This advice is aimed at people who are rated in the region of 500-1000 rapid on chess.com or lichess, and are playing mostly online. For context I’d say this is a level where you’re starting to feel confident and you’d probably beat someone who only knows how the pieces move, but you still hang the odd piece or make other one move errors. If you’re new to the game, you might want to check out my advice for beginners.
Once you’re in the habit of playing live games (that is, online rated games with a set length against a human opponent), you’re comfortable with all the rules, and your rating is starting to climb, the piece of advice that I found most helpful was: Play slower games. I switched from playing 10 minute games to playing 30 minute games, and it gave me so much more time to think and calculate. Try and think on your opponent’s time, too- try to work out what they might play and what you might do about it.
In addition, I limited the number of games I played each day. One thirty minute game, win or lose. The purpose isn’t only to limit the amount of time I spend, but to prevent Tilt- the phenomenon whereby losing one game or making one mistake leads to losing more and more. There’s often a temptation to play one more game to try and end on a win, but this rarely ends well. If you want to play more chess, play a bot- the stakes are lower, therefore the frustration is less.
This is an important one. At this level, you’re going to be putting in the work and seeing the improvement. This can make you feel superior to other people at the same rating level, who you might feel are not putting in the same work. The most frustrating thing I found was when an opponent would play some nonsense opening, a wayward queen attack or something, and I’d think, oho, this’ll be a walk in the park. And then I’d make a mistake, as we all do all the time, and I’d lose, and I’d feel dreadful. How could I, who was putting in all this time and effort, lose to someone who plays the wayward queen attack? The answer is: a game of chess lasts a long time (as long as you know how to defend against the wayward queen attack), and just because someone is messing about in the opening doesn’t mean you’re an all around stronger player than they are. As long as your ratings are the same, it’s a battle against a worthy opponent which you can win or lose.
I will say that I’ve found it a lot easier to respect my opponents in general since I disabled in game chat.
“I’m not really 600, I’m probably more like 800, 850…”
I got into the habit of playing a 30 minute game every day. Then I started playing daily games much more. At this time I watched an excellent video (more on this later) which was a real epiphany for me, and I started winning a lot of games. Then I went away for a few days and when I came back, I didn’t feel like the stress of playing live games, and for several months I only played daily. I continued to improve, and when I started playing rapid again, I was winning a lot of games. My rating, then 750 or so, quickly increased, and it’s still going up. I’m winning about 80% of my games and it definitely feels like I’m underrated.
It’s possible that that is true, but the only way to find out what my rating is is to play more, and right now I’m rated 979 rapid. If I start thinking, “I’m actually about 1200, I’m just passing through” then I’m setting myself up to feel awful when I lose. And I do lose. If a 1200 player plays a 900 player then the rating system says they should win 85% of the time- this page has more information and a calculator. Losses to lower rated players happen. I’m rated 979 and that’s all we know for sure.
With that said, I’ve found a lot of more experienced players who’ve been around for a while don’t really understand what it’s like to be a low level player- when I first joined chess.com about 15 years ago, I don’t think it was mathematically possible to be rated 600, and yet now that’s about the median rating for rapid. When I made a new account in 2024 I started at 400 and immediately dropped to 250. Being below 1000 isn’t anything to be ashamed of- in fact, at time of writing, a rating of 1000 rapid on chess.com puts you in the 83rd percentile.
When your rating is at the correct level, you should lose approximately 50% of your games, so you’ve got to learn to accept it. Sometimes I’ll lose a game and be in a bad mood or feeling stressed about it, and I try to remind myself- if the biggest cause of stress in my life right now is that I lost a chess game, I really don’t have much to complain about.
Of course there are different ways to lose. A hard fought battle that could have gone either way but at the end they found a brilliant forced mate? Can’t feel too bad about that. You were ahead on material and time and then you managed to trap your own queen? That’s rather harder to stomach. It’s all part of it though. Some games grind through pretty even throughout, but at this level, the vast majority of games are likely to be won or lost because one player made a mistake and the other player capitalised on it.
It’s easy to feel like you’re rubbish if you lose a few games in a row, but the fact is that you are better at chess than when you started, and losing doesn’t mean you’ve got worse. Starting a document of reasons you’ve lost games can be helpful to highlight areas you need to work on.
Try to make a regular time to sit down and really study, whatever that looks like for you. I do puzzles and such every day, but on Tuesday evenings I take an hour to sit down and study, whether that’s evaluating my games, going through opening lines, or working through a book.
There are so many excellent resources for learning chess. I recommend looking at these study guides to give you an idea of what you should be looking at. I won’t tell you what you should study here, but I do recommend doing lots of puzzles, and really taking the time in your games to try and spot similar positions and take advantage of them. Finding a tactic in a the wild is one of my favourite things about chess.
I mentioned videos earlier and I particularly recommend IM John Bartholomew’s Chess Fundamentals series- the source of a great deal of improvement for me. The videos are long, but extremely worthwhile.
I’m also a big fan of IM Eric Rosen in general and in particular his speedrun series. It can be easy to think of higher rated players as completely infallible, and this series really shows how untrue that is. As I constantly tell my 1350 daily rated self: “1500s aren’t magic”.
What’s great about playing chess at this level is that there’s so much to learn, and so many resources to learn from. With work and practice you can see a lot of improvement quite quickly. If you get frustrated after a loss, remember that lost games are the ones that have the most to teach you, and remember how far you’ve come!
It's also a great idea to join a local chess club or go to a meetup and play some over the board games- it's much more social and fun than playing online, and you can talk through ideas and do post mortems on your games, which can be very helpful.