's Real Chess Training.

See ya inside. See you next time. Bye.

Hey guys, just two quick things before you take off.

If you enjoyed this episode and want more structured chess improvement tips from myself, check out my newsletter at nextlevelchess.com/newsletter. It's totally free. We'll always remain free, and it goes out every single Friday with the best, latest chess improvement tips that I have. Most of the podcast episodes that I record are based on a previous newsletter.

So getting the newsletter, you'll get the advice earlier and you'll get it directly into your inbox every single Friday. It's totally free, as I mentioned, and you can unsubscribe any time. So go to nextlevelchess.com/newsletter to sign up.

And one last [00:20:00] thing, if you enjoyed this episode and if it helped you then please take a few seconds and review this podcast. This helps a ton. It helps other people see, oh yeah, many, many people profit from the advice given in this podcast. Let's give this podcast a try, and if you can, if you know anyone in the chess world that would profit from this episode or any other episode.

Make sure to share it with your friends, with your people online. That's super helpful. Podcast growth is really just working through mouth by mouth recommendations, so thank you. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for spreading the word about the Next Level Chess podcast. Now, that's all from me.

Thank you for listening and see you next time.