Learning Plans and Ideas

In chess, there are few things worse than not having a plan.  Every move is a struggle. We agonize over every decision, wondering if we are on the right track. Typically we drift, jumping from one idea to the next, with no consistency in our moves.  It's terrible.

When you have a plan, though, then life is easy.  Just follow the plan.  If we are doing a Queenside minority attack, well, then every move should address that.  Simple. We know exactly what we are supposed to do. Sure, we still have to calculate and evaluate and all that hard stuff, but our plan guides our thinking.  Having one is much better than the alternative.

This guy probably knows what he is talking about.

Okay, so we're probably in agreement, knowing plans (and their associated ideas) is ideal ... but how do we learn these?  Every pawn structure has its own general plans, and every opening brings its own nuances. How do you go about learning these?

I will provide three options.  Two of them are quick and easy.  The last one takes work, but it may be the best of the bunch ... assuming you can put in the work.

1. Free Resources
2. Paid Resources
3. Self Study

Free Resources

Basically, all the most common and essential plans already exist on YouTube.  Minority attack, playing against an IQP, hanging pawns, the Carlsbad structure, all of these have countless videos on them, plus many more.  You can learn these foundational structures for free from the comfort of your own home.

Some of these go deeper, not just covering these fundamentals but into the nitty-gritty details of various openings.  There's a lot of good stuff here ... and a lot of junk, unfortunately.  I propose two places to start:

1. Hanging Pawns: an enthusiastic and strong amateur provides detailed guidance.
2. Chess Factor: over 600 lessons by top instructors, with quality that makes you wonder how it is free.
   

These channels provide extremely good analysis, and there's a lot of it.  Definitely check them out.  I suppose I could also link my own YouTube channel, but it's less active and has less focus on these plans, but hey, a little self-promotion is fine, I guess.

Paid Resources

Like the above, but less free.  These typically come in two flavours, opening books/courses and game collections. In theory, opening books tell you how to play a given opening, but I've found these to be hit-or-miss.  Some, like GM Shankland and GM Ganguly, strongly emphasis the plans involved and give us exactly what we want here.  Others, without naming names, focus too much on the individual move-by-move analysis, so you learn a lot of moves but not the overarching ideas that glue it all together.

The best series I've seen that consistently describes the plans and ideas of a given opening is Everyman's "Move-by-Move" series:

These exist across virtually every major opening and dive deep into the plans and ideas involved.  Very enjoyable, and perfect for our needs.

That said, opening books are only one option.  Possibly a better option are game collections.  I own a dozen or so, and honestly, I've never regretted going through them. They are consistently the highest quality.

These books frequently feature breath-taking games, but more importantly, they have a detailed analysis of different positions and, often, a description of why a typical plan works or does not. This is absolutely illuminating.  You get dozens of these explanations, all spread across different structures, and you emerge with a wealth of knowledge at the end.

Most game collections feature players, not openings, so it is harder to pre-select a given structure in advance.  That said, some, like GM Ilya Smirin's "King's Indian Warfare", do both.  Anyway, point stands: opening books can be hit-or-miss, but game collections (especially of past greats) are near universally excellent.  Definitely worthwhile investments.

Self Study

This option will not work if you are not strong enough.  How strong is "strong enough"? I don't know. As we'll see, you need to be able to recognize vague similarities across a multitude of positions, as well as the memory to put the pieces together. Not rank beginner, but not master-level either.

This is something I have done most of my life, but I only really noticed the benefit when I was over 1800.  Honestly, it was just something I did for fun, and I only eventually realized it had some positive carry-over effects when I performed the deeper analysis described further below.

Anyway, the process is simple.  Chose a structure, such as an opening you want to get better at. Take a whole bunch of games, say 50; the more the better.  Divide them equally into White wins and Black wins, so 25 a piece.  Now go through all of them quickly, maybe 1-2min max for each game.  Ideally, you get through all games in a single session, or at least all games of one colour.  We aren't trying to look at moves or calculate or evaluate.  No, we just want to see the general flow of the game.  What patterns jump out? What do we keep noticing?

Here's an example.  Let's say we want to study the Open Spanish:

Okay, let's get a whole bunch of games and start going through them. Chessbase is a premium database and makes it easy, but you can also use online databases, such as the free one on ChessTempo. Whatever source you use, let's look through a bunch of White wins to start.  What do we notice?

I've just gone through 12 White wins quickly, and one thing is jumping out: the d4 and c5 squares. White frequently occupies one and controls the other.  Here are four examples:

Four very different position, but with a common theme. It's not necessarily that this is directly leading to White's advantages, but it's a pattern I'm seeing.  Another pattern: a lot of long games, as eight of the games went over 40 moves, and only one (1) was less than 25.  This might tell us the nature of White's advantage: not immediately decisive, but Black suffers long-term.

Let's now do the same for Black. It only took 11 games for me to notice White's King coming under fire: (forgive my photo-editing skills; click to enhance)

In nearly half the games, Black has some play against the White King.  What's interesting, though, is that the other half?  Not a hint of Kingside aggression.  In the games where White won, I only saw one (1) game where Black had a Kingside attack. This seems to suggest that poor play by White allows an attack, whereas accurate play keeps it at bay.  If we look at more games, we'll be able to get a better sense of how this plays out.

Game length was similar:  six games over 40 moves, with two more in the high 30s (one at 39!), and only one game less than 25 moves.  This is quite interesting, as it suggests that this is not a "quick-and-easy, hack-and-slash" opening but rather one that features longer games. This tells us to pay more attention to what happens after move 20 rather than before.

This is just a snapshot, not even 25 total games, but we're already getting a sense of what this opening is like.  If we extend this another 75 games, how much more accurate will our insights be?  A lot.  Little things that we pass over in the first few games might start re-appearing more and more.  I might have gotten lucky and happened to pick the only five attacking Black wins in the database; a bigger study will reveal the real trends.

Finally, once we've done this over a large collection of games and are fairly comfortable with our conclusions, we do the last step: take two games, one White win and one Black win, and analyze it deeply.  Play guess-the-move.  

The first part, the many-games-quickly approach, gives us the general flow; this second part, the two-games-deeply approach, now dives into the details. It's a much different experience, and this will help confirm whether our conclusions were right.  If we go through two games and never once think about the d4-square or Black's Kingside attack, then we probably need to re-evaluate.

That's it.  Do that, and you will have internalized a good chunk of the plans, similar to how a baby learns to talk, through pure immersion in the positions. Of course, you can do more than two games for a deep analysis. The more the better, actually. Two games at a minimum, though, ensures that you are getting a proper sense of what both White and Black are after in these structures.

Depending on the opening, you might need to do this process again, with more games or from a different starting position.  The Open Spanish is so rich that I looked at merely a drop in the bucket of all possibilities; other openings, like the London or Colle, can be learned in a single pass, just because the structures tend to be so similar game to game.

One More Thing: Write down your conclusions.  You don't want to do all this work and then forget about it in six-months time.  That's frustrating.  Take it from personal experience, even if it's just a few sentences, record your conclusions.  Your future self will thank you.

Conclusion

We have three ways to learn typical plans: free resources on YouTube (and other sites, I guess, but YouTube dominates), paid products and self-study.  If you are more on the beginner/intermediate side, then I'd suggest looking at game collections, as you will get a lot of good from there.  Once you have gone through several dozen annotated games, you might be able to do your own self study, similar to what I described above.

I'll also add in passing that all of these (free, paid, self-study) work more than just plans.  Indeed, playing guess-the-move improves basically every skill in chess.  This is thus worthwhile to do even if plans aren't your primary focus. As they say, it's never a mistake to go through master games.