How to Play Chess by Yourself (And Actually Improve)

Playing chess alone isn't a consolation prize. The trick: commit to each side's move before you see the reply — so you can't rescue a losing plan.

When I was learning, nobody I knew played chess. Not my roommates, not the people I worked with, not the man on the train who once watched me set up a pocket set and asked if it was solitaire. In a way, it was.

So I played myself. For years. And I'll tell you what everyone told me back then, which turned out to be wrong: that playing chess by yourself is a poor substitute for a real game, something you do when you can't find anyone better.

It isn't. Learning how to play chess by yourself, if you do it with a little discipline, builds the one thing a live opponent can never make you practice — the honesty to argue both sides of the board without hoping someone blunders.

The two-hands problem: why solo games feel like cheating (and how to stop)

Here is the trap, and it caught me for a long time.

When you play both colors, you control both hands. So when White's attack starts to fall apart, some quiet part of you reaches over and lets Black play a slightly weaker defense — nothing dramatic, a passive move instead of the sharp one — and suddenly White's attack works again. You didn't decide to cheat. You just wanted the plan you liked to survive, and you had the power to grant it.

That's the two-hands problem. When both sides are you, the losing side always finds a friend.

The fix is not "play both colors fairly." That advice is useless because you already think you're being fair. The fix is mechanical: commit to each side's move before you look at the reply. Decide White's move, write it down or say it out loud, and only then turn the board around and let Black answer with its own best try — as if White were an opponent you couldn't take back. You cut off the hand that rescues losing plans.

The Endgame Journal collects our writing on openings, tactics, endgames, and the habits that separate players who improve from players who plateau. Every article is written by people who teach chess, not by a content farm.

How to Play Chess by Yourself and Actually Improve | Endgame Society