Many of my readers and students are overwhelmed. If you’ve spent any time following chess content online, you might think you need to memorize dozens of opening lines, master complex endgames, read every strategy book out there, and calculate ten moves ahead, all while reviewing and remembering the most important classical games in chess history. You’re left with a giant to-do list of things you should get better at.
In today’s article, I teach you how to skim that list for the few things that actually will make a difference to your chess.
Why Knowledge Alone Won’t Improve Your Rating
A big part of the problem is that the work many do only translates into theoretical knowledge, not actual results. Many of my students know more names of openings than I do and have seen more classical games than I did in my whole career. To fix this, let’s frame it very clearly what the goal of chess improvement is.
The goal of chess improvement is to improve skills which are needed in an actual chess game and make a difference in your results.
It is nice to brag about your knowledge of classical games or some obscure names of openings that never happen. But in an actual practical game, this knowledge is basically useless.
The two key Questions
If you want to invest time in skills and areas that actually make a difference in your game, ask yourself two questions:
- How often will I need this skill in a chess game?
- What are the consequences of this skill on my game results?
If you find the skills that happen often and have a big consequence if done well (or not!), you will likely spend the time on things that bring actual improvement.
The fundamental chess skills
In Chess, there are a few skills that decide 90% of the games. I’d like to call these fundamental skills. If you neglect the fundamental skills, you will most likely lose the game, no matter how good your other skills are. I might sound like a rotten CD recorder, but yes, these fundamental skills aren’t new to anyone. Revisiting the two questions introduced above:
- How often will I need this skill?
- What are the consequences of this skill?
We should understand that the fundamental chess skills are tactics and playing/training with focus. Nobody on this planet can play a good game of chess without precise tactics and decent focus. I had to learn this the hard way. Playing professionally with a Traumatic Brain Injury from 2017-2021, I knew the single most important task for me was to be able to focus decently during any game.
My opening preparation, endgame knowledge, and positional intuition would only matter if I didn’t make a big mistake due to lacking focus. It might be a little overstatement, but I feel I won or drew my games when I was able to focus and drew or lost my games when not.
You always need to work on your fundamentals.
So far, it might be fairly obvious. What I believe many misunderstand is that you never finish working on your fundamental skills. Nobody has achieved a level of tactics or focus that they can simply forget about these two fundamentals and purely work on other skills. This is the main reason I created the 1/3 rule a few years ago. It shows that tactics and playing with proper focus should always be and remain the central part of your chess routine.
When a Less Important Skill Becomes Urgent
Now, you might be thinking, “But what about those times when I lose to the same opening again and again? Shouldn’t I focus on that?”
Absolutely. Sometimes, a skill that’s usually less important suddenly becomes critical. For instance, let’s say you keep losing against a specific opening. If you end up in a bad or lost position every time your opponent goes 1.d4, now you have a problem! You’ve just answered our two key questions:
- How often does this happen? Every time you face 1.d4.
- What are the consequences? You (likely) lose the game.
Suddenly, this opening has moved to the top of your priority list. Fixing this weakness becomes essential. Learning how to deal with this specific opening becomes one of your main training goals for a short time. Now, this is super important.
You don’t just throw away all your fundamental training and purely focus on the opening. Instead, you keep working on your fundamentals while also solving this urgent problem. That’s what you use the last third in the 1/3 rule.
The 1/3 Rule
Many of you are already familiar with my 1/3 rule, and some of you have even started applying it. It’s a simple way to ensure that most of your training is focused on the basics—tactics and playing with good focus—while still giving yourself room to address other areas that need attention.
The rule works like this: spend one-third of your training time on tactics, another third on playing games with focus (and analyzing them), and the last third on anything else—like openings, endgames, or strategy.
When you follow this simple framework and detect an urgent problem in your chess, you make that your only priority in the last third of your time. While still improving your tactics and playing with good focus (and analyzing the games!), you fix this urgent problem.
Conclusion: Master the Foundation, Then Build
Improving at chess isn’t about randomly picking skills and hoping they’ll stick. It’s about focusing on the fundamentals—the skills that show up in every game and have the biggest impact on your results.
The next time you consider what to work on, ask yourself: How often will I need this skill? and What are the consequences if I get it wrong?
It will guide you to the things that truly matter in chess.
Keep improving,
Noël
PS: This article was initially sent out to my Newsletter list. If you want to get chess improvement advice for free in your inbox, join 17,000+ chess improvers by signing up for Friday Grandmaster Insights here.
Whenever you’re ready, here is how I can help you:
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