Articles on getting better at chess: making sense of your results, fixing the habits that quietly cost you rating, and understanding what the numbers really mean. Each one also shows how to spot the idea in your own games.
Most chess advice is about what to play. These are about what already happened on your own board. Every one of them starts from something you can measure in your own history: the labels a review puts on your moves, the openings you keep losing in, the shape of your rating graph, the hour of day you sit down to play, or how your games compare with someone else's.
They are written for club players rather than engines. Where a piece explains a number, it also says how that number is worked out and where it can mislead you, because a statistic you do not understand is worse than no statistic at all. If you want to follow along with your own games, the sample report shows the whole thing without signing up, and how it works covers where the data comes from.
What the engine is really measuring behind every label, and why a true Brilliant is so rare. Most classifications come down to how much winning chance a move gives away, not how clever it looks. Brilliant is the exception, with strict conditions that a plain recapture can never meet.
How to tell a genuinely bad opening from one you just play badly, and fix the one that matters. A poor score in a line usually says more about the middlegames it leads to than about the opening itself. Sample size matters too: twenty games is a hint, two hundred is evidence.
See past the daily noise to the trend that actually shows whether you are improving. A rating graph mixes real progress with swings that mean nothing, and the difference is visible once you know what to look for. Includes how to spot a genuine plateau, and what a tilt streak looks like next to ordinary variance.
Time of day, day of week and session length swing your results more than you think. Most players have a window where they score several points better, and a point in a long session where results fall away. Finding both in your own history takes one scan.
Why a 1500 on one site is not a 1500 on another, and why raw accuracy cannot tell you which game was better played. Ratings only mean something inside their own pool, and accuracy depends on how sharp the position was. Both need adjusting before any comparison is fair.
An accuracy percentage is not the share of moves you got right. It measures how much winning chance you gave away, which is why a blunder in a decided position barely counts. Includes why the same game scores differently on different sites.
What +1.20 actually means, and why it is a price for the whole position rather than a count of material. Covers converting evaluations into winning chances, why the number moves as the search deepens, and when a shallow reading should not be trusted.
What makes a sacrifice sound, and the four shapes compensation usually takes. Also the distinction that catches players and engines out: a piece that was lost whatever you played is not a sacrifice, however brave the move looks.
Every game leaves theory somewhere, and that move is the fairest test of whether you understand your opening or just remember it. Why more memorisation is usually the wrong response, and what to study instead.
Late-session results are worse for almost everyone, but fatigue is only part of it. How to separate tilt from ordinary matchmaking, since winning early pairs you with stronger opponents, and which stopping rules actually work.
Your three ratings are three separate measurements, and the gaps between them say what your real limit is. How to work out where your playing time is going and which format deserves more of it.