I’m either an advanced beginner or at an introductory intermediate level. I just finished Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess without too much trouble and am enjoying the chess puzzles on Chess.com and can usually handle the 600-800 rating puzzles.
Where should I go from here? Focus on openings? Closings? Continue doing pattern recognition puzzles?
I figured I’d ask here and look into free resources before plunking down cash for more books or online subscriptions.
Thanks for any help.
I know you said you wanted free online sources. But I don’t have any.
What I will recommend is The Complete Chess Course by Fred Reinfeld. I found it very helpful when I was working on improving my game.
Tactics, tactics, tactics. Some endgame study, and a little bit of opening study (it’s very easy to go overboard with studying openings).
https://lichess.org/ is a great free site for playing and studying.
https://www.chessable.com/ is a nice site with an interesting approach to instruction.
There are several good YouTube chess channels; I really like GM Daniel King’s PowerPlayChess.
There is a very large amount of free resources available, to the point that it’s really not necessary to ever spend any money. Many of the sites (chess.com, chess24.com, etc) have premium subscription models, and the channels tend to have some kind of Patreon or Twitch set up for contributions.
I’m a (retired) professional chess teacher. 
What borschevsky said makes a lot of sense.
Study basic endings (starting with the checkmates v lone king) because:
Study tactics on the middlegame (e.g. fork, pin, zwischenzug…) because:
Only do a bit of opening analysis because:
Stick to the essential basics of the opening:
Practice - nothing beats playing a game against a) an opponent about your strength / b) a chess teacher.
I can offer to play a game with you here on the SDMB.
There would be a game thread (just for the moves) and an accompanying thread for comments and kibitzers.
Afterwards I could give some analysis.
Here’s a game thread from the past. (Unfortunately we combined the game and analysis, which I why I suggest two threads.)
If you want to play, say so here and I’ll set it up.
glee: You are a pearl beyond price.
[Moderating]
Moving from CS to the Game Room.
My father was a very, very good chess player. I was not, not. I could match him for about 10 moves, but then he’d start working combinations and cross-board attacks and leave me defenseless, not to mention offenseless.
Once you’ve established the center and protected your king, it’s time to work on your attack.
That was one of the things I learned from the Reinfeld book. He wrote that you should do seven things within your first ten moves:
Advance your center pawns
Bring out your bishops
Bring out your knights
Castle
I would challenge this. Playing good chess is ART.
Requesting forum change to Great Debates.
Is playing speed chess helpful or does it lead to the development of bad habits?
I was probably about your level when I worked briefly with a teacher some years ago, and what borschevsky and glee say pretty much align with his advice. The main thing was to practice tactics. At my level games aren’t lost to subtle positional play, it was usually because someone overlooked some tactic and blundered away material. I don’t know what free resources are out there today, but back then I got a lot out of a book called “Chess Tactics for Students”, which I cut up and made into flash cards.
Besides tactics, he had me get really good at the basic endgames, and to just play a lot. He didn’t want be to put too much study into openings beyond the basic strategies (control the center, protect the king, etc…) because memorizing a bunch of book lines doesn’t help if I don’t understand the reasoning behind them.
I wish that I’d had you guys around back when I was in middle and high school. Back then, the “accepted wisdom” (at least, among the folks I had contact with) was that memorizing the opening books was necessary, which I didn’t have the patience for. And since that’s what I thought opening theory consisted of, I never got very good at openings, and so even though I’m decent in midgames and great in endgames, I never got the chance to put those skills to good use, because by the time the midgame came around, I was sunk.
If I’d instead spent time studying the why of the openings, I’d have been a lot better off.
What glee and borschevsky said. Learn the basics of endgames, just enough to keep from pissing away a game you’ve won. But at your level (even mine, as far up as I got which was low 1700s), games are largely won and lost in the middle game. And besides, combinations (pins, forks, discovered attacks, etc.) are fun, like they said.
As far as openings go, my approach would be:
Decide, for when you play white, if you’re a 1.d4 or a 1.e4 player. That cuts in half what you have to learn.
Learn one defense against each of 1.d4 and 1.e4. I advocate something non-symmetric in each case: White gets the first move, but Black gets to choose the battlefield, is how I see it. 1.d4 d5 and 1. e4 e5 pisses that away for Black. Flip through the openings just enough to pick one that seems to fit your personality. I used the Grunfeld against 1.d4 and the Pirc against 1.e4, because those fit my personality. Fiddle around with the possibilities just enough to see what fits yours.
Again, choosing just one defense each against d4 and e4 cuts way down on how much you have to learn about openings, and gives you a path to the middle game that works for you. That’s enough to ask of the opening.
Most kind. 
It can be very difficult to give advice on chess (which is why I stick to a few bits of advice on the opening, with practice as the main teacher.)
One chess book advised “To free your game, take some of your opponent’s pieces - if possible, for nothing.”
An admirable concept - but the book gave no idea how to do this! :smack:
Of course this is sensible guidance.
However there are exceptions: established openings that don’t follow these rules (e.g. English opening; Benko Gambit etc.)
Also number one priority is to watch what your opponent is up to e.g. 1.e4 e5 2. Bc4 Bc5 3. Qh5 … now Nc6 develops a piece and controls the centre. Sadly it loses to Qxf7 mate!
Position
Former world champion Anatoly Karpov said "chess is everything— art, science, and sport” .
At the human level (with us chaps making mistakes, getting flustered under time pressure and getting emotional), of course he’s right.
However (sadly) computers have shown that playing good chess is pure science.
Armed with chess tablebases, computers can now play many endings perfectly.
If you already understand chess quite well, it’s a great learning tool. 
You can practice a new opening, play loads of tactics and even get a few endings.
I remember how my chess grading shot up when another strong player worked in my building and we played speed chess in our lunchtimes.
But if you’re not really sure what you’re doing, then the game goes too fast for you to absorb new techniques.
Absolutely.
World Champion Capablanca said “In order to improve your game you must study the endgame before everything else; for, whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middlegame and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.”