How to Win at Chess, Next Level

Introduction

Hello and welcome! My name is Levy. I’m an International Master, a former semiprofessional player, and now I primarily teach chess online. Fun fact: I plagiarized those first three sentences from the introduction to my first book! Not much has changed since then. I’m still an International Master, still teaching chess online, and still writing books. Before we get into the specifics of how to evolve your game from the intermediate to the advanced level, I’d like to give you some background about myself and what you can expect to find in the coming chapters.

I learned how to play chess when I was six and played my first tournament when I was seven, in January 2003. I spent most of my childhood as the slightly weird kid who was good at the board game nobody else at school cared much about. But in 2010—my sophomore year of high school—I had a classmate named Ed. Ed was much smarter than me in basically every academic subject, but I had the upper hand in chess. One day, Ed’s mother asked if I would teach chess to Ed once a week. She even offered to pay me for it! I was beyond ecstatic at the opportunity to share my love of chess and pick up a little extra cash.

Over the next ten years, I taught chess to people of all ages and levels across New York City. My students won city and state championships, and I was having the time of my life. My passion for a board game had grown into a sustainable career.

Then, the global pandemic in 2020 changed everything. I turned my focus from offline chess lessons to livestreaming and YouTube videos. And since 2020, I have made a video about chess nearly every single day of my life. At the time of writing this introduction, my chess videos have accumulated nearly five billion views across the globe. In 2023, I published my first book—a guide to beginner and intermediate play—which was a New York Times bestseller. Words cannot describe how grateful I am to fans who’ve given chess a shot these past few years.

Now, let’s talk about this book, which covers intermediate and advanced play. More specifically: the goal of the book, the structure of the book, how to practice, and lastly how to not win at chess.

The Goal of This Book

Chess is intimidating. Getting into it as a beginner is fun and exhilarating, but sticking to it and methodically improving can be challenging. That’s why I wrote this book. How to Win at Chess, Next Level will transform the way you think while playing a game of chess. I will help explain some of the most common patterns that you’ll face at the intermediate level and provide guidance for when to do (and not do) certain things in a position.

Hopefully, by the end of the book, you can use what you’ve learned to make good moves more consistently than your opponents, leading to more victories. One important note: we won’t cover openings in this book. The goal of this book is to teach you how to think about chess more broadly. There’s no opening you can play that’s going to lead to you winning every single game. Choosing an opening is like choosing an avatar at the start of a video game. They’re down to personal choice and are ultimately cosmetic. Even understanding an opening in great depth won’t count for much if you can’t implement the other things we’re going to cover, related to the middlegame and endgame. If you’re looking for advice on openings that will lead to winning all your games, neither this book nor any other will help you.


The Structure of This Book

The book is split into nine chapters, each one taking a deep dive into an important aspect of improving your chess game. We’re going to look at pawn play and piece play, tactics,

attacking, defending, converting winning positions, and endgames. You can read the chapters in whatever order you like, except for the first and last chapters: “How to Make a Plan, Part One” and “How to Make a Plan, Part Two.” I recommend reading those two in order, since they are like the before and after chapters of the book, introducing how to make a plan at the start and then circling back at the end with everything you’ve hopefully learned along the way. By the end of the book, everything we’ve explored will connect together and build toward the positions we’ll be solving in the final chapter. At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a link that will take you to additional online learning material based on what we covered in that chapter.

Practicing Chess

A lot of tips, tricks, and useful ideas will be introduced in this book, but you will never improve at chess without lots of practice. This goes for openings, tactics, checkmates, and everything in between. But how do you actually practice chess? The chess learning ecosystem has a few components you should get familiar with.

Chess Engines

A chess engine (sometimes called a chess computer) is a program built to calculate the best move in any given position. Using chess engines can be very instructive. The best computer programs have far surpassed the best human players, so using them to explore the best lines out of the opening you play can be very useful. However, the engine can only show you the best moves; to capitalize on this knowledge, you need to be able to memorize and implement them in games against humans. Using an engine during a game, whether online or over the board, is cheating.

The best engine in the world is Stockfish. Stockfish evaluates positions on a numerical “piece value” scale, where a positive number means White is winning and a negative number means Black is winning. If an advantage is +1, White is up the equivalent of a pawn. If it’s -5, then Black is up the equivalent of a rook!

Game Analysis

To keep improving at chess, you need to analyze your games—wins, draws, and losses. You have to understand where you went wrong so you can make better choices in future games. Analysis can take the form of either a chess engine on an online platform, or in person with a strong player. Chess engines will be able to identify the best move in any given position but won’t give an explanation for why. Sometimes it will be obvious, like a missed tactic or checkmating attack, but at other times you’ll have to work out why a move is so strong. If the computer is showing you the best move but it doesn’t win material or deliver checkmate, it may be a deeper, positional idea, like getting pieces to more active squares, thwarting the opponent’s movement, or setting up longer-term pressure. This is something you’ll have to figure out yourself, which always makes for good practice.

Chess Bots

Most chess websites have a section where you can play live games against chess engines

of different ratings, called bots. A bot is essentially a chess engine but will often have a name and avatar to simulate the experience of playing against a real person. Some players enjoy practicing against bots because it eases the anxiety that comes with playing live chess games against other humans. While bots don’t always emulate human chess behavior—especially the emotional and psychological aspects of chess—they can be useful to train against. You’ll easily be able to see the difference between a 1200-rated bot versus a 2000-rated bot, for example. Playing against them can help you see the difference in play—and the deeper ideas—between beginner-, intermediate-, and advanced-level players.

Puzzles

Doing training puzzles is one of the most effective ways to improve your chess. Chess is, after all, a game of pattern recognition. The more you repeat puzzles, whether checkmates in one or two moves, or spotting tactics, the more likely you are to find them in games. Look to progress from basic one-move or two-move puzzles to the more complex puzzles, where you have to find multiple consecutive moves in order to solve. You can still find puzzles in print workbooks, but they are now widely and freely available on most major chess websites. Doing them digitally is simpler, given they are easy and free to access, and much more numerous, and you can repeat them until solved.

Bonus Material

To help with your learning, there are URL links at the end of each chapter. These will take you to additional, exclusive online material to further your understanding of everything we’ve covered in each chapter, with additional information and practice positions.