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 Every month we will post helpful articles to help you improve your chess game.  

 Tips to Balance Chess and School Classes 

 It is definitely not easy to manage trying to improve in chess as well as academics (especially for high school students).  Elementary students will have more time to practice chess.  But there are ways to balance both improving in chess and academics.  It’s very important to make the best use of the time we are given, and follow a daily plan to finish school homework and get time to improve in chess.  

1. One possible way would be to wake up early before going to school.  By waking up early, you may get an extra hour or even more to practice chess.  The extra time can be used to do plenty of tactics before going to school.  Tactics are extremely important in chess, and doing them daily can help sharpen your skills.  It’s very crucial for players of all levels to do tactics.  Doing tactics is one of the fastest ways to improve in chess.  Some very good websites to practice tactics are chesstempo.com, chesskid.com, and chess.com. 
2. If there isn’t any time in the morning to do chess, it would be best to do as much chess as possible after coming back from school.  I recommend to at least spend 3-4 hours on chess.  Spending 3-4 hours on chess daily will immensely improve your chess.
3. It’s also needed to know how to improve in chess, and what to do on a daily basis so that the playing strength can increase.  I had already mentioned tactics as a necessity to improve the playing strength.  Its also very important to play as many online games as possible.  Playing online games is a very good way to gain plenty of practice and experience.  The experience can help when it comes to playing actual tournaments, where you will feel more prepared because of playing so many online games.  Chesskid.com and ICC are great platforms to play online games.
4. A very crucial part of improving in chess is to always analyze your games.  It’s a healthy habit to analyze both tournament and online games.  Analyzing the games helps identify the mistakes and most importantly helps you to not repeat the same mistakes in another game.  Analyzing the games helps you identify the good and bad parts of the game and can immensely help improve your chess.
5. Doing plenty of checkmating puzzles is very important for beginners.  In a chess game, the main goal is to always checkmate the opponent.  So, knowing how to checkmate is very important.  It’s not just about knowing how to checkmate, but also being able to identify the checkmates quickly.  Doing plenty of checkmating puzzles keep the brain sharp and whenever you are presented with a checkmating pattern in a tournament game, it will become really easy to solve it and win the game.  Chesstempo.com and chesskid.com are great websites to practice checkmating puzzles. 
6. Another way to improve in chess is to follow the games of world champions.  Following the games of world champions is a great way to improve since we can get many ideas from their games.  Getting inspiration from their games is very helpful, since we can try to use similar if not the same ideas in our own games.
7. The last thing I would like to mention about improving in chess would be to play as many tournaments as possible.  Playing tournaments gives lots of experience.  Playing tournaments also helps you implement all the chess you’ve been practicing and it’s a lot of fun to win! 

In a future article, I will recommend some very important chess books for beginners.