You'd get a lot out of picking up any decent beginner book and reading through it. Playing should be practice and you need a model of what to do.

Hi everyone. I haven't been on this thread in months, but I have been playing a bit for the last few weeks and have seen some significant improvements in my chess.com rating. I had my online chess rating up to 1248 until I lost a game this morning, and I'm really happy about this.

I realized several things during my time off, the most important being that I was focusing way too much on playing and not enough on learning. I know a lot of people mentioned this here and in other places, but for some reason it took me a while to separate these things. Instead of just playing as much as I can and hoping for improvement, I'm now playing pretty much just online chess, taking time between moves to look at the board completely, and then going with the best choice rather than a rushed choice. I still make mistakes, but not nearly as often. I have a couple books that I'm planning on going through, but for right now, I'm just doing tactics training, watching videos, and analyzing my games during and after play. I've seen some good improvement, and I'm really excited because there's still a lot more room to improve.

I also used to play in high school, in a rather informal chess club (it just played during lunch) and during breaks at debate tournaments. I played in one USCF rated local tournament (a short Swiss event) when I was 15. I went 1-2-0 against players with ratings from ~1800 to ~2200. The win was a pretty major fluke--my opponent resigned after going down a minor piece, not realizing I was an unrated amateur. I ended up with a provisional rating over 1900, which was absurd for my abilities. I lost interest in the game not much later. Looking back, I think it was that I realized how much work would be involved and how chess would have to be a pretty high priority in my life if I wanted to become really good at it. I didn't really have a good sense of how to go about improving, either, so it was easy to let it go. I now regret having given the game up.

Anyway, I decided to get back into the game a couple of weeks ago after starting to follow coverage of the world championship. I've been playing on chess.com, mostly with standard time control. My rating there is at 1299, after peaking at 1360, after around 120 games. I've been spending some time with the Tactics Trainer and the Chess Mentor--I've found the latter super helpful, and it's made me more consistent with the former.

The advice here to just ignore the timer on the Tactics Trainer and to wait until being sure about the best move has been good advice. I was definitely in the habit of guessing or moving impulsively.

It's been over 7 months since I last posted in this thread, mostly because I went a few months without playing much.

I've been trying to change that over the last few weeks. One thing that I've noticed is that I am much more aware of the board this time. Maybe I am playing lesser quality players, but I feel like I am better at anticipating moves and preparing for more possibilities.

I did have a question though. What is the best way to start learning openings? I have been practicing things like the French Defense, the four knights, and the Sicilian, but I feel like there are just so many of these and I have no idea where to start.

Ideas?

I think if there was one opening to get good at and which has one of the sickest win rates under 2200 is the Smith Morra Gambit. You will get the chance to play it almost every other white game you play.I play it on chess.com as frontrunner78 and against my peers I win 70% of the time.

While it's a bad idea to mechanically pick the most scoring lines that databases (Chesstempo / FICSgames / Chessbase / chess.com Game Explorer) suggest, they do help discover good lines, you just need to take their advice with a grain of salt, analyse the lines manually and choose those that click with you and score decently.

It depends on the game speed. I think Smith-Morra is a decent surprise weapon in blitz and bullet but gets crushed in correspondence chess.

At this stage, you should learn general opening themes and principles instead of diving too deeply into any specific openings. Read these articles slowly and thoroughly and more than once. A couple of them address your question in greater detail.

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman37.pdf

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman53.pdf

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman138.pdf

The problem with the Smith Morra gambit is that Black can just transpose into the
2.c3 Sicilian if he wants. For this reason it has limited practical value.

Thank you for sharing those articles, Rei. I'm about to start the first one.

I'm just under 1400 on online chess on chess.com right now, and I keep getting better. The problem is that I have no idea what the best way to facilitate that process is, and I figured that opening theory would be a pretty good next step. I'm also working my way through Logical Chess still, which is a really great read, surprisingly.

1400 on chess.com's online chess isn't as strong as 1400 USCF; it should be somewhere in the 1000-1200 range.

If by "opening theory" you mean lots of specific variations, not really. Guidelines and principles, and the general plans and themes associated with the openings you play, would be useful, however.

For example, it'd be more useful for your opponent in this game to learn why moves like 2.-Bd6 are generally bad* than to memorize 200 moves of Ruy Lopez theory.

*The c7-c6 --> Bd6-Bc7 operation can redeem it, sometimes, but not here.

Better next step:

Keep doing lots of tactical exercises: http://chesstempo.com/.

At least 15 minutes a day should be enough. That translates to "more than an hour a day", for me. But then again, I do tactical exercises because I find them fun -- not because I want to get better at chess.

Digression: I think it's better to frame study goals in the form of "do at least X per [period of time]" instead of "shoot for Y per [period of time]", where Y is somewhat lofty and X should be achievable even on busy days. It's ridiculously easy to fall out of the habit of doing useful things, take a bunch of days off without really caring, and fall behind your original respectable pace. "At least X every day" circumvents that problem, I've found.

Of course, you can't just do a bunch of tactical exercises thoughtlessly (well maybe it's possible, but it's probably not the most effective method for most people). It's important to learn how to do them well.

1) Instead of just jumping in and trying different moves out (a very common mistake), spend some time at the start of every exercise identifying "tactical seeds" in the position. 2) Look at both sides' forcing moves (checks, captures, and threats -- in that order, usually, although mate threats should be prioritized over captures at the very least) on every half-move.

There are a lot of tips/techniques/heuristics chess players can use to calculate better*, but those two are good enough for now.


*One of my favorites is the "pieces that can make forcing moves are often phantoms" principle. (It might have an actual name. Maybe not.)



White's queen controls d4 and d5 because the bishop can deliver check on h7. It's almost as if the bishop is translucent. 1. Nd4 Qxd4? 2. Bxh7+ 1-0.

This "trick" allows White to place a knight on the e6 outpost before Black can stop it from getting there (with Bf6, a king move, or both).

If you are doing tactical exercises and reading annotated games you are on the right path already.

This post was longer than I expected it to be! Anyway, gl.

Alekhine stated the best way to improve was to study your own games and find out why you lost. Most top players became strong simply by doing this.

I think the bolded part isn't quite true, unless the italized part includes study of master games / strategic theory and principles to understand why you lost. I'm not a master but I think most masters improved studying masters before them.

I'm not sure where tactics training comes in, but Narodistky did write that he spent 2 hours a day when he was a teenager doing tactics problems so I'm sure a lot of the newer GM's do a lot of tactics training as well.

I think it's safe to say that no GM ever became a GM exclusively through one single type of studying...