The One Thing I Wish I Had Realized Before Wasting 30 Hours “Practicing” Chess

Watching Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, play 3 minute blitz chess games on Youtube is entertainment, not education.

That’s it.

I was putting in the hours. After the first 20 hours of playing chess on lichess, I wrote my first chess blog post and it was all good. I had settled into the groove of playing chess and learned the basics. By this point I knew that I had to move the king to safety, develop my pieces and control the central squares at the beginning of every game. I even had a number of check mates that I was proud of.

The next 30 hours of chess however were…. frustrating! “Why is my rating not improving?”, I often wondered. I’d get above 1000 and then get smacked back down to the lower 900s. Over and over again.

My lichess percentile was oscillating around 3.4%. That’s not good.

At the 50 hour mark, I stumbled across GM Ben Finegold’s lectures on YouTube where he’s teaching kids, mostly 7 to 12, at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta. The one thing that turned my chess rating around was a simple lesson: “Never resign!”

Never resign! Even if you’ve lost the queen, you’re down a lot of pieces and are running low on time. “Never resign,” GM Finegold urged.

Since I was just watching Magnus play, whenever he had a commanding advantage over his opponents, they would resign. That’s reasonable. It’s nearly impossible to beat Magnus on a good day, and not worth even trying when you’re not in a commanding position in the middle or end of the game.

So why does it make no sense to resign for anything below 1500+? Because at this rating level, you’re only playing against players that also don’t know what they’re doing. They’re more likely than not to also blunder, run out of time, fail to checkmate you, leave pieces undefended and much more. It makes no sense to resign. Just play the rest of the game, and if you lose, you lose. That’s fine.