900 is a beginners level rating but it shows that you do know something about chess. When someone signs up to any chess app, usually a beginners rating is 800 and normally these new players lose rating from there on to as down as 100.
900 rating shows that you have made some progress. While it can make you competitive among your friends and may even secure you a victory or two in local tournaments’ final rounds, it can feel limiting if your ambitions exceed your current rating.
Thankfully, improving your chess doesn’t require monumental efforts or tedious tasks yet at this level.
By making strategic adjustments and focusing on key areas of the game, you can achieve gradual improvement.
In this article, we will explore practical tips and techniques aimed at propelling you beyond the limitations of a low rating, opening up new possibilities for growth and advancement.
How To Improve Chess Rating From 900?
To improve your chess rating from 900, you just need to play a lot of chess and solve some tactical puzzles. You need to improve your basic board vision and try not to hang pieces doing blunders.
Your rating is just a little above the very beginner level, and at this point rather than targeting the master level of chess, you just need to target a more achievable goal like 1200 rating, for which tactical puzzles and playing lots of games are enough.
You don’t need to get into analysis and studying openings etc so early. Neither will they be helpful because your board vision is not developed yet and it won’t be easy to remember the sequence of moves for more than a few days.
At higher levels, like 2000+, players need to do a lot of things to add an additional 100+ ELO to the rating. But at your level (900ish), that effort is far less needed.
6 Top Tips For 900 Rated Players To Improve Their Rating:
Follow these 6 rules in every game and you’ll be a 1200 rated player in no time.
1. Be Brave
Don’t play too safely in chess. If you have a feeling that a move will work, play it. If it’s a bad move, you can fix it in the next games, but if it’s a good one, it will boost your confidence in the game.
Just make sure that your moves are not over ambitious, that leaves your king vulnerable. Make sure that your king is safe, and go for the kill.
It is also important to know that a successful attack on the opponent’s king requires at least 2 of your pieces to attack the opponent’s king in most of the positions.
If opponent king is defended by a piece, you will need 3 of yours to attack the opponent king. That’s just the general philosophy of how attacks work in chess.
You can learn many such concepts by following the speed run of Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky.
In the video below you can start from the rating 750:
2. Move with a Plan
In chess, a bad plan is better than no plan. Always move the pieces with some goal in your head.
Playing on the clock without any idea behind the moves will only lead to problems.
The thing that will help you a lot in planning good moves is knowing your openings, the more you know an opening, the better you will be ready for the middle-game tactics.
3. Solve Puzzles and Chess Tactics
Puzzles and tactics are a great way of winning material and in turn, winning the games.
They are the opportunities that can arise in any phase of the game.
Be it the opening, middle game, or endgame, your opponent can blunder a piece anytime and you have to be ready to grab those.
There are 24 different types of tactics in chess, knowing them by name will help you a lot in spotting them on the board:
As far as puzzles are concerned, they are all made of the 24 different types of tactics mentioned above.
On any online chess site, just like when you play games and win, you get matched with more difficult opponents, in the same way, the more you will solve puzzles, the more difficult new ones you will get.
Solve those puzzles and they will help you a lot in going beyond the 900 chess rating.
4. Focus On Development
Focus on moving a piece only once in the opening. Play an easy opening like the Scotch game in which you can develop pieces easily and towards the center.
Develop all your pieces before moving any of them twice unless you have a huge tactical opportunity to grab the opponent’s hanging piece or checkmate his king.
5. Castle Early
It’s far safer to have your king on a side of the board rather than in the center. Castle the king whenever the first chance you get, ideally within 5-10 moves.
6. Keep Your Pieces Protected
Always keep your pieces connected to each other. Don’t blunder them by putting them in the center or anywhere on the board where no other piece is guarding it.
If your piece can’t be protected, don’t just blunder it, try to grab an equal material with it or just move it backward somewhere safe.
Is A 900 Ranking In Chess Good?
If you are playing chess only with friends and family for fun then a 900 chess rating for sure is good, but if your ambition is to play in local tournaments and win a few games, you need to be at least at a 1500 level, even in the amateur tournaments.
Conclusion:
Practice makes a person perfect. But in chess, only the practice of playing games is not enough.
The tips we listed above are only a few, but enough to work on and become a higher-rated player.
Once you get to the intermediate level of 1500 and above, you can then add more new things and make use of chess tips for intermediate players.
For now, the 6 tips discussed in this article are enough for you to start off with. 🙂
Also Read:
Best Chess Sets Under $50: One of the major benefits of on-the-board chess is the ability to improve your vision and the ability to deal with the complexity and emotions of yourself and the opponent, and for this purpose, it is important to have a chessboard and pieces at home.
And for that reason, you don’t need to pay a lot of money. For 50 dollars you can buy a chess set that can improve both your vision of the game and teach you the basic notations of chess.
Top Chess Content Creators on Youtube in 2022: This article has a list of top chess content creators on Youtube.
With the emergence of chess content creators like Gotham Chess and Samay Raina, it is very much clear that you don’t need to be a Super GM to create quality chess content. People love content creators for the entertainment they bring into their chess lives.