When first learning chess, you learn what the pieces do, then you learn the special moves, then you learn the importance of the center of the board, what pins and forks are, what developing pieces means, all that.

So often people forget there’s a critical lesson to be learned somewhere in here, and that’s that there’s two styles of playing chess, and you need to learn both. Fast chess vs slow chess.

Fast chess is what you most often see video clips of, the clock is running low or they’re just playing speed chess, and they move very quickly, using a lot of intuition and experience. People naturally want to play like this, because its more fun.

But, it’s also much weaker. You also need to learn how to play slow chess. This is when you take your time and plot out a lot of your possible moves. Then you imagine you are your opponent, and you decide what you would do if you were playing that side. Then back to yourself, what would you do next?

You’re peering into the future, plotting out the possibilities of the game, playing as both players as you do it. This takes a long time, but it is critical to learn, as it’s much stronger than fast chess, and becomes necessarily particularly through the midgame. There is a reason the chess clock exists in the first place, after all, the more thought you apply to a given move, the stronger you can make it.

You have to learn both styles, and be able to flip fluidly from one style to the other, in order to become an intermediate chess player. This is important to remember.