How To Study Miniature Games

In Part I, I listed all the reasons you should study miniature games.  Today, for Part II, I explain how to do it.  Specifically, I describe the process I've developed. I started doing this as a kid and then tweaked it as I got older.  No one taught me this; I just figured it made a lot of sense, and the results were excellent.

A fair warning: this process takes work.  It's not hard to get started, but the process has no hand-holding: it's you, a chess board and a lot of thought.  If you do it, though, I guarantee you will get results.

And if it seems intimidating, then check out my new free course on miniature games.  I walk through 12 of my games and describe the thought process, the common mistakes, the thematic maneuvers ... basically, everything worth extracting.  I tried to make it as fun as possible, and with any luck, you will finish it and be itching to go analyze games yourself.

It's also free.  Free is good.  Check it out, but in the meantime, let's dive in.

Why I Love Miniature Games

A miniature game is one that ends in under 25 moves, generally because of a decisive attack or combination.  These are excellent training tools, for a number of reasons:

1. Efficient: It is possible to review several entire games in a small period of time.
2. Capitalization: One side punishes the other's mistakes.  We thus learn to recognize common mistakes and how to take advantage.
3. Thematic: The same types of mistakes occur again and again, generally from the same root causes.  This makes it easier to learn and absorb.
4. Applicable: You can apply the lessons in your own games quickly.  Contrast endgames, where you might not play an endgame you have studied for a long time.
5. Fun: Seeing someone get blasted off the board always brings a smile to my face.

This the start of a two-part series.  Today, I want to dive deep into these reasons and convince you why a portion of your study time should include miniature games.  In the follow-up, I describe exactly how to do this. If you can't wait until then, feel free to click on this mystery link.  It may or may not take you to a free video series on miniature games by a certain chess blogger.

Spoiler Alert: I have created a new video series on miniature games.

You Are the Sum of Your Skills

 I played Pokemon as a kid.  Everyone did.  We spent a lot of time discussing strategies and arguing over who was the best Pokemon.  Fundamentally, Pokemon were just a bundle of stats, and the best ones tended to have the most stats.  Makes sense: all other things being equal, the better attacker is the better choice.

Charts like these visualize the stats.  Ideally, the entire chart should be green, showing max stats in everything.  The less green, the more a particular area is a weakness.  You can't do much about that with Pokemon ... but you can with chess.

Normally, the only stat chess players care about is our rating.  Makes sense, but not all 1500 players are the same.  Some are great attackers, others are great endgame players, and some are amazing at both but blunder every other game.  Just like a Pokemon is a bundle of different stats, we chess players are a bundle of different skills.  These skills determine your total rating ... and they also tell you exactly where you can improve to get the most progress.

In other words, instead of trying to get better at chess, we should focus on getting better at these individual skills.

Knowledge, Skill and Deliberate Practice in Chess

How do you get better at math?  Thinking back to grade school, two things stand out.  First, lots of time memorizing the times tables.  Two times two is four, three times two is six, etc.  I think that's all we did in Grade 4, honestly.  More than that, though, we did hundreds if not thousands of practice problems, and test day was basically just more practice problems done in a formal setting.  Learning the times tables made it easier, but at the end of the day, getting better at math was mostly about ... doing more math.

Let's now flip the script: how do you get better at chess?  Two things stand out.  First, there is a wealth of chess content that teaches us something about chess: openings, endgames, concepts, ideas, traps, the list goes on and on.  I call this, broadly speaking, chess knowledge.  Second, we can take what we know and apply it: playing games, analyzing, calculating puzzles, that sort of thing.  For lack of a better term, I call this chess skill.

More than just nomenclature, I believe this is a crucial concept for improvement.  Indeed, it may be the most important element when it comes to improving.  I think the majority of players, and I point to myself here, spend far too much time on knowledge acquisition when  we should be focusing on building our skill.

My Thinking System

When you play a game of chess, how do you decide on your move?  I mean that literally: how do you do it?  What goes on in your brain?  For a long time, I couldn't answer this.  When I was 1800, my process was as follows:

1.     Stare at the board.
2.     Have a move pop into my head.
3.     Calculate to see if it works.  If so, play it.
4.     If not, go back to step 1.

Essentially, I played chess randomly.  If my intuition suggested good moves, I did well; when it didn't, I played terrible.  There was no middleground.  Worse, the random nature made my results random.  I could play the game of my life and follow it up by dropping my Queen on move 9.  Needless to say, I plateaued at 1800, and I attribute the main culprit being this complete lack of structured thinking.

I eventually discovered GM Smirnov, and his advice basically boils down to cultivating an efficient thinking algorithm.  This has done wonders for me: I surged past 1800, approaching 2200 in both long-form correspondence and short-form blitz.  More importantly, it opened my eyes and helped me appreciate the beauty and logic of chess.  Adding structure has made chess much more enjoyable.

This post describes my current thinking system.  I've written about it before on various forums, but I can dive into detail here, so let's do it.

How I Made My Biggest Leaps

Frustratingly, improvement in chess rarely comes in neat linear fashion.  We like to imagine that spending X number of hours means Y number of rating points, but it doesn't work that way.  Chess is a grueling climb, with ratings slowly inching up in between long periods of plateaus and dips.  Sometimes, though, we seem to magically level up and jump dozens if not hundreds of rating points seemingly overnight.  

I have been fortunate enough to have at least three of these level-up moments.  Today, I want to briefly list what I was doing just before each phase, and then to give a summary of the common factors.  I can't guarantee copying this will give you equally large leaps, but perhaps training like this is something to consider.  Certainly I plan on doing this more.

Quick Update: My Course was nominated as one of the Best Chess Books for Improving!

 What do I have in common with Capablanca, Fischer, Dvoretsky and Aagaard?  We all made chess content that made this list: the Top 23 Chess Books For Improving!

https://saychess.substack.com/p/the-top-23-best-chess-books-for-improving 

A friend sent me congratulations, and I was confused.  Then he sent the link and I was delighted!  Apparently the SayChess site ran a survey among its members, asking for the chess content that helped them improve the most.  My course ended up in a tie for 17th place, and the other books feature authors much more famous than I, to say the least!

 I wrote "Smithy's Opening Fundamentals" because I saw the need. So many people asking the same sorts of questions on chess forums.  The answer was inevitably "focus on opening principles", but few provided a way to do that.  That was my goal, and I'm delighted that, for many people, it has helped them appreciate this great game a little more.

Obviously, thank you to the people that voted for my course, and thank you to SayChess for featuring me.  It may just be a random Internet list, but I greatly appreciate it.  I've always wanted to be an author, and now it seems undoubtable that I am.  Maybe I'll have to create a follow-up...