The Gym You Don’t Need to Change For — Old Chess Training Methods Revisited

Look at This Chart

Look at this chart. It’s my profile on Chess.com. Peak puzzles rating: 3453.

The numbers say I’m a tactical genius, that I see every shot in a fraction of a second. Those numbers lie.

This is not a chart of my chess ability. It’s a chart of my ability to click and to handle the platform. And the best part is: you only realize it when… you sit down at a real chessboard.

Because inside the app everything is clean. There is always a “correct answer,” always feedback, always some kind of reward. In a tournament game there is no easy reward. There is silence, the next move, and the shame when you make yet another simple mistake. Otherwise you would have won.

I fell into the trap most of us fall into. I confused gamification with training.

And real training hurts. Not in a dramatic way. In an honest way: it leaves you tired, but stronger.

The Myth of a Thousand Reps

In strength training you don’t build form by lifting an empty bar a thousand times.

Sure—you can sweat, you can feel like you did work, you can even do it every day. But your body won’t learn to lift 100 kg from that. It will learn how to lift an empty bar.

The brain works the same way.

Chess apps are designed to make you feel good. Quick shots. Dopamine. “Ding!” Good move. Next. One more. Five more. Ten more, because it’s going well. And if something doesn’t work—no problem, we test further. Do you know the word TILT? No consequences.

But in a real game there is no “ding.”

There is no “try again.”

There is no “undo.”

There is only silence. And consequences.

That’s why I stopped clicking. I went back to lifting weights.

Warm-Up: How to Enter Calculation Mode

But before you take a heavy weight, you don’t go for a record. You warm up. And in chess it works exactly the same.

Whenever I have training or an important tournament game, I begin with a few simple tactical puzzles. So simple that sometimes you want to say: “why am I doing this, it’s obvious.” Exactly.

This is not training. This is turning the engine on. Setting the focus. Switching the brain from “life mode” into “calculation mode.” If you don’t make that transition, you’ll enter hard puzzles—or a tournament game—while your thoughts are still scattered and your decisions are impulsive.

A tactical warm-up is like the first kilometers of a run: they are not meant to exhaust you. They are meant to set you.

And only then does the real work begin.

The 100% Rule and the Urge to Click

The biggest enemy of training (not only in chess) is the word “almost.”

“I’m almost sure.” “It almost works.” “It has to be this.”

In an app, that word is like lubricant. It makes life easier. It lets you keep moving. You click and check. In a second you have the answer. And if not—no big deal.

But in a game, “almost” means a loss.

That’s why I teach (and train) a simple rule: a puzzle is solved only when you have calculated to the end. One hundred percent. No “holey” lines.

Not because I’m a pedant. Because chess is not won by “good intentions.” It’s won by precision. And precision is born from discipline.

And here we return to what the screen teaches worst: fighting the urge to click. The hardest thing is not calculating a line. The hardest thing is not checking when you feel you already know.

On the computer you are always fighting an impulse. On the board you fight the problem.

The Squats Rule

The kids I train hate this rule. But it works so well that it’s a shame you can’t build it into Chess.com.

You miscalculated and chose the wrong move? You do 20 squats.

This is not physical punishment. It’s a lesson in economics. In an app, the cost of a mistake is zero. In a tournament, the cost can be painful: a loss, rating points, anger at yourself, a wasted chance. For every chess player that is real weight.

Squats bring something into home training that usually doesn’t exist there: cost.

When you know a mistake means effort, suddenly you stop guessing. Suddenly you calculate a second time. Suddenly you check branches you wouldn’t have checked before. And something interesting happens: you start taking your decisions seriously.

And that is the whole essence of chess.

Frustration as Proof You’re Improving

The biggest growth doesn’t come from puzzles you solve in fifteen seconds. They’re good for warm-up, for “sharpness,” for rhythm. But growth comes from the ones that create chaos in your head.

There are puzzles you sit with for ten minutes and nothing works. Twenty minutes and you want to check the answer. Thirty minutes and you start negotiating with yourself: “okay, I’ll try—worst case we’ll see.”

This is where playing strength grows.

Because then you don’t calculate one line. Then you build a tree—branches, offshoots, non-obvious moves. You learn to evaluate the position at the end of the variation, not only to find a “pretty shot.” You learn to return, repeat, verify, correct.

This is exactly what muscles do under heavy weight: adapt—or break.

And here is the important caveat: hard puzzles develop you, but you don’t have to get stuck in them. You can put them aside, take a break, return. Just never “shoot.” Guessing is like cheating in strength training. You feel like you did the set, but in reality you ran away from the work.

The Problem That Stays on the Wall

There are problems you won’t solve in three minutes. Those are the “heavy weights.” And here, technology often loses to physics.

Because the screen disappears. You turn it off and the topic disappears with it. But a position on a real board can remain.

I set a difficult position on the chessboard and… I walk away. I go for coffee. I come back. I glance. I pass by. I look from another angle. And even if I don’t want to—my brain starts grinding it anyway.

This is the “in passing” method. You don’t sit over the problem by force. You let it hang in space. And your mind does its work while you do other things.

Until the moment that is the most pleasant in chess arrives: click. You see it. You know.

And you didn’t click it. You found it.

That’s the difference between fast food and slow cooking.

(If you want the deeper background on wall-mounted boards as a training space, here’s our long guide: Vertical Chess Boards — Complete Guide.)

Online and Over-the-Board Are Two Different Games

Anyone who plays online and then sits down over the board knows it’s not “the same thing, just without internet.” It’s a different game: a different feel, a different tempo, a different responsibility, and different emotions.

Young and very active players can sometimes transfer strength almost 1:1. But the less tournament practice you have, and the less “battle-tested” you are, the more these differences grow. That’s why I believe it’s worth improving in classical chess. It teaches depth—not clicking.

And here is an anecdote that still sits in my head.

I didn’t play chess at all for five years. A team asked me to represent them in a league match. I sat down at the board and felt a discomfort that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t lived it.

I couldn’t reach for help. I couldn’t “check.” I couldn’t talk to anyone.

I was alone with the problem.

After a few games I found some rhythm again… and suddenly I liked it—again. That’s the charm of multi-hour games: it’s you and the chessboard. And nothing in between.

The Only “Screen” Like This

For some this will sound like an argument “from another world,” but for me—as a man in my forties and a father—it matters. I see the difference between time spent in front of a screen and time spent at a chessboard.

A screen is work, emails, fatigue. A chessboard is focus, training, and mental recovery.

The optimal training conditions are simple, but hard to create: phone off, cut off from stimuli, one problem, and silence. After such a session you leave tired like after the gym—seriously, it’s almost the same—along with satisfaction and fast recovery after the effort.

Group Analysis: Without the God of the Mouse

There is one more thing that makes a huge difference: analysis in a group.

Computer analysis has hierarchy built in. The person holding the mouse and turning on the engine is “god.” Everyone else watches. It’s convenient, but it kills effort.

At a physical chessboard there is democracy. You don’t turn the engine on. Anyone can walk up, show a line, calculate, and be wrong. The chances are equal. And everyone has to work—and to defend their ideas. This is no longer passive watching of a “movie,” waiting for what Stockfish will reveal.

Word-of-Mouth in Your Living Room

I have a client. An IM. A junior national team coach from Denmark. He bought three chessboards for his home.

His kids didn’t want to play. And he didn’t want to force them. He knew forcing kills passion.

He did something else. He changed the environment and created opportunity.

He hung the boards. He showed how to play. He invited friends. They drank coffee, moved pieces, laughed, argued. The kids saw it. They saw it wasn’t a boring obligation. They saw it was social. That it was “adult.” That it was alive.

They came on their own.

Two years later we met at the European Championships. He came with his son. They both played there. It was genuinely satisfying to watch—but as he emphasized, the fact that they played together wasn’t an accident. He had a plan, and it required effort again.

It doesn’t give a guarantee. But it gives a chance. And it gives an argument that this is not another screen gadget that will end up in the attic in two years.

Back to the Classics: Methods That Worked Before Shortcuts (Botvinnik, Lasker, Dvoretsky…)

Botvinnik. Mikhail Botvinnik is the author of the most effective chess training system ever created. From the accounts of his students, collaborators and competitors—among them Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Tal—it follows that he did a large part of his work alone, in his study, at a physical chessboard.

In the era when games were adjourned, Botvinnik often left an unfinished analysis on the board. He did other things, walked, read, returned to the position after time, and looked at it with fresh eyes. The point was not to keep “forcing” variations, but to allow the thought to mature.

This method—today we might call it incubational work—rested on the belief that the mind does not always work best under constant pressure. Sometimes it needs an image, silence, and distance.

Lasker. Emanuel Lasker was not only a world champion, but also a mathematician and a philosopher. In his writings—especially in Lasker’s Manual of Chess—he repeatedly emphasized that chess is not merely a game of variations, but a decision-making process rooted in human psychology.

Lasker wrote that the solution to a complex problem rarely comes at the moment of greatest tension. First you must “plant” the problem: calculate, understand the structure, feel the difficulty. Only then is it worth stepping aside—doing something else, letting thoughts settle. Intuition, in his view, works best when it is not forced.

The Soviet school and the cost of error. In the Soviet chess school, discipline was the foundation. Coaches such as Mark Dvoretsky repeatedly emphasized that a mistake in calculation is not a matter of bad luck, but a consequence of superficiality.

Dvoretsky wrote about the need for consequences for inaccuracy. The point was not punishment in a literal sense, but that the mistake should be felt—through time, effort, or mentally. The student was meant to understand that guessing and “almost” are enemies of development.

Rehabilitation of the classics. What today seems like a return to the past is, in reality, an attempt to restore balance. The methods of Botvinnik, Lasker, and Dvoretsky were born in a world without computers—but not because technology was missing. They were born because this is how the human mind works when it must take responsibility for a decision on its own.

And ultimately we are preparing to stand face-to-face with an opponent at a chessboard, without a computer—so the game itself hasn’t changed that much. Maybe it’s worth considering new (or perhaps old) stimuli and methods.

Your Move

Good chess training is not about doing a lot. It’s about doing it honestly. Calculating to the end. Being able to tolerate frustration. Fighting the urge to guess and the laziness inside calculation. Sometimes being able to put the problem aside—and return at the right time, with freshness.

And if after two hours of such training you walk out tired like after the gym, but with satisfaction and calm—then you did something valuable.

Chess is a sport of decisions. And training that doesn’t teach responsibility for a decision is not complete training.

If you’re curious how a wall-mounted board fits into modern home training, here are two practical entry points: Vertical Chess Boards — Complete Guide and Vertical Chess Boards Collection.

Edit: Does It Still Work?

My experience and intuition are one thing. Practical transfer is another.

Before publishing the article above, I asked a friend for an opinion 😊

IM Piotr Murdzia  — a nine-time World Champion in chess solving — wrote: