I Changed How I Use Chessable

Lessons from burning out on chess study and trying to learn new language. Plus some tips for Chessable users.

By now everybody should know what Chessable is!

If you’re on the internet these days and make efforts to study, then you have almost invariably heard of the website Chessable. The main idea of Chessable is to use spaced-repetition in order to learn and retain chess variations. They have courses that range from the opening to the endgame, including tactics and strategy.

In my opinion, their system, known as “MoveTrainer” works best with openings and tactics, and not so well with things like theoretical endgames, since the system only allows the user to practice the “main line” of any given variation.

Nevertheless, I’ve used chessable for every aspect of my chess training over the last four and a half years. I have a 1600+ day study streak, and over 35 million xp points (e.g. I am a “Legend”-ranked user). I own around a hundred courses covering almost every aspect of chess that I’ve ever wanted to study (minus game collections), and I’ve beta-tested a lot of courses.

Over the years I’ve studied many, many courses and I’ve learned a lot. I owe a lot of my progress as a player to that company and have no regrets regarding the time spent there.

Feeling burned out.

But I did experience some chess study burnout earlier this year, as can be seen from my Clockify (shout out to

Say Chess

!) report. I started really leaning into this realization near the end of August, when my average study time dropped below 10-15 hours a week and basically hovered at around 4 or 5 on average (mostly spent studying master games, which have never grown old):

Starting in August I began to lose a lot of enthusiasm for studying chess. It was a combination of the stress of work projects from the first half of the year, family health issues, and probably a bit of depression. I do think that some of the burnout also came from studying Chess too much. July was a great month for my chess. But the month after it was difficult to continue consistently studying.

So… I took a break.

I quit playing as many practice games, and I definitely basically stopped studying openings (which is what most of my time spent on Chessable was concerned with). I played a lot of blitz online, continued to play at my local club, but I wasn’t taking the events very seriously. And in the meantime, I picked up a new hobby that was more exciting than studying chess (at that moment anyway): trying to learn to read and speak Japanese.

That occupied my time here or there, but interestingly I found there was a strong similarity to learning a language as there is to learning chess: the usefulness of spaced-repetition learning. I downloaded Anki and also used a few websites and this is where I found that the spacing on their SRS systems differed quite a bit from Chessable’s. Anki’s is particularly interesting. The default way the system is set up, you can only do your reps once a day. You can’t overstudy, and you don’t ever have to review something more tha once a day. This meant that my study session with Anki might take up anywhere between ten to twenty minutes most days, but then I was “free” from the responsibility of studying until the following day. Chessable’s default is much more rigorous: after you study something, it is due to review after four hours. After that first cycle, it’s due again in 19 hours. In other words, in Chessable’s design and recommendations, you would “optimally” learn something once and repeat it twice within the first 24 hours, not to mention much more frequently than Anki over the next cycles of spaced repetition.

Additionally, Anki lacked gamification, but one of Chessable’s gimmicks is the gamification. This can be somewhat motivating, but it can also tempt a user to engage in less instructive methods of using MoveTrainer. It was refreshing to feel completely self-motivated to study by using Anki.

Chessable’s review system has also led me to compulsive behaviors for other reasons. For a very long time I felt slavishly tied to the number of due reviews I would accrue while studying. It felt like I just had to get that number down to zero before learning or studying anything else. But since I liked to study a lot of things, I found myself sometimes getting into the trap of being buried under hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of reviews. The end result of this poor habit was normally that I ended up constantly pausing courses, resetting or even archiving them, as I tried to triage the most important or desirable learning subjects. Of course, this is a deficiency in me, not in Chessable. I’m a min-maxer at heart, and this is one curse that comes with that kind of blessing.

Oh no, 124 variations to review!

Redefining My Relationship with Chessable.

Somehow in late October when I was ready to use Chessable seriously again, I finally realized and decided that I needed to forget about the “Review All Courses” button if I wanted to live happy with Chessable — I had to stop worrying about how many reviews I had stacked up. My time spent learning with Anki also taught me that I can study opening lines less frequently than Chessable recommends, and if it helps sustain my path to learning by avoiding burnout, all the better for it!

When I came back hard to studying chess in November after taking a pretty serious break for the past few months, I decided to relate differently to Chessable. Here’s what I’ve done thus far:

I stopped trying to get my review count down to 0.

The easiest way for this to not become a thing is to just get used to seeing that you have some reviews due, and learn to ignore the “Review All Courses” button. Instead of Reviewing All Courses to get your reviews due down to 0, study whatever you want and don’t worry about the review count.

I stopped trying to study everything at Chessable’s pace.

I started breaking the typical advice about studying on chessable which is “always finish your reviews before you learn something new.” This advice may be a great idea if you only study a few things and don’t want to be slammed with too many moves to review. But if you stop worrying about Review Zero, and just concern yourself with studying what you want to study, you’ll be much happier in the end.

I stopped compulsively refreshing my page after I made a mistake or an error in MoveTrainer.

It can feel like a punishment when you miss a move on a variation and the countdown for that review goes from, say, two weeks all the way down to four hours. So sometimes it can be tempting to click refresh, to give yourself a “free” do-over to bump that variation up to the next level. However this is a very harmful practice: If you missed it, you obviously need to see it more frequently again until you’ve got it down. Lying to myself about knowing something won’t help me to know it better. Secondly, this ends up being a waste of time over the long run. The time spent refreshing your page to try again adds up when you do this all the time. Just don’t do it. Maybe this is just a me problem, but I don’t think I’m alone!

I set study-time related goals for quick, pattern-based puzzles instead of trying to clear all the reviews at once.

Instead of trying to do a chapter of this or that course, or review all of the problems for this or that course, I now just set myself an amount of time doing my study and reps. Since this is for pattern recognition, I do do all the reviews for those course first. Then, if I have any more time left over, I’ll do some learning. Then once that time is up, I wait until the next day and repeat. This allows me to use a course like Checkmate Patterns Manual for twenty minutes for the purposes of a daily pattern-recognition-based warm-up. My goal isn’t to “complete” these courses. It’s to use them to keep myself tactically sharp.

I only study openings when I feel like I need (or more importantly: want) to.

Studying openings can take up absolutely all of your time if you let it. Chessable’s Lifetime Repertoires don’t just give you a lifetime of theory — they could possibly take a lifetime to learn. Instead, I now study opening lines a few times a week at the most, and in a single session for the day. This means that I might spend up to an hour a few times a week doing reps on things I recently learned; but for lines that I have good results with, I don’t need to go out of my way to study them. My time is limited, so this rule saves time.

A few more tips about studying openings on Chessable:

• Probably just study the Quickstarter chapters by default. This mostly applies to the platform’s Lifetime Repertoire series of courses or their larger courses that don’t form the whole of a repertoire. The exception to this advice applies to the neat and succinct 100 Repertoires courses, such as

  Nate Solon
  ’s Reti (1.Nf3); or the Starting Out series,
  Alex Colovic
  ’s Simplified courses, or any other ones that aren’t loaded with hundreds of lines.

• Only add variations to your study load after you encounter them in your games. The EV on studying a line that might never come up is very low. And you might find that you’re just fine without overloading yourself with information about every possible chess variation you can.

• I highly recommend configuring the following course settings for every one of your owned opening courses in Chessable.

  Quiz: Immediately. Learn new lines by guessing what you should play. This is more instructive than having it spelled out for you in advance, which is their default. It also probably saves time — if you play the right move, your instincts are probably good and you don’t need that move explained to you by default.
  Study: All Moves. For a long time Chessable would start you in the middle of the variation based on what the prior line was. I found this confusing and frustrating. It’s possible they already updated this to be the default setting. It is much better to study every variation from the beginning.
  Review: By course order. This makes sure that Chessable reviews lines in the exact order that the author intended that they be learned and studied, rather than based on which was due first.
  Reps: 1. This just saves a lot of time over repeating your reps thrice every time you either learn or re-learn something new.

• Learn to ignore the impulse to “complete” the course by studying all the variations. Also, get used to seeing that you haven’t “finished” the course. It’s OK to not be a completionist!

• Treat the courses more like a reference than a workbook. This is especially useful for when you’re playing correspondence or Daily games, but also when reviewing and analyzing your OTB games.

Are you a Chessable user? How do you use the platform? Do you ever feel yourself burning out? Does any of this advice resonate with you? Anything you disagree with? Let everyone know in the comments below!

And thanks as always, for reading!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Nick