There's a lot to get your head around at the start.
Jumping into Chess has that "drinking from a firehose" feeling. There's so much to work out to build the foundations of your skills and it comes at you all at once. It's very difficult to work out what matters, what you need to know, and where the issues holding you back even are.
Chess under 800 rating on Chesscom has a unique conceptualization challenge that players above that rating range struggle to understand.
There's one way I know of to re-experience it. And it's to play a totally different game: Egyptian Rat Screw.
It's a card game using a standard deck of playing cards. It operates much like Snap, with the deck evenly split amongst the players and each player taking turns to put the top card from their deck onto the pile in the middle.
Whenever two cards of the same value are placed on top of one another on the middle pile, everyone tries to be the first to slap their hand on the top of the cards.
The first person to slap the pile wins the cards.
Egyptian Rat Screw operates much the same, but there's more to it. You can still snap on a pair of matching cards, but you can also snap when a king and queen are together, or a matching card is on the top and bottom of the pile, or when a card matches the card before the last card, or when the last two cards add to 10, or, or, or, or, or...
You get the point.
There are between 10 and 13 different combinations you can snap depending on which version of the game you play. And for a new player it's impossible to keep them all in your head at once.
Our working memory has 7 slots for information, and 13 different snap combinations is simply too many.
Even if you do manage to remember all the different ways you can snap the cards, good luck actually applying them as the game goes on.
The brain reacts to this overload by Freezing, Forgetting, Framing, and Freewheeling.
Sometimes a new card gets played and several of the players' brains glitch out as they try to work out if they should slap the pile or not. But it's like their brain shuts down and they can't seem to process anything anymore.
Sometimes a player will fixate on one or two of the combinations without noticing they've done it, and miss "obvious" pairs that pop up. Sometimes a simple pair of 10s will appear on the pile and no one will snap because they're all stuck looking for the more complicated combinations.
And sometimes a player will snap the pile on instinct, then sit there with their hand on the pile trying to work out why they did that.
This is what it feels like to be pre-800 on Chesscom. It's all simply too much to process at once. There's too many concepts to think about, too many pieces to track, too many rules to navigate. Seven slots is just not enough.
They regularly get stuck in patterns of thinking, or of not thinking. Focusing on one thing makes other things slip. And their fledgling intuition regularly misfires with a pattern recognition that's not well developed yet.
None of this is their fault, just like it won't be your fault when your brain glitches out if you play Egyptian Rat Screw.
Players right up the rating ladder will feel some version of these things under enough pressure, but for players under 800 "enough pressure" is the default state.
So the most critical thing you can do if you're under 800, from a conceptualization standpoint, is improve your ability to juggle all that information.
There's a layer of familiarity and context you need to earn. As you become more familiar with how Chess works, how the board goes together, what moves do, you will naturally build up your ability to handle the pressure of that information. Things we're familiar with are much easier for our brains to juggle.
Here's some ways you can build that foundational familiarity and comfort with the board.
Learn the fundamentals of the game, and stop there for now.
At this stage, anything you learn that isn't a core fundamental of the game is piling on top of shaky foundations. You'll likely have to relearn or at least revisit any of that more complex stuff as you improve anyway. And it will all be easier if your foundations are rock solid.
Learn the board itself.
We need to understand the field of play. Coordinates, square colors, diagonals, how a knight actually moves across the board. It's dull material, sure, but it's exactly the kind of raw information your brain is currently burning working memory slots to process in the moment. Once it's automatic, those slots free up for everything else.
It might sound silly, but when your brain knows these things without your eyes having to tell you, the board becomes much easier to navigate.
I have free tools to train each of those things here.
Focus on how pieces relate to each other.
I recommend you do the following. Go through your own games after you've played them, move by move. On each move, ask two questions:
- what is this piece attacking, and
- what is it defending?
These two questions are the most basic building blocks of piece relationships. And it's so easy to miss these details when your brain is swirling with everything that's happening in the position.
Checking for them in game review helps you get the reps on noticing those two things, so that your brain can eventually learn to notice them automatically, regardless of how much pressure it's under.
I call this technique "Jessika's Review" and here's my full article on how to do it.
Lastly, play fewer games. And give the ones you do play your full focus.
When the working memory is strained, we get tired quick. When we're tired, we have fewer slots to work with in that working memory. So we strain more and we get tireder, and so on and so on.
A single longer game, played with full attention, focus, and good energy, will do more for helping you to build those core skills than a bunch of faster games played while tired.
Seriously, the amount of improvement in skill and rating I've seen from players just from limiting themselves to one rapid game a day, or even a handful in a week, it's wild. When you go into every game fresh, your brain performs and learns just so much better.
If you decide to give Egyptian Rat Screw a go, here's the trick to it.
First off, accept that it's too much to handle all at once. Don't even try. Instead, consciously pick 2, maybe 3, of the combinations you think will show up most commonly, and focus on nailing those as often as you can. You'll miss a bunch of the other ones, but that doesn't matter.
Then, when you're comfortable with those, add a single other combination. Get comfy with that, then add another one.
Start with the ones that will make the most difference, and only then add the complicated, less common ones.
Foundations first, everything else later. Your working memory will thank you.
It's almost like I'm not really talking about a card game, huh?
Here's to the journey,
Aiden
