I managed to get my USCF rating to Class A before getting out of chess in 1995 or so.
The biggest improvement in my game (in addition to following most of the suggestions mentioned in this thread) came from devouring Winning Chess: How To See Three Moves Ahead
I have at least a dozen other “tactics” books, along with quite a few on strategy and positional play, but Winning Chess is a gold mine. You ought to be able to get a copy for less than $20. Don’t pay more!
I find just the opposite: When it gets down to the endgame, I can just see how it plays out from scratch each time, since there are so few plausible moves left, but I seldom get to that point, because my lack of memorization on openings so often leaves me too weakened to make it as far as a real endgame.
To the OP, one thing that helps is to go back through games you lost, and see where your final mistake was. A computer opponent can help with this, even if the original match was against a human. Take the game back to what seemed like a critical juncture, and see if a different move would have led to a win. If it would have, that was your mistake there. If no matter what you tried at that point it was always hopeless, then the mistake was somewhere earlier.
The only thing I can add is that it is worthwhile to go through games you’ve won as well. Sometimes you think you kicked ass when all that happened was that your opponent missed a crucial move.
It’s all well and good to tell new players to improve their game by studying past games. But I think a lot of new players aren’t going to know how to study a game. Knowing what kinds of things to look for is what they want to learn.
I have tried looking back over games, but honestly I think I need to be a bit better before I do that - I’m not at the point where I see the errors yet.
I’m reading some basic strategies/tactics (“outposts” and so on; general principles like “control the center”, “develop pieces ASAP”, and stuff). Not trying to learn a pile of openings by rote quite yet (though I’ve committed a couple to memory - but I want to be sure I know why I’m making those opening moves, not just copying them). I do know I’ll need to be at least familiar with a bunch of 'em at some point though.
How many moves does a competent player tend to think ahead? I find myself able to visualize a couple of moves ahead as long as there aren’t too many possibilities available, and very occasionally three moves in a fairly limited scenario. At the beginning of the game? Crap all! The number of things the opponent can make is too large for me to track mentally.
With the chess.com iPad app, when I initially tried it I was getting beaten by the CPU on difficulty 3 out of 10 (yes, I’m that weak - that’s the default difficulty). So I decided to start at difficulty 1 and when I could consistently beat a given difficulty level 8 times out of 10 I’d move up to the next. Difficulty 1 was easy; I won every game without exception. Moved up to 2, which was more a 50/50 proposition. I’m now beating it 7 times out of 10, so there’s some improvement there. Once I beat it 8 times out of 10, I’ll move back up to that default difficulty 3 that wiped the floor with me a couple of weeks ago! If I can beat that, then I know I’ve improved.
I usually find that I’m discouraged from analyzing my games because I want outside help to show me my mistakes. Otherwise I figure I’m biased in my self-analysis. I know I could laboriously set up a position on my computer program and use it to see what the computer would have done during my moves, but really what I would need would be a program designed specifically for the purpose of pointing out my tactical mistakes. Is there a good free or cheap one out there anyone can recommend?
The reason I like Fruit (a GNU chess engine) is that it’s very customizable. Not just “hard” “easy,” but how much the computer values King safety, develop pieces, pawn structure, and so forth. I think it’s a good tool for someone at my beginner level.
With all due respect, you are wrong. Check a book on end games out from the library. A lot of the tactics are not as intuitive as you might think. Studying master games can be almost useless, since they often don’t bother to play out the game once the advantage is over whelming.
Without knowledge of endgame tactics, you can end up drawing or even losing with a big positional advantage or even when you are up a pawn or even a piece.
Most chess AIs will give you a good game. It depends on the algorithm used, I guess. But none of them will prepare you for the occasional, totally off the wall move that you will get from a human.
Pick three basic, popular White openings. Learn them. Here are three lessons/questions to ask while doing so:
In general, openings tend to try to control the center of the board. Why is that? How does this one do so?
In general, a piece is moved once, maybe twice in an opening. Why is that? How does this help development of your side?
This line, this order of moves, these particular moves were selected for a reason. There are known responses as well. Why these moves? Why this order? What other moves could I do and why are they inferior? What responses can I make if someone plays an inferior opening move outside book?
Seconding this. If you want to get better faster, you need to play people who can explain things to you on the fly either in the middle of a game or immediately afterward. In person is usually better.
That aside; unfortunately, I realistically am not going to find the time to attend a chess club, though I appreciate that’s undeniably gonna be the best way forward. I’m gonna have to make do with books and online malarky for now, and hope I can persuade a friend or two into a game.
I’m finding this thread very frustrating. I’ve never learned to play chess, but have always wanted to. The iPhone apps don’t make any sense to me. I don’t understand what I’m doing at all. Any time another human has attempted to teach me chess, what they tend to do is explain how each piece can move, mumble something about protecting the queen, but will neglect to mention about how using each piece’s moves in certain ways results in a strategy. And I’ll say, “But I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do! What’s a good opening move? What’s a bad opening move?” Inevitably, the “teacher” will tell me “It doesn’t matter. Just move one piece. You’ll figure it out by playing.”
Not if you won’t answer “why” for me; I won’t learn shit that way.
My current BF wants to teach me chess. Says I’ll be awesome at it because I’m a strategic thinker anyway. I explained to him the rant above and told him if he won’t talk me through each and every single move and answer why eleventy billion times, I will get frustrated, quit trying to learn and will never try to play chess with him again. Forewarned, he persists and claims he will patiently explain everything I ask him to. While he does teach for a living, he teaches martial arts; he’s not a wordy language kind of guy. I have my doubts, but I’m going to give it a shot.
So I guess what I’m saying is I’ll have to bookmark this thread because it might actually make some sense to me in about a year.
In the opening you want to control the four central squares, develop pieces before pawns as much as possible so that you are more flexible, and castle soonish as this will protect your king. You want to move the queen out last since, because she is so powerful (and for that reason extremely valuable) she is very vulnerable. While there are lots of threats and counterthreats on the board (i.e. during opening and much of midgame) you should be conservative with her unless you see an absolutely certain sure-thing strike you can make against your opponent using her.
There’s plenty of great tutorials online if you look for them. I learned exactly in the way described above: played, made a lot of mistakes, then figured out how things go together over the course of a good number of games. Of course, that’s how I tend to learn most games with strategy. Just play out the game a number of times to figure out the mechanics of the game, then you can start figuring out the basics of strategy and tactics.
But if your learning style is to have a strategic overview of the game already in mind before jumping into it, try going through any of the tutorials on this page to help you out. Generally, the most basic of strategy boils down to controlling the center, protecting your king, and developing your pieces (i.e. moving them to useful places on the board and not keeping them in the back for the whole game.)
This is sort of what I’m after, only I need much more specificity, like you were teaching chess to a 3-year-old.
• How do I “control” the four central squares? What does that mean, exactly? Line up my pawns in a certain pattern? Go for the other guy’s pieces asap?
• Why are the squares on the ends not my concern? Why do I only care about controlling the four middle squares? Why are there end squares if all I care about is protecting the middle ones? Is that on my “home row” (whatever that’s called) or for all rows? Does that include the other guy’s side of the board? What do I do when I get over there?
• What do you mean by “develop” pieces? How does one develop a piece?
• What does “be conservative with the queen” mean? Do I designate one really burly strong piece to be her body guard and not ever move it? Or does that mean I don’t want to move the queen around because then she might not always have a piece that has her back?
