Hi guys.

I'm looking for some advice on what avenues to pursue to improve my chess game. I am not a super serious player, but I enjoy the game and am wondering where to go next.

The vast majority of my play is on chess.com. When I started trying to take the game a bit more seriously, I was about 1100 on that site. I toyed around with openings and a couple other things and got very little in the way of results. I then started focusing on tactics, and now I fluctuate between 1500 and 1600 (chess.com rating).

I'm wondering where I should go next. Is it time to start working on openings? Any books in particular for someone at my skill level? Thanks for any help.

Which chess.com format is that 1500–1600 rating, blitz, standard, turn-based?

If you have mainly built up tactics I'd recommend working on the middlegame and/or just playing solid moves when tactics aren't available. There are a ton of books to potentially take a look at. It's hard to know what to really recommend without making a bunch of assumptions. As far as I think of it, there are a few main areas of study:

- tactics (motifs and combination of motifs in a variation)
- calculation (ability to think through variations)
- opening (not just memorizing moves but understanding the point of all of them)
- middlegame (being able to evaluate positions and material/positional imbalances well and construct plans to engineer them)
- endgame (basic endgame mates + critical positions/methods of defense/attack)

This is how it's broken down in my mind, anyway. I'd assume your already strong in tactics. If you're 1500-1600 in blitz you are likely also better at the opening than other phases. You may be ok at endgames simply by being good at calculation. But you may be very weak at positional or strategic middlegame play.

I'm making a bunch of assumptions here btw. I'm rated ~1820 USCF over the board fwiw. I also have what's probably the most active improvement log so you can see how I'm attempting to tackle this too. A-rod's log is very active too, although I'd say it's less structured and more focused on putting up actual games fairly frequently. If you are 1500-1600 blitz my guess is you are somewhere in between us strength-wise.

15-1600 in standard. I haven't played much blitz. The only actual opening I ever use is the King's Gambit.

If that's standard then perhaps you are pretty close to a-rod in terms of his current strength. Tbh I'm not really sure how quickly he's progressing but he certainly seems to be improving and is shellacking fools in turn-based (correspondence) 2p2 matches, anyway.

I'd recommend studying with whatever books/tools were recommended to a-rod in his log. I believe some were, most likely by Rei (and potentially others). Or even some of the books recommended to me in my log, but some of those may not be the best sweet spot for you right now, especially if you don't already study and/or enjoy studying. (I.e. if something is too challenging you might just quit it and get nothing from it.)

Hmm, maybe there isn't a list of books in that thread.

This is a link that should be useful though in terms of what books to potentially study: http://home.comcast.net/~danheisman/...Book_Guide.htm.

Nah I'm only in the 12-1300 range in standard. It's my correspondence that is 1595. And my blitz rating is a terrible 950.

But yes Rei and others made plenty of quality suggestions in my log. I'm just lazy and never bought anything.