Do you feel like studying chess has gotten overwhelming? You aren’t alone.

Look around and you’ll see AI is everywhere now. It’s a buzzword, but what I’m noticing lately is very refreshing. People are fed up with AI and want to embrace simplicity again.

This post is going to talk about chess studying and technology, and how it has changed over the past 30 years.

1996: The Early Internet Era

Ahh, the 90s. I was ten years old in 1996 and the way we studied chess back then almost had limited overlap to how people study chess today.

The internet was rarely used at the time. My family had AOL and used a dial-up connection, shared with the phone line. This was about two years before I started playing on the Internet Chess Club (ICC) and the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS).

Playing Games: This was rough. Most of my friends at school who knew how to play were rated 1000 points below me. It was always fun to get together with peers and play blitz and bughouse, but most lived at least an hour away. OTB tournaments were always a blast. But what I was missing was the ability to play chess at any time, day or night, against challenging opposition. Playing more games is so important that even blitz chess can help you improve quickly!

Game Analysis: Feedback from games always came from a chess coach or a mentor. To improve at chess quickly, almost everyone hired a chess coach. Sometimes analyzing one game could take an hour because I’d go back and forth debating recommendations with my coach. We’d have to play out the full variations to see who was correct 😁. Usually coach was! We were missing the instant feedback that an engine could provide.

Tactics: We had books. Books felt boring as a kid! And doing tactics with a book is kind of painful looking back on it. Not efficient for busy adult improvers.

Openings: This category has vastly improved in the last 30 years! We had the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (ECO), and monthly Informants where you could look up ECO codes for your openings and see if any games were played. It was very expensive and time-consuming to keep up on opening theory. I remember with the first big tournament winnings I had ($150, I think), I went out and bought the five-volume ECO set. I was so proud of it.

Other Content: There were some VHS tapes and dusty old books with tips that wouldn’t be approved by computers nowadays. Not fun. Not efficient.

Early 2020s: The Golden Era

This is what many of us will agree was the Golden Era of chess improvement.

Technology saved us time. Life is busier and there are more things demanding our attention than there were in 1996.

Playing Games: Massive improvement. Instant games against someone near your rating, at any time, at any time control.

Game Analysis: Fire up Stockfish after a game and see where you went wrong. I believe the blunder chart is the best tool possible! See my post on game analysis for more details.

Technology Tools: High-quality video courses are easy to find these days. The hard thing now is sifting through which content is best for you. Searchable game databases give updated theory and ideas with a few clicks. Spaced repetition and puzzle trainers make it easy to target your weaknesses and fix them quickly.

This era is the sweet spot for chess improvement. Busy adults can make rating gains in just 30 minutes a day.

2026: The AI Era

Okay, what about today’s climate? I believe the balance has shifted from tools being helpful and efficient into digital overload.

AI tools are everywhere now. I get an email every week from someone asking ChessGoals to partner with their new AI chess tool. Maybe some of them are cool and useful, but right now I’m not interested in that. We are already flooded with too much AI slop. Let’s dive into why.

Over-Analysis: I don’t want to call out any specific websites here, but the amount of feedback some of these sites give users based on one game is absurd. You realistically only need between one and three takeaways from each game. And if they are blitz games, one should be plenty. Then you move onto the next game. You don’t need an AI coach that gives you paragraphs of text between each move. These AI coaches do not truly understand you as a player, and they definitely don’t replace the value of a real coach… especially not a real coach who knows your style and uses Stockfish as a tool to guide recommendations.

Massive Courses: It’s easier than ever now to make a 1000-line course with tens of thousands of words of text. Who. Cares. We need focus and structure to improve as busy adults. Just give us the good stuff!

What Works Best

The positive side is we can pick and choose exactly what we want to use technology for! 2026 can be the best year for chess study!

Engines as Guides: If you can afford a coach, I recommend it and it has shown to help players improve in the ChessGoals Survey. Second best to a coach is using Stockfish to guide your takeaways. This combines instant correct results with your brainpower to work through why the results are correct. Learning to work with the engine is a skill in itself and a very important one for chess improvement.

Human-Designed Repertoires: Find curated opening systems designed by humans with computer tools to check their work. ChessGoals opening courses are usually 100 lines, based on games of players at your level (thanks to online databases), and have no errors (thanks to chess engines). These are super efficient, fun, and keep you focused on playing games and improving.

Active Learning: When it comes to correcting weaknesses, I prefer to keep a Google Sheet with my own takeaways. The work of manually doing this I think helps me cement the items I’m actively working on in each game. This is more efficient than pen and paper, but not by much. Pen and paper is a great way to do this as well. Don’t just passively scroll through AI-generated suggestions.

Last Thoughts

Modern chess engines are awesome. Playing online is awesome. Chess is awesome.

Chess improvement comes from enjoying the game, playing a lot, learning from your mistakes, and implementing what you learned.

If you can figure out how to cut out all the noise outside of those factors, you will be on your way to reaching your chess goals in no time.