Some Chess Remarks

24 Feb, 2026

Related post: Some Chess Tips

For more than a decade, I've played chess. And recently upon reflection, I've found online chess to be a net-negative on my life. I'm tired of caring about elo, tired about worrying if I'm really as good as I was before, tired of trying to anticipate my opponent while I'm playing 1+0 bullet, which might as well be an infinite time sink.

So for a few weeks now, I've stopped playing online. I still play at my university's chess club, watch chess content, and think about chess, but overall my relationship with the game has changed and most notably, I don't experience guilt from playing anymore. Moreover, below are some of the meta-thoughts I've had about chess that I find quite interesting.

• Mindset in chess is super important. More than moving the pieces, if you can't control yourself emotionally, you're going to have a tough time. If losing a game puts you "on tilt" or winning a game makes you too cocky, then you can easily spend hours playing essentially meaningless chess games that were played just in the hopes of making a number (presumably, your bullet/blitz/rapid rating) go up. And while it's harder to tilt when playing OTB club chess, being able to regulate your emotions is a super important skill to have when playing OTB Tournaments.

• Online chess, OTB¹ club chess, and OTB tournament² chess each have their own distinct style and characteristics. Disregarding the different mindsets one has when playing in each scenario, the absence of an engine at your fingertips when playing OTB forces you to consider each position deeply as there's no other way to know what's going on. Moreover, the style of play is also very different; I generally seem to have many more (potentially dubious) chess ideas when I play OTB, and the presence of others in any decently ran IRL chess club really fosters a sense of community.

• If you genuinely want to improve at chess, you should frequently play in OTB classical chess tournaments, study with a good chess coach, and self-study. Frequenting OTB classical tournaments will give you a gauge on how strong you are and will also pit you against opponents of a similar strength, a chess coach is immensely beneficial to your chess journey as they can recognize your weak points and recommend appropriate studying, they can suggest openings and lines that match your style of play, and they can offer invaluable advice regarding the emotional and analytical side of chess.

• Fabiano has a perfect quote on 1+0 bullet chess: "1+0 is like half chess, half videogames." - Fabiano Caruana

• As you get higher and higher in level, chess improvement starts becoming more discrete than it is continuous. While at the lower levels a solid way of improvement is simply by "playing more games" and getting more exposure to different types of positions, different openings, different endgames, and generally getting a handle on the game as a whole, as you internally get better at evaluating positions, chess improvement starts becoming learning certain specific facts, whether that be a certain idea (e.g. the Nd5 sacrifice in certain lines of the e6 sicilian) or a certain technique (e.g. making a "bridge" in certain rook endings (see the Lucena position)).

• A significant difference between a "good" player and an expert is their opening knowledge. Simply put, the experts just know more opening theory — their increased opening exposure means they know more lines, they know the positional thematic ideas better, and they have more intuition for where each piece should be placed. Moreover, a key seperating factor is also the amount of openings known — a "good" player is probably good in their own openings, but what makes an experts (and especially masters) experts is their ability to play a wide variety of openings. As the strongest player at my chess club put it, "I'm a master of the openings I play, but a Grandmaster is a master of all the openings."

• Most online chess videos and online chess content is simply that - content. And eating content will not help you improve. While it can be beneficial to watch professional chess players break down games and ideas, at the end of the day, learning comes from practicing the techniques you've learned in the real world which means either playing those ideas in a real game or doing your own analysis of the same positions.

• Elo³ ratings suck at differentiating those who are good from those who aren't. Your chess skill level can probably vary 100 points in either direction just based on how you're feeling while playing the game. Moreover, chess also has high variance — e.g. your play/skill level on different days of the week are different, your play/skill level in different openings or pawn structures are different, your play/skill level against varying levels of opponents are different, and so on. As such, elo is at best a rough approximation for your total "combined" "chess skill" whatever those two terms mean. It's good for getting a gauge at how strong the other person is (e.g. someone who's 2000 elo is probably better than someone who's 1800 elo), but by no means does that mean a 2000 rated player will handily beat an 1800 all the time⁴.