Improving once you've stalled

I thought I'd write a quick post to point you guys to an interesting article I found on the /r/chess subreddit. The article was written in 2011 by IM Kostya Kavutskiy, and attemps to provide tips as to how to overcome a drought in chess improvement (i.e., when your rating has stopped increasing and has effectively stalled). The article is titled "... on Breaking 2366", and is about how this IM came to reach the rating 2366 after stalling around 2250. (Funnily enough though, 6 years later his FIDE profile shows a standard rating of 2390, with games played as recently as May 2017, so perhaps he's stalled again and would be due for another article...)

He separates the tips into the following categories:

Analyzing your own games

Kavutskiy recommends reviewing the opening of every serious game you play. You shouldn't make the same mistake in two different games that use the same opening. I've recently played in an OTB tournament and have definitely made (costly and annoying) mistakes in my openings. Also, if after a game you realize you had trouble finding a good plan once you reached the middlegame, then Kavutskiy says your understanding of that particular opening is lacking.

Psychological mistakes

A psychological mistake is "usually the main culprit of any chess slump". Kavutskiy gives as example the main mistake he found in his own play, namely relying too much on intuition (or rather, not relying enough on concrete calculations); he writes that he would sometimes refrain from sacrifices because (1) he didn't trust his calculations ("the hard part was convincing myself that my opponent hadn't set some nasty trap. A year ago I would have just assumed that I [had] missed something in my calculations and would have played some 'solid' move instead"), or (2) he was simply not "brave" enough. Unfortunately, I feel like this section doesn't really answer one very difficult question: how do you figure out the psychological mistakes you make during your games?!

Working harder

To get over stallation (if that's a word), Kavutskiy says that you need to work harder than you're used to, at home (by analyzing your games, reading books, etc.), but also during your games. In particular, you need to work harder than your opponent: stay more focused, calculate variations more deeply and accurately, etc. I think this advice makes sense, and for me this was one of the main takeaways from this article. It can be hard to stay focused for the whole duration of a longer game, or after you start feeling like you have a sizable advantage against your opponent.

Chess books ("Chess books are ridiculously helpful")

Finally, Kavutskiy recommends reading more chess books as a road to improvement. He recommends a few specific books, a list which you may or may not find interesting (and which I invite you to consult in his article). He does recommend Perfect Your Chess by Andrei Volokitin, which I own and would also wholeheartedly recommend; the book presents hundreds of puzzles that target more advanced players. I can also recommend Excelling at Positional Chess, which I've reviewed here almost 10 years ago. I think benefits you get from books depend on how much work you put into them (do you get invested, set up boards with the position and run through the variations in the book, or do you read passively?), and I think that was one of the main messages in Kavutskiy's article, for better or worse (I've been reading very passively these days).