I've been at this for half a decade now.

In that time, I've coached dozens of players from near-total beginner to International Master. Over 500 hours of one-on-one, face-to-face time with the brains of adult players wrestling with conceptualization.

It's given me a strange ability.

For the last couple of years I've been able to guess, with about 90% accuracy, what type of conceptualization issue is holding back a player's game by hearing their rating alone.

It appears I've developed a kind of intuition about it now.

The issues are never exactly the same from person to person. There's nuance to it, specific idiosyncrasies based on their own brain, model, experience, personality, whatever.

But I nail the broad strokes most of the time.

I have a love/hate relationship with rating. It's an extremely valuable tool to help me group players so I can better target my advice. But it's also too reactive a mechanism to be a real reflection of skill. That reactivity causes a lot of pain for a lot of players.

We can lose a bunch of rating all at once because we got unlucky and our opponents played out of their skulls that day. We can gain a bunch of rating all at once because our opponents kept blundering or running out of time that day. Neither situation actually indicates that we've gone up or down in skill.

Rating is reactive to every game we play, and therefore overly reactive. We can only get a sense of where we really sit by looking at the overarching trends. We're rarely as good as our peak tells us we are, and we're rarely as bad as our floor rating says either.

But that little number next to our name is the closest thing to an objective marker of progress that we have.

Every hundred points you could gain demands slightly different things of you. But in my experience, there are five milestones that present the most challenge.

On Chesscom, those milestones are 800, 1000, 1200, 1500, and 1800. For the Lichess equivalents, add around 250 points.

(Once you're past 2000, every point is basically its own milestone, and the issues players run into are more individualized. I won't discuss 2000 and up in this series, but many of the concepts I talk about will apply up there too.)

These five ratings are all points where the demands of the game change dramatically. Where the skills you've developed to reach that milestone won't necessarily carry you to the next one.

At each of these points, there's a certain amount of knowledge you need to have to progress. You won't hit 1000 if you never develop your pieces. You won't hit 1200 if you constantly fall for traps in your opening. You're unlikely to hit 1500 if you don't know at least the basic king-and-pawn endgame. And so on.

Conceptualization is no different. There are things your mental muscles just have to be able to do if you want to get above and stay above these rating milestones.

If your brain can't handle the demands of that milestone, you won't reach it.

By the time a student starts working with me, they've usually learned the knowledge they need. There's plenty of content out there about what knowledge you should have to reach a new milestone. It's the frustration of knowing the stuff and not actually being able to use it that drives them to reach out.

A good chunk of adult improvers are the same. They know the things they need to know. But their mental muscles are letting them down in the moment.

(Not everyone, though. It's worth being very honest with yourself whether you actually know the things you need to know for that next milestone or if you're kidding yourself.)

Each rating milestone demands increasingly strenuous work from our mental muscles.

The amount of data we need to notice and process about each move goes up. The amount of information we need to juggle without letting anything slip goes up. The amount of awareness and control we need to have over our own thinking process goes up.

But as with anything else in learning, there's really only a few key things out of everything you could work on that will give us most of the value.

If you're pushing for 1000, you're far better off mastering knight forks than spending hours studying rook endgames. The endgames will help you hit 1800 eventually, but they won't help you hit 1000 now.

Same here.

The goal of this series is to arm you with those key conceptualization muscles for each milestone.

I'll walk you through what they are, why they'll make a difference, and what you can do to train them.

But you need to do some of the work too. When I'm one-on-one with a student, I can review their games, ask them lots of questions, and watch their minds work. I can tailor my diagnosis and recommendations to exactly their issues.

I can't do that in a newsletter. I can tell you the concepts. You need to work out for yourself how they apply to your own unique brain.

Play with the ideas in this series. Review your games, look for the things I'm talking about. See how they show up. Try to catch your brain doing the things I mention. And don't be afraid to tweak things to fit your needs.

Wherever you are with your rating, and whichever of my recommendations resonates the most, there are a few things that will help you get the most out of the series.

#1: Be consistent in your training.

Our brains are lazy. Beautifully, hilariously, wonderfully lazy. And, especially for us adults, they simply won't bother to learn anything if we don't show them that this new thing is important.

(Except for weird, obscure, useless trivia. For some reason, our brains love learning that stuff. I should look into why that happens.)

We show our brains that something's important in two main ways: we do it often, and we give our full attention.

If you're consistent with this and putting real effort in, your brain will get the memo and point resources at learning it. If not, it won't. Simple as that.

Don't Move members can access a 10-minute daily stretch feature that takes the guesswork out of consistent conceptualization training. If you're time poor but want to build consistency, that's a good way to do it. You can learn more about the Don't Move membership here.

#2: Play slower time controls for a while.

Intuition is both a blessing and a curse for our Chess. It's the source of our best moves and many of our worst out-of-nowhere blunders. To improve, we need to create a better dance between our intuition and our deeper reasoned thinking.

Fast time controls encourage us often to just accept what intuition says because otherwise we'll lose on time. That's reinforcing a habit that's going to hinder you long term.

You'll get better results from this series if you swear off bullet and blitz for a while.

Yes, I know it sucks. You can go back to them once the intuition/deeper-thinking relationship's in a better place.

#3: Pay close attention to each part of the series, regardless of which milestone you most care about.

The mental muscles we need for each milestone build upon the ones we needed for the milestones before. Even if you're above the specific rating I'm discussing, watch for any missing pieces in your own conceptualization. You'll need to bolster those if you want to progress.

Similarly, it's extremely valuable (and often inspiring) to know the skills you're currently working on will serve you for the rest of your Chess career. If you're pushing for 1000 now, I guarantee there'll be stuff in the part for 1800-rated players that will give you useful context on why getting things right at this stage matters into the future.

Ok, next week, we kick off with the absolute foundations of conceptualization. What muscles do you need to finally hit 800 on Chesscom?

I'll see you there.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden