I think they’ve removed all the exceptions to the 50-move rule now. I’m not sure if KBB vs. KN was a known exception.
Some people can’t play chess - yes they can memorize the moves and play, but even if they are smart - they can’t plan ahead. People with executive function disorder (somewhat related to ADD) have a hard time with chess.
Oops, so they did, about 20 years ago. :smack: (eta: previously, this ending was covered)
Which means, sadly, the “winning line” in your study isn’t winning after all, because the weaker side can hold out for a 50-move draw. 
Yep, although I should mention that it’s an actual game position, rather than a study. In any case, playing around with the tablebases, if we move the bishop to d4 it becomes a win in 50, and to d2 it becomes a win in 39, so that repairs it.
Dude, you have way too much time on your hands - and when I say that it means a great deal! 
It is also possible to envisage an endgame study contest whose rules excluded the 50-move rule from consideration, and allowed tablebases.
Anyway, this is all a long way from the OP, apologies for starting a hijack. OP, have you had time to follow any of the suggestions yet? Have they helped?
I’ve immersed myself in Gaemknot and am having a lot of fun practicing the chess tactics. I’ve also got some books lined up for purchase and am reading one now (called, ironically, Stop Sucking at Chess, which has an annoying “reg’lar guy” prose style but otherwise has some solidly pitched advice for someone like me). I don’t feel comfortable going up against a human opponent yet until I have a better handle on what I’m doing, but I feel like I’m on my way. There is a great deal to learn; I mean, I knew there was a lot, but had no idea how much “a lot” there really was.
Here’s a rule of thumb I’ve heard - the seven in ten principle. There’s seven moves you should make early in the game: advance both center pawns; bring out both knights; bring out both bishops; and castle. If you’ve done all seven of these things within your first ten moves, you’re probably in a good position at that point.
And be reassured that learning to play chess is no harder than learning to play a musical instrument. 
I have not read all the comments here but I’ll chime in and forgive me if it has been said before.
Chess below expert level is almost all about tactics.
You only need to know enough about a few openings to avoid going down before you’ve got developed. You could almost play with as few a three opening systems. One you play all the time as white, and a response to e4 (Pawn to King Four) and d4 (Pawn to Queen Four). For a while I used the London System, Scandinavian and Queen’s Indian for 90% of my games.
For tactics, learn the relative values of the pieces and then get a basic book to teach you about pins and forks etc. and then do lots of simple tactical exercise from a book or internet.
In play, if nothing else, before you make the move you have decided upon double check you are okay against ever possible capture the opponent can make (even the least obvious) and every possible check he has (not matter how crazy). Most tactical mistakes are about assuming a reaction and not checking all his forcing options - captures and checks are the most forcing and lead to lots of unexpected tactics.
Play humans, face to face or on the internet, at the same rough level as you or a little better. If not too boring play over the game with the opponent afterwards and try to figure out what each of you were thinking at the key points.
Most importantly, enjoy the game!
Bump
I too suck at chess. Not super bad, but bad enough in the eyes of any ranked player to make any difference. I try to implement sound ‘tactics’ (castle early, don’t bring out queen too early, get knights and bishops out quickly, etc) but at the end of the day my “strategy” is little more than waiting for an opponent to do something dumb and try to seize material advantage. This might work for playing a novice, but the few times I’ve followed this while playing opponents who actually knew what they were doing, I lost quickly and often (like every single time).
They say that to improve in chess one should play against opponents better than yourself, but the few times I have, I can’t say I learned much of value apart from the fact that my game falls apart rapidly in midgame, and each time it does it seems to be for a different reason. Maybe there’s too much ego involved with chess against human opponents. Perhaps it would be more rewarding (or less punishing) to play against computer opponents
You don’t learn to be a better chess player just by playing games. In fact, they are one of the worst ways to learn, because they don’t come with running commentary until after you’re toast.
Can you execute mates with all the regular King/piece combos without regularly stumbling or having to re-learn how to do so efficiently? (King-Queen, King-Rook, King-2 Bishops). Can you promote a pawn by force when it’s in a position to have that done, and do you recognize the exceptions to when it’s a forced promotion on sight? Have you worked out some basic combination mate chess problems, so you can see how pieces interact in the middle game to force mates? Have you gone all the way through a basic chess primer such as Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess or Ludek Pachman’s series of beginning play books called Complete Chess Strategy?
These are the way you become better. It’s like becoming good at anything: if you cannot execute the fundamentals and do not know how to accomplish basic tactics, you’ll have a hard job knowing exactly why it makes sense to do all those rules of thumb in your opening moves, to say nothing about how to convert your opening moves to winning positions.
After you’ve mastered some of this, it does help to memorize some standard opening lines to play. Thus, you should know the basic lines of play for Black responses to 1. e4, 1. d4, 1. c4. As Black, you should learn one basic defense to each of those White opening moves, so you are prepared to play those defenses in response to whatever first move White chooses. That saves you a LOT of grief against higher-rated players, who probably do have opening lines memorized.
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess was my chess bible. It covers the basic stuff and then moves on to more advanced concepts.
This advice is for a player who aspires to a rating in the 1500-1800 range, but doesn’t know how to get there:
My bible was Chernev and Reinfeld’s Winning Chess: How To See Three Moves Ahead.
First, I agree with notquitekarpov’s comment from 2012 about openings: you need an opening system to play with White, and with Black, you need one response each to 1. d4 and 1. e4. Don’t get into detailed opening analysis - when you’re trying to pick one, just find something that feels comfortable. (I used the Grunfeld against 1. d4 and the Pirc against 1. e4, but that’s just me. Find responses to d4 and e4 that feel natural to you.
Now, Winning Chess: what it does is tell you what to do once you’ve gotten through the opening (the first 10-15 moves), your pieces are developed, your king is castled, and your pawns are more or less where you want them to be. What now?
This book introduces to ‘moves that smite,’ in the authors’ words. (I haven’t actually opened this book in decades, but I have no problem recalling the words.) They show you how to use the pin, the knight fork, discovered attacks, skewers, and so forth - all very useful!
But the one big idea is that checks and captures, and moves that threaten checks and captures - ‘moves that smite’ - drastically narrow an opponent’s responses, which is what enables you to look a few moves ahead with some reliability: if you take a piece of his or put his king in check, your opponent must respond with a capture or an attack, or move so that his king is no longer in check - and there are usually just a few such responses.
And if you can follow up with more of the same, his move after next will also have few decent possibilities, at which point you’re looking at the third move ahead.
And even if those ‘moves that smite’ don’t produce any lines that give you the advantage over the next 3 moves or so, you’ve still got the initiative, which means your opponent isn’t causing you problems. But sometimes they will produce lines that lead to your taking a piece by pin, fork, or other means, and then you’re ahead in material and cooking with gas.
The one disadvantage of Winning Chess is that it’s an old book, written in old-fashioned descriptive notation (1 P-K4, P-K4, 2 N-KB3, etc). That’s fine for older guys like me who grew up on that notation and still read it more naturally than algebraic, but it might slow you down if you’ve grown up on algebraic, which I’d guess most chessplayers under 50 have. But the ideas are just as valid now as they were ~50 years ago when I picked up this book.
There’s a really old, but VERY good fundamentals of chess book by GM José Raúl Capablanca, called, appropriately enough, “Chess Fundamentals.” It’s one of the ones I used to learn basic tactics back in my youth. Quite good, in my opinion.
Certainly there are many good books and videos by people FAR better at chess than I am or ever will be. If you have enough interest in the game they are well worth reading.
I will say the single best piece of advice I got was to improve my pawn game.
That is, don’t view pawns as disposable as they may seem. Yes, they are the least valuable piece and certainly are used in trades but you have eight of them and they can make your opponent’s movement difficult. I found being judicious in bringing them out and careful about trading pawns really helped my game. Particularly since pawns cannot go backwards. Draw their pawns out while yours are in reserve. See how it goes.
That sounds like terrible advice, to me. Yes, pawns have value, but they have that value by virtue of being developed. If you let your opponent develop his pawns while you don’t develop your own, you might as well not have any.
If you want to protect your pawns, then develop them in diagonal patterns. Don’t leave them undeveloped.
Well, in fairness, if he’s playing as Black, there are several well-known defenses that are based upon not advancing pawns to the rank a5-h5 until absolutely necessary. There are even some good White openings that eschew the usual 1. c4/d4/e4/f4 for less cavalier pawn play, if you will. For example, Pal Benko’s Opening (1. g3).
But I find that such play requires incredible understanding of the tactical interactions of pieces, because you end up playing in such cramped spaces. And while it certainly avoids the tactical difficulties inherent in calculating exchanges of pieces and pawns in the center of the board (always fraught with mistakes), having your pieces unable to respond to threats from the opposition can end your game very quickly. Most decent chess players know how to attack “hedgehog”-type pawn structures, so you’re just really making it difficult only for the average player.
Not an unreasonable strategy, although in general is it easier to attack rather than defend and counter.
The key is to learn how to recognize “dumb”, i.e., weakness. What are the weaknesses in my opponent’s position, and how can I exploit those weaknesses? What are the weaknesses in my position, and how can my opponent exploit those? Most everything then follows from that. Jeremy Silman’s “The Amateur’s Mind” and the followup “How to Reassess Your Chess” are the modern takes on these questions for amateur players. Fair warning if you read these books; Silman’s writing style tends towards condescension at times.
Kasparov once said that the winner of a game of chess is the player who made the second-to-last mistake, so seizing on mistakes when you find them is certainly viable. But it’ll work better if you give your opponent more opportunities to make mistakes, and you do that by attacking.