25 chess goals for your rating, your tactics and your study time

Chess goals for beginners

Beginner goals are about finishing games and not giving pieces away.

• Play a full game with no illegal moves.
• Deliver the 3 basic checkmates against a computer.
• Play one game a day for 30 days.
• Solve 5 puzzles a day for 30 days.
• Check for hanging pieces before every move for 20 games.

Chess rating goals

Rating goals are the direction. Pick the next round number, and expect it to arrive in jumps.

• Gain 100 rating points in 3 months.
• Reach a rating of 1,000.
• Reach a rating of 1,200.
• Reach a rating of 1,500.
• Get your first official over the board rating.

Tactics and puzzle goals

Puzzle goals are daily and small, the same shape as the vocabulary counts in language learning goals.

• Solve 1,000 puzzles in 100 days. That is 10 a day.
• Do 20 minutes of puzzles a day for a month.
• Raise your puzzle rating by 200 points.
• Solve 50 mate in two problems.
• Solve 10 puzzles in a row with no mistakes, taking your time.

Chess study goals

Study goals are about looking at your own games, which is slower and less fun than playing the next one. The same habit of reviewing your own work shows up in coding goals.

• Analyse every loss before you play again, for a month.
• Learn one opening for White and one for Black to move 8.
• Learn 20 key endgame positions.
• Write notes on 10 of your own games.
• Read one chess book from cover to cover.

Playing and tournament goals

Playing goals count serious games, the kind with enough time to think.

• Play 100 slow games this year.
• Play in a first over the board tournament.
• Go to 20 club nights this year.
• Play 4 rated tournaments this year.
• Play one game a week against a stronger player and go over it together.

What is a good chess goal?

A good chess goal is a count of work, with a rating as the direction. A review of 35 years of goal research found that specific, hard goals lead to higher performance than being told to do your best. "Reach 1,500" is specific but it is a result. "Solve 10 puzzles a day and analyse every loss" is the work that produces it.

Practice matters in chess more than in most things. A review of 88 studies found that deliberate practice explained about 26 percent of the differences in performance in games, the highest share of any field it looked at. It also means most of the difference comes from elsewhere, so do not read a slow month as a lack of effort.

For scale: the grandmaster title requires a rating of 2,500, and the international master title 2,400. Most of us are playing for the next 100 points, and the research on goal tracking says the record of your work is what helps you get them.

How to track chess goals

Log your puzzles and your analysed games the day you do them. A review of 138 studies found that people who monitored their progress reached their goals more often, and that recording it beat keeping it in your head.

Puzzles and games are amounts that add up. Study days are a day count, the shape most study challenge ideas use.

A rating graph goes up and down every day. A picture that fills up 10 puzzles at a time only goes one way, and it is the one you control.

Frequently asked questions

What are good chess goals for beginners?

Play one game a day for 30 days, solve 5 puzzles a day, and check for hanging pieces before every move. Those three habits go after a very common way to lose early on: leaving a piece where it can be taken.

What is a realistic chess rating goal?

The next 100 points in about 3 months is a fair target for an improving player. Set it, then put your attention on the daily work. Ratings rise in jumps, not in a straight line.

How many chess puzzles should I do a day?

Ten a day is a good number. It is a short daily session, and it adds up to 1,000 puzzles in 100 days. Solving them slowly and correctly is worth more than racing through 50.