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.

The Skills

Caveat: most of these skills can be combined or divided in a number of ways.  Reasonable people can differ.  This is simply how I would divide overall chess skill into its component parts.

• Pattern Recognition.  The ability to quickly see common patterns, such as forks, pins, skewers and the like.  The more developed, the more patterns you see and the faster you see them.
• Visualization. The ability to see multiple moves ahead.  The more developed, the farther you can see and the more clarity you have.
• Calculation. The ability to calculate and evaluate different moves.  Developing this allows deeper and more accurate evaluations of more and more complex positions.
• Time Management. The ability to use your time appropriately.  The less developed, the more likely you run into time trouble.
• Anti-Blunder. The ability to recognize and avoid blunders.  The more developed, the less likely you are to make an unforced error.
• Attack. The ability to ... well, attack and apply pressure. This includes both attacking the King and attacking weak pawns.  The more developed, the more you recognize targets and press your advantages successfully.
• Defence. The ability to resist pressure.  Includes both direct defence against your King as well as general tenacity in holding unpleasant positions.  Prophylaxis also fits here. The more developed, the more pressure you can absorb and the more games you can save.
• Technique. The ability to convert a technically winning position.  This includes sub-skills like simplification, eliminating counterplay and basic endgame ability.  The more developed, the more you can read, "The rest is a matter of technique," without rolling your eyes.
• Positional Play.  The ability to ... play positionally.  Using pawn majorities, understanding weak squares and good knights vs bad bishops, etc.
  
• Knowledge. The ability to use what you know about chess in a game.  This includes the most general stuff, such as piece values and basic principles, to the hyper-specific, such as knowing historical games and applying the same patterns in your current game.  This is not knowledge in general, but rather your ability to use what you know in your games.

Some of these could be combined together, other could get split into multiple skills, but that list essentially encapsulates everything a chess player needs to do.  You likely nodded along as you read, noticing what you do well and what you do less well.  This leads to the magic.

Improving Your Skills to Improve Your Rating

This seems so simple and obvious: the better you are at these skills, the better you are as a player.  Therefore, focus on one skill until it gets better!  Judging by what I've seen, though, many people focus too much on the big picture.  "How do I improve?" or "How do I get to X rating?", as if there is one magic solution that fits all.

Instead, we can focus on these sub-skills, and by focus, I mean focus.  We place our dominant attention, the majority of our training time, on just one or two of these.  Preferably your weakest link, but this can vary.  At absolute beginner level, pattern recognition and anti-blundering will have a much bigger impact than time management or positional play, for example.  Once you are firmly in intermediate territory, though, then improving your weakest area likely improves everything.  Your rating will then rise as a byproduct, a "rising tide floats all boats" sort of thing.

Each skill can be trained in different ways.  For example, pattern recognition involves doing many easy, thematic tactics, whereas calculation requires going deep on a few hard puzzles.  Learning technique might involve reviewing entire master games, seeing how Capablanca converts his endgames, and visualization might require just the starting position and trying to replay the first five moves entirely in your head.  Different skills require a different approach.

Smithy's Skills

For illustrative purposes, here's how I would categorize myself:

I have several skills more or less in the same area: knowledge, pattern recognition, time management, anti-blundering and attack.  I have one stand-out skill, positional play.  I have a few lagging areas, calculation and technique, and then two big deficits, visualization and defence.

Defence has been a long-standing weakness; I can resist simple attacks but frequently crumple under prolonged pressure.  Conversely, with visualization, I can see several moves ahead, but it takes enormous effort and clarity drops exponentially.  Improving either of these areas would provide untold riches.

To improve my defence, I can read a book dedicated to that topic (surprisingly few, but they exist), focus on "defensive" tactical puzzles and/or review games where scary-looking attacks get parried.  To improve visualization, I can do blindfold training, which is my current focus.  

Once these skills improve, I will have no real obvious weaknesses, and so I can focus on the skill I want to improve most, or perhaps the one I feel subjectively will hold the most value.  We can see, though, that this approach simplifies my training.  I know what I need to study, so I study it until I improve that skill.  No mysteries. 

Conclusion

Instead of focusing on improving "at chess", which risks missing the forest from the trees, we can focus on improving our individual chess skills.  Even if you disagree with my division, you can still follow the general idea: if you improve your underlying skills, you cannot help but improve your overall skill.  The stronger your individual skills, the stronger you become.  That's how you become the ultimate Pokemon ... err, the best chess player you can be.