1200 is a clear line in the Chesscom rating graph. There are a lot more people on one side of it than the other.

It's one of two most common plateaus that drive new coaching students to reach out to me. (The other is 1800, and we'll get there later in the series.)

1200 is a key turning point in Chess. For one reason above any others, 1200 is the land of the short calculation.

Up until this point, it is in most cases enough to focus on your opponent's last move and your own next move. That's where the blunders are, and that's where the opportunities are.

Pair move-to-move awareness with some training around key tactical patterns, mating patterns, and some fundamental Chess principles, and you'll hit 1000.

But the skills that got you through to 1000 won't get you past 1200. You still need them, of course - at 1200, any one-move blunders you make are going to be punished 90% of the time - but they're not enough any more.

Here the mistakes and opportunities lie in short sequences of three-to-five ply, and navigating those sequences is a far trickier task for our brain than anything that came before.

You're considering playing a certain move. To do this, you have to imagine - however your brain does it, visual or not - that the piece is no longer where it currently is and is instead in a new spot.

To avoid blunders, you need to know if the piece will be defended on its new square, whether the new square is attacked, and critically whether the vacated square leaves any serious weakness that your opponent could exploit. That's three details already, and each could be many-faceted depending on how complex the position is.

That's a hard enough thing for the brain to do when you're just considering one move. Now multiply that same load over three-to-five ply.

The conceptualization mistakes that a 1200 makes are much the same mistakes that an 800 or 1000 player would make, but they come not from the move that was just played but from an oversight during their short calculation.

They're hung pieces, undefended pawns, forgetting to protect the back rank, missing that your opponent's queen is threatening mate, things like that. "Basic" errors, triggered by the significant increase in working memory pressure at this level.

(Note that I'm only talking conceptualization errors here. There's also an increase in the Chess knowledge required at this level, but that's not my domain.)

To get through this level, we need to put solid effort into strengthening our awareness and our working memory efficiency. We want to be as clear three-ply down the line as we would be if the moves were actually played out in front of us.

Attackers, defenders, vacated squares. The basics, but applied to a position that's not on the board yet. Get properly good at that, and your conceptualization skills will be more than good enough for a push through this rating range.

There'll be a few challenges we'll have to face along the way, but I've got you. I've worked enough students through this phase to be confident these steps will help you too.

1. Get great at vacated squares during calculations.

It's one thing to track vacated squares for just one move, but a whole other demand on our brain to do it for moves ahead. Build the discipline now to always look at both sides of the move whenever you consider moving a piece in your calculations.

A good starting place is to identify just one thing that changes about the position because the piece is no longer where it was. Sometimes it's a useless detail, but sometimes it's very important indeed. And you won't know which one it is on this specific move until you check.

Without rock solid vacated square awareness, you are doomed to all sorts of blunders from hung pieces, surprise checks, and in-between moves.

2. Get great at piece alignments.

Tactics in Chess rarely come out of nowhere. They're usually a result of a couple different patterns sitting dormant in the position for a little while, then woken up by a mistake of some kind. Since we're now looking at short calculations as the key piece, we need to be clear what these patterns sitting dormant in the position are so we can either use them or avoid walking into them while we're calculating something else.

There's no point calculating to win a minor piece if you miss an alignment and your opponent ends up pinning and winning your queen immediately afterward. (We've all done it.)

The main dormant ideas you want to be 100% aware of at this level are alignments. Even if there's nothing you can immediately do about it, you need to know if a queen or king are on the same diagonal, if pieces could be forked by a knight, if a rook is x-raying an undefended bishop through a couple pawns. Notice the dormant ideas in the current position, and you'll be far more likely to use or avoid them properly in future positions.

The way to make this awareness of alignments automatic is through Jessika's Review. After your games, go through move-by-move and identify any alignments that the move created. Use every move as an opportunity to practice the habit of noticing them. And I guarantee you'll find a bunch of alignments that you could have used if you'd spotted them at the time as well.

(Here's the full guide on how to use Jessika's Review. We'll mention the exercise a couple more times this series, so it's worth checking out.)

3. Get great at applying pressure.

One of the big upsides of understanding and conquering this conceptualization stuff is that you can start to weaponize it against your opponent. Around this 1200-level, you can really start to use it, and it applies all the way up the rating ladder.

As you're playing, look for opportunities to increase the mental pressure on your opponent. Pose challenges for them, use the alignments you notice from step two to constantly be poking and prodding at their position. You don't need to play aggressively to do this, you can apply pressure whichever style you play.

If you apply enough pressure, absolutely anyone will eventually overload. Most likely at this level, they'll overload by forgetting the vacated square or missing an alignment that you're pressing against. But they could simply freeze up and burn a bunch of time, or freewheel and play something impulsively without thinking it through.

Anything you've learned from me about how Chess brains work and the glitches that occur also applies to your opponent. Use it as a weapon.

And as always, start each session of Chess with 10 minutes of blindfold work.

Teach the working memory to handle a full position without your eyes, and it will find juggling the mental load of a short calculation easy by comparison. If your working memory overloads, all bets are off.

This is one of the hardest milestones to crack. The shift it requires in our conceptualization and working memory load is immense. It's why so many players get stuck here.

Committing to the above work will take you a long way to finally cracking it.

Next week, we look at the coveted 1500, a rating goal for many adult improvers. And a rating that I think any player taking their Chess seriously could eventually reach.

The working memory demands jump again here, as we need to start handling a lot more complexity, increasingly hidden ideas, and especially fight our brain's hard-wired tendency to simplify and filter the information it takes in.

It's a fun one.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden