If 1200 is the most common rating for a new coaching student to reach out to me, then 1800 is a close second.

To be pushing up and through that 1700-2000 space requires another big jump in conceptualization strength and clarity. In this area, you're now playing against opponents who are more likely than not to punish lapses in your awareness or any messy thinking.

All of the things we've discussed in the previous couple parts about the position in front of us and dormant ideas still apply. But the big difference when hitting this level is the intense clarity that calculations now demand. Often deep or branching calculations, tracking large transformations in the position.

To navigate this rating range, you need to correctly assess all the ways the moves you're calculating change the position, then accurately evaluate at the end if that resulting position is good for you or not. Evaluation is its own topic, so I'll keep the focus on the first bit here today.

You need serious attention to detail, and serious flexibility of thought. Missed details will crush you, frames will break you.

To illustrate what I mean, here's a story from a tournament game of one of my coaching students in this rating range.

They were playing white and sensed they had a strong attack against the black g7 pawn. Their goal was to get that pawn out of the way and overwhelm the king.

So they calculated it out. They found a pathway through, everything looking good, until they noticed their opponent could play Bf6, protecting the g7 pawn again. It screwed up the whole plan. My student couldn't find a way to deal with it, so they gave up on that line and played a quieter move instead.

Reviewing the game afterward, he saw that he should have gone for his original line. It was the best line by a mile.

But to spot why the line worked required a level of detail and flexibility he couldn't muster in the moment.

Because Bf6 did mess up his plan. His entire attack on g7 no longer worked, he was correct about that. But the bishop moving to f6 also meant it was no longer on the e7 square. And that meant the pawn on c5 would become undefended. And that meant that his queen could take it, with a fork on the black rook and knight, winning him a piece.

You can see the similarity between this story and the one from part 5: my student fell victim to a frame over his thinking.

The amount of information we need to process as we calculate through a complex middlegame is staggering. To help us filter out what's important from what's not, we often become slaves to the "point".

We enter into a line usually with some point. It could be an attack on the g7 pawn, or to open up a file, whatever. As we push deeper into that line, and the pressure on our seven slots of working memory ramps up, that point becomes a filter. We start to see details that obviously relate to the point, and ignore or miss details that don't.

This happens at all levels of the game, but it really bites us as we're trying to push to and through 1800. The margins for error get a lot smaller the closer you get to 2000. And one ignored detail, one incorrectly-filtered point, can be the difference between an accurate calculation and a missed opportunity.

The answer is to develop a much lighter relationship with the point.

Commit to data before meaning.

You'll make the clearest, most flexible calculations if the following things are true:

• your working memory can handle the information without overloading
• you have a running log in your mind of the dormant ideas and alignments present in the position
• on each move, you're aware of the Four Things and how they interact with the dormant ideas
• you maintain a fluid, light attachment to the "point", always ready in case other ideas open up instead

To improve in this area takes a full commitment across all of your Chess study.

This isn't something that you can do a few exercises about, never think about otherwise, and actually see improvement on.

Eventually, you get so good at it that you don't even notice you're doing it. For a master-level player, the Four Things are just "the move", alignments and other dormant ideas are just "the position". They pick up those details on every move. Under enough pressure, even they will slip sometimes. They're human too. But 99% of the time, they're aware of all that stuff.

That should be our aim too. We probably won't get to 99% consistency any time soon. But even small improvements here can make a big difference in your charge for 1800 or 2000.

We must understand that our brain wants to filter a lot of that detail out, frame our thinking down, and that we won't notice in the moment when it's occurred.

Whenever you see a piece move or consider moving a piece, ask what it actually does before accepting your brain's assessment of what it means. Don't jump to thinking about your response, or their response, or your goal. Slow it down, gather the data. Then decide on meaning.

To start your journey toward this, here's a few places to begin:

1. Practice the Four Things with composed mate-in-2 studies.

Composed mate-in-2 exercises rock. What makes them so good is the error feedback loop. To find the only viable mate-in-2, you need to 100% aware of all Four Things on each move you consider.

My personal favorite place to get them is the excellent Rewire Your Chess Brain by Cyrus Lakdawala. Highly recommend this one.

2. Do some intense calculation practice.

I'm a big fan of "isolate and intensify" as an approach to learning and improvement. If you want to get good at the Four Things and remaining flexible in your in-game calculations, then practice them with higher-difficulty calculations where all of those things really matter.

Finding good fodder for this is tricky. But there's some excellent stuff in Ramesh RB's Improve Your Chess Calculation book. I use the exercises in that book regularly with coaching students from this rating range. They force exactly the awareness and flexibility we're after here.

3. Use Find the Blunder exercises and analyze games blindfolded.

At the mention of Find the Blunder exercises, I can feel all the Don't Move members shuddering through the screen.

Find the Blunder is a blindfold exercise style on the site that runs you through a series of moves from the starting position. Somewhere in that sequence, one of the players will make a blunder and their opponent will not punish them for it. Your job is to spot the blunder and find the punishment. And they are HARD.

But they also train exactly the kind of awareness we need for this level. Handling sequences of moves, Four Things, dormant ideas, keeping flexibility of thought (there's no way you'll solve some of the harder ones if you're framing in too hard).

If you don't have access to the site, you can get a similar experience by analyzing games blindfolded. Either record yourself reading the moves of a game (my recommendation) or read a PGN. Take pains to understand every move, track the dormant ideas, and try to analyze the game in the way you might analyze a game you could see.

There are a bunch of games, a couple find-the-blunders, and literally hundreds of other blindfold exercises for free on my podcast, Chess Visualization with Aiden Rayner (Spotify | Apple Podcasts) as well.

Progress through this rating range is slow. Be patient with yourself as you train. Be honest with yourself as you review your games. And hang in there.

You've got this.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden