Before getting into specific techniques for your chess improvement, I want to tell you my own story. This story fits into two distinct parts.

I had a somewhat unusual chess education. I grew up in San Jose, California, and my dad taught me how to play at age 10 in 1985. At age 12 I got really into chess and started to play in tournaments, and about the same time I found a weekly chess class that I just loved, taught by a man named Richard Shorman. Mr. Shorman had the point of view that the beauty of chess was in slashing, attacking play, and that everything else in chess was a sad compromise. Each week he would bring in amazing tactical games by strong players, and our class would guess each move for the winning side, while he would talk through why our moves were good or bad. The games were amazing. I learned how to attack, how to use the initiative, how and when to make sacrifices, and all of the tools one needs to make an attack successful. I fell in love with the game, and Mr. Shorman and his classes were at the center of that.

Mr. Shorman’s approach had some weaknesses, however. He taught us to play nothing but gambits, and that positional play and endgame play was for the weak. I bought into this philosophy whole hog, playing the King’s gambit, the Elephant Gambit, the Budapest Gambit, and I played as aggressively as I knew how on every single move. It worked great in my fantasies, but it didn’t work that well in my actual games. Although I always loved Mr. Shorman’s classes and teaching, I stopped playing and going to classes after three years of chess frustration and lack of objective improvement.

When I was 16, I was still feeling demoralized but I decided to try tournaments again, mostly to have an additional activity to put onto my future college application. I no longer had the expectation of success, and - shockingly to me - I immediately had success in buckets. It turned out that what I needed to move forward was the addition of a single element to my game: caution. I was still playing unsound gambits, because I knew nothing else, but I was no longer playing only aggressive moves and just expecting my opponent to fall over. I now knew that attacking chess didn’t always work, and I started scouring the position for my opponent’s defensive resources. I was even more afraid of getting positionally stifled and losing in the endgame, so on every move I was looking for ways to complicate the position to get a position I knew how to handle, but adding a healthy degree of justified restraint made a huge difference for me. In the period of four years I went from a rating of 1441 to 2107, with almost no breaks in the rise.

Once I hit around 2100 however, I stopped going up. I was good at playing complex, tactical positions, beating even strong masters in these types of positions, but in slow positions and endgames I played like a gorilla. I was still playing unsound gambits, and these simply weren’t consistently successful against strong opposition. I started playing some better openings - especially with black, where my shoddy opening play was getting consistently punished - but I still tried to avoid openings that were well mapped because I didn’t want to have to study theory. In fact, other than playing over games by strong attacking players, I didn’t want to do any study at all, really. It showed in my results against better players. I played intermittently through my 20s with mixed results, but at 29 I started dating a girl I really liked and got an interesting new job. I just didn’t have time to devote to competitive chess, and it turned out that that fact wasn’t going to change any time soon.

That’s really where I thought my competitive chess story would end, with a mediocre tournament in 2004. And I was OK with that. Really. But then in 2020 I unexpectedly found myself stuck inside for weeks and months, and something happened to change my trajectory.