What the research says
Neil Charness and his colleagues asked tournament players in two studies how they had trained. In both, studying alone was the strongest predictor of playing strength. All the chess activities together accounted for about 40 percent of the differences in rating. Grandmasters had put in about 5,000 hours of such study during their first ten years of serious chess, nearly five times as much as intermediate players.
A review of six studies found that this kind of deliberate practice explained 34 percent of the differences in playing strength on average. Practice matters, in other words, but it doesn't explain everything.
How long does it take?
Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli studied 104 Argentine tournament players. Those who had reached master level, a 2200 rating, had trained 11,053 hours on average to get there. But the differences were huge: one player made it in 3,016 hours, another needed 23,608. Some had trained more than 25,000 hours without getting there.
In the same study, training with others and having had a coach went with higher ratings. The researchers summed it up this way: practice is necessary but not sufficient.
How to train
This is what the site has for each of the parts.
| Part | What you practice | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Tactics | the tricks, such as the fork and the pin, until you see them at once | Puzzles, the daily puzzle, tactics |
| Your own games | your own mistakes, and where the game turned | The analysis board |
| Endgames | winning when few pieces are left, and holding a draw | Endgames |
| Middlegames | plans, pawns, and the pieces' best squares | Strategy |
| Longer games | thinking it through before you move | Play now, correspondence chess |
Sources
- N. Charness, M. Tuffiash, R. Krampe, E. Reingold, and E. Vasyukova: The role of deliberate practice in chess expertise, Applied Cognitive Psychology 19 (2005), the abstract
- D. Z. Hambrick et al.: Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?, Intelligence 45 (2014)
- F. Gobet and G. Campitelli: The role of domain-specific practice, handedness, and starting age in chess, Developmental Psychology 43 (2007)
- A. P. Burgoyne et al.: The impact of domain-specific experience on chess skill, American Journal of Psychology 132 (2019)
The facts on this page come from the sources above and, where possible, were checked across several sources. Where the sources disagree, we say less or say what each one says. A number that is an estimate says whose it is, and a counted number comes with its date.
Updated November 14, 2026