10 Chess Hacks

I’ve never been very good at chess. But I think, probably due to an exaggerated sense of my intelligence, that I should be.

I’ve been training on a few apps, and there are many. The better ones allow you to adjust the difficulty level upwards as you progress. And I’ve found that if I move up the level by, say, 5%, my win percentage drops from about 70% to about 10%. That’s not fun, so I’ve settled on making the smallest increments that allow me to win most of the time.

I’ve wondered if this is the right thing to do. Recently, TS, a friend, colleague, and subscriber, sent me this “excellent overview of specific, proven methods for performance improvement.”

The overview comes from Scott Young, a young man that has some pretty impressive credentials when it comes to self-teaching. Among them, the two-year long MIT Challenge, where he attempted to learn MIT’s four-year computer science curriculum without taking classes, and “The Year Without English,” where he attempted to learn four languages in one year.

Young lists 10 chess hacks, the eighth of which made me feel good about what I’m doing. Click here.