I’m completely familiar with the rules of chess; I’ve just never been very good at it.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a human opponent interested in playing, so I’m using the magic of the interwebz to play against both online opponents and computer opponents. I’m trying to play a game or two every day.
What can I do to help, other than practice? Are there any decent websites which guide you through tactics slowly as you get better? Any good openings I should concentrate on for now?
I’ve been told I should study the games of the masters. Tried that. I’m not good enough to follow their tactics yet; I need to get a little better before that makes any sense to me. I also found some YouTube videos on tactics and the like, but they whiz by so fast with the narrator speaking a stream of moves that, again, I ain’t good enough yet to profit from that. I’d need examples which went really slowly with the narrator taking his time to explain the why of each move.
chesstempo.com is excellent for tactics. Set it at whatever level you can get half of them right in less than a minute and just go to town there until the patterns start sinking in. Then bump it up a notch.
A couple of ideas.
Simple: Write down or otherwise keep a log of the moves in your games and go over them to look for mistakes and missed opportunities. I have often played games where I had a great opening that led to a strong position, but I didn’t really know how to proceed.
Looking back over the game I realized I had a strong mating threat that my opponent could have handled, but which would have opened up attacks. In the game, I skipped the threat because I saw it was defended, but I missed the opportunity of forcing him into a specific move.
Somewhat Simple: I like Chessville Problem of the Week.. There is a lot of variety in the problems, including your basic “find-the-fork” approach. But there is an archive as well as a listing of problems broken down by tactic.
In the linked problem, the moves in the game that led to the position are included and a very basic explanation is given. It might help to set up a board to play out some of the more advanced scenarios.
Less Simple: I have an old version of Chessmaster for the PS2 (there are a lot of newer options for computer and consoles). It has a wide variety of opponents with different styles as well as tutorials, Master level games to play through (e.g. the Morphy Game), as well as hints and advice. You can also set up positions from a Problem or from one of your own games and ask for advice.
What I really like is that it is easy to try moves, back up or even start over with the same game, playing out the moves as they were in the game until you decide to take over again. On lower levels, your opponent is likely to replay their same moves, but at higher levels it is much less predictable and will not make the same mistakes twice.
Just some ideas, I’m not a great player and I have had my ass handed to me even on this board, so YMMV.
What helped me go from being sucky to mediocre was memorizing a lot of opening book repertoire, and all the possible variations. I admit that’s a precarious pitfall for the long term development of your game, but the short term benefits will at least spur a new interest in becoming better. At least it did for me!
antonio107 is right that opening theory can improve your results, although maybe not really your skill at the game. Especially at beginner level, there are lots of well-known opening traps that your opposition will often not know.
Probably the best approach is to study simple tactics until you are very proficient at them, to the point that you’re basically solving them by recognition rather than working them out. A large percentage of novice games are decided by relatively simple tactics.
I’d recommend going through the [archives](http://www.chesscafe.com/archives/archives.htm#Novice Nook) of Dan Heisman’s Novice Nook column. It gives very good advice for people in your situation, and the archive holds about a decade of monthly articles, so there’s lots of good stuff there.
You also need to study your end game or you will find your self losing games you should have won. The middle games tactics and strategy takes some study, but less memorization than the endgame.
There is too much to memorize for openings, so you try to limit yourself to a few openings and try to force the games into openings you know or at least try to force the opponent out of their opening book.
I know you’re doing this already, but: play a lot, and analyze games once they’re over. I’m on gameknot.com myself (vratislav), and that has a whole lot of nifty features, including computer analysis of games. One of the most sure ways of improving, IME, is paying attention to the opening; developing your central pawns, getting knights and bishops out there, moving towards castling, etc.
I think this is excellent advice. Learning to recognize end game patterns can help a lot in recognizing middle game patterns that allow you to push toward an endgame that lets you take advantage of minor positional or material advantages.
I’m not the guy to ask – I love the game, but am beaten pretty much by everyone who has a clue, including GNU chess engines like Frui t. But (don’t have the titles handy), I learned a ton from at least one book on endgames – it’s frustrating to have, like, seven queens and get into a stalemate, or not know how to mate with rook+king vs. a king – basic stuff, but starting with the basics helped me at least start thinking about more complicated configurations.
Opening theory for me was invigorating to explore, but ultimately frustrating. Yeah Dragon Sicilian sounds very kung fu and cool, but it’s nothing without transposition. When I play, I play blitz games to practice – I think intuition is underrated. Without an intuitive grasp of position and possibilities, you’re basically not playing a game, but becoming an android automaton. Capablanca had something to say on being asked how many moves he saw ahead – I forgot what he said, but it was withering ang witty.
Review and analyze Grandmaster games. Play through them. Understand their motives and reasoning for each move. Remembering openings and positions is nice (and necessary), but that’s just rote memorization, which is useless when you’re in a position you don’t have cataloged in your brain. Learn how to play through those positions correctly.
Partly true. The IM I did lessons with many years ago suggested that I learn one defense as black for 1. e4, and then another one that could counter c4, d4, Nf3 or any other screwy opening (I settled on the King’s Indian Defence). So, it’s really more malleable than learning one specific wrinkle of an opening line in that way.
For white, I like playing e4. So I learned an opening for the Sicilian, caro-kann, and whatever d5 is called again (Scandinavian?), up to about 10 or 12 moves or so. Not well enough, but I learned them. The Fried Liver attack is still my favorite of all time.
I miss playing chess. I have instant chess’s free app on my iPad, that gets me 3 games a day for free. That’s about 2.999 more than I normally can squeeze in, but I feel like I should find a FICS client for it so I could challenge folks on here, see how rusty I’ve gotten!
That’s really helpful to me – it’s so easy to get caught up (IME) in the main lines, and your teacher (an IM!) seemed to have had a good way to get you beyond the beginning hurdles.
If I weren’t hella busy I’d be trying this out! Thanks!
Do not ignore the help your local chess club can provide:
Besides finding your level, playing for fun or on a tournament, (and it is not too expensive to join the USCF) a club allows you to interact with members that have the same level as you and the ones that are better do help the less able ones on many occasions.
You can ramp this up a notch by playing out the games one move at a time with the moves of one player covered up. You then try to select the move that he or she played. I did this for years, leaving a board set up on my desk with a part played game. Sometimes it would be days before I decided on a move in complex positions. As you improve you start picking the right moves more often.
To be honest I think grandmaster games are far too advanced to be of much use to a relatively new player.
I learnt chess a long time back from a old book by Euwe and Meiden called Chess Master versus Amateur. As the name suggests it analyzes the games of a relatively weak player against a master and provides insights into how weak play can be exploited. It’s a great second book to read on chess, the first book should probably cover things like basic tacticis, endgames and so on.
On the downside it does use the old descriptive notation (not that big a deal, might take ten minutes to learn it) and of course you will probably have to buy it. Perhaps there are Youtube videos which analyse similar games by relatively weak players?
