Use A Chess Calculator To Upgrade Your Training

Chess, like every part of life, has been overtaken by computers. Not only can they play faster, more accurately, and more strongly than humans, but they have also infiltrated the world of chess training. Everywhere you look, an AI chess coach is trying to teach you your next move, or a chess computer program wants to train against you. So, how can you use these new chess calculator tools to the best of your ability, and when should you ignore the computer and stick to the old-fashioned way?

What is a Chess Calculator?

Chess computers are software programs created to identify and execute the optimal chess move. Because computers have access to more computing power than our brains do, good chess computers can calculate with more depth and accuracy than any human. Computers evaluate the position, identify strong candidate moves, and calculate deeply along those lines to find the best chess move. The more time a chess calculator has to think, the stronger the move it comes up with will be.

Computers Calculate, and So Should You!

In chess, the term "calculation" refers to the process of finding, assessing, and considering different moves and sequences. If you identify a move, consider how your opponent might respond and visualize a follow-up, and then you've calculated the position. Often, I hear the misconception that all chess players think far into the future, but in reality, most good players think only one or two moves fully ahead. The problem for beginners is that they often don’t know where to focus their brain's computing power, and they end up calculating the wrong lines or never even considering the best move!

How to Get Better at Calculating

If you want to get better at calculating moves in chess, you need to put in the work. Calculation practice means deep, intense thought about complicated positions. You can practice this by looking at difficult puzzles, studying master games, and going over your own games and learning from your mistakes. Ultimately, this takes time and practice, but eventually it will become natural to think ahead and calculate what might be played.

Practicing with Puzzles

One of my favorite ways to practice calculations is by setting up a physical chess board and placing a puzzle position on it. Ideally, you could do this with a friend or two. Then, talk out the position. Vocalize what you notice about the position. What are the forcing moves, weaknesses, or advantages one side might have? Then, calculate through the different moves. Try not to move the pieces at first, but eventually, you might try playing out a line with your friends and see what happens. You can also do this with a position from a master game, so that the answer is not specifically some kind of tactic.

How Chess Calculators Can Help

In the scenario I described above, you basically never need a chess calculator, and you will be improving at chess. So, when do you need a chess calculator, and how can you use it to improve your training? There are three areas I think chess calculators can really help a player improve: 1. Reviewing your own games. 2. Practicing endgames. 3. Learning Openings.

1. Reviewing Your Games

Once you have played a game, take those moves and review the game. If you played the game online, the recording is quick and easy to go through. If you played in a tournament, I suggest copying the moves you wrote down during the game into a Lichess Study so you can easily review them. Then, identify any moments you thought were mistakes or blunders. Make sure to do this before you have used a chess engine. If there was a major blunder in the game that neither you nor your opponent noticed, those are the areas to focus on for improvement, helping you win more games. Then, after looking over the game yourself, you can look at moments that the chess engine thought were blunders and see if you can learn from those moments.

2. Practicing Endgames

Endgames in chess take time to master. The best way to practice is to drill them repeatedly. Because endgames can swing on one small mistake, it is helpful to practice them while a chess engine is judging your moves. One mistake can turn a winning position into a draw or a loss. You can practice endgames like this online, and it can be really helpful to drill these kinds of positions over and over.

3. Openings

A chess calculator or engine can’t necessarily teach you the best opening moves, but it can help you expand your repertoire. If you had a moment in one of your games where you were suddenly off-book, you could use a chess engine to give you the quick and easy move that you should add to your memorization. This is also helpful for beginners learning to counter annoying tricks or traps in the opening. Often, those kinds of tricky openings have quite simple engine refutations that you just need to learn about. By going through a game where you had a tricky loss with a chess calculator turned on, you can quickly see the types of responses that you should be playing in your games.

What to Avoid With Chess Calculators

Many beginners are tempted to play most of their games against bots online. They may feel like it is less stressful, or maybe that there is more forgiveness if they make a mistake. The problem is, when they play in rated online games or in rated tournaments, they will be playing against humans! You should practice as closely as possible to the types of scenarios you will actually be facing. Humans make human mistakes. Sometimes, a bot will make an error not because it is a human-type mistake, but because it needs to play a bad move to avoid being perceived as too high a level. This can lead to bots failing to recapture captured pieces, giving away pieces for no reason, or giving away tempo unnecessarily.

The Trap of the Engine Analysis

I see many beginner players, especially kids, finish a tournament game and immediately plug the game into some online engine to “see where they messed up,” only to turn around and blame their loss on some missed six-move tactic that would have won them a piece. Instead, those same players should have seen the simple strategic errors that might have put them in that bad position to begin with. But the engine analysis cannot adequately explain those kinds of swings in evaluation. So, take your time and examine your game first, then, if you can, get another person, like a coach or an advanced player, to take a look at it and share their opinion. I would always value a person’s opinion on your play over a computer’s analysis that cannot be explained.

The Allure of the Engine

Another problem with the chess calculator being so easily obtainable is that it has led to an increase in online and in-person cheating. To be clear, it is never acceptable to use a chess engine during a chess game. Just because it is easy to do during an online game or your local chess club might not be strict about its phone policy, know that cheating can ruin your chess career. The first step to improving as a chess player is losing chess games. Take your losses, review them yourself and with a chess coach, and then learn from those moments. Don’t use a chess engine to tell you how to play.

The Future of Chess Calculators

Chess engines have gotten better and better over the past few years. The rise of AI and computing power worldwide can be similarly tracked through the lens of the chess world. Nowadays, the most modern chess engines use neural networks to calculate more like humans and less like brute-force robots. With that rise in engine strength has come some ingenuity in the chess space. There are more ways than ever to learn, practice, and study chess. People have found ways to use AI to help them in prep work and more. But, ultimately, the way to get better at chess is time and effort. Put in the work, play games, and you will see improvement. 

The Best Way to Improve

There is no shortcut to getting better at chess. Play games, review your games, do puzzles, and repeat. You can use computers to help optimize your study, but you still have to work hard, and put in the time it takes to improve. If most of your training time is spent playing chess games against other real people, then you will start to get better.