Where’s the learning?

This post is in the spirit of constructive criticism. I don’t personally  see much learning happening in this club. It seems to be dominated by seasoned and strong players. Noobs of my sort are a small minority, or at least they don’t participate much. Granted, “beginner” is relative, and folks rated 1300 on chess.com are probably still beginners out in the real world, but still… Anyway, I would like to see a more organized effort in setting up things like recurring, scheduled practice matches, lessons/lesson plans for different levels of players, where groups of players of roughly at the same level can study together with maybe a higher-level player acting as a teacher… people are helpful here, and they’ve been nice enough to sometimes play with me and comment on my games, which they certainly didn’t have to do. I just wish there was more of that. Or maybe there are other clubs that are more targeted for that kind of thing? My 2 cents.

Your 2 cents? Make sure to share a bit of that comrade sheesh

No need to be hostile buddies, just sharing my opinion.

I’ve seen the pinned threads. I don’t know why you assume I haven’t. They don’t answer my specific needs, that’s all. And I ask people to play, usually the answer is no, or no answer at all, which is totally fine, no one has to play with me, but I’m saying, if this is one of the goal of the club, a little more effort can be put into making this more organized and useful. And of course I can do my part. 

Fair enough. Other than the pinned threads mentioned and games, what specifics would you like to see for this club? Structured "lessons" seems a bit impractical (since different "beginners" are at different levels and therefore need different things to improve/work on) because it is too broad of a range.

p.s. You are still of course free to message me with any chess questions, ideas, or perhaps even some unrated games

I feel that the most useful pinned thread is the ‘analyze my game’ one. The others are too vague and general, especially for a beginner who does not really know where to start. 
thanks for the personal offer. You’ve already helped me plenty! You’re one of the nicest and helpful people around here . 

Homework? Summer? Damn

Hmm there's always room for improvement

Sounds enticing

I legit play people and give them feedback and they learn lol

OK when are you free?

In all honesty I don't teach people that much or help that much... I believe in a trial by fire and really most of what we can do to help is to punish your mistakes... The way I got to ~1200 OTB and here was just a ton of practice, not really studying, so I'm not that much help.

Let's do it!

Hey punish away! Sounds good to me

Agreed. For example, I am a pretty good player for my rating, however I need to work on my board vision because I always make dumb blunders and hang pieces in weird ways.

Username checks out

p.s. Yeah, we've played chess together and I'd say under-rated as well, this is true.

Awesome I’ll check it out soon!

About setting up practice matches - perfectly good point. Personally I do not think simply asking “hey is anyone available to play” whenever you can play is a good idea. I would advise to set up a time with someone - “hey, I live in [this] time zone, I am usually available [these times], would [x] like to play sometime?”

Another thing as guinea pig pointed out - a lot of things get redundant, especially at the beginner level (don’t hang pieces, don’t hang pieces, yada yada) which are covered too much. I think the most important thing a beginner should learn is how to think, to be able to weigh two moves in their head and compare the pros and cons instead of hard calculating everything. I’m thinking of making such a thread in the future but no time recently- if any one else wants to take up that job I’m fine with it.

I personally think that this club isn't meant for the higher rated players to drill opening principles and long time controls into the heads of the beginners (Like in the general forum), rather I like to think that this club does a really good job of giving exposure of higher level concepts and ideas to lower rated players. Like Guinea said, the things that beginners have to do to improve are pretty straight forward; don't hang pieces, practice tactics regularly, etc. What I think this club does a good job of is filling that niche of bridging the gap from beginner to intermediate. 

Of course, you have some valid points. I do think that the system of finding a game here is a little loose, but it's hard to identify a method of improving that. At least for me personally, I don't play that many games because by the time everyone gets online and starts asking for a game, I've already played two classical games over the course of the day (Not making excuses just offering my reasoning.)

As for the lessons standpoint, that's certainly something to consider in the future, but it's important to note that 1. It's hard enough to actually get people to play in the tournaments 2. You'd have to schedule it in an organized matter (which is hard to do without flooding the forums). 

I'd also like to point out that this isn't an in person club. Most of us here have other lives, even  chess related activities other than this club. It's amazing that this club is as active as it is given the deadness of other clubs of this nature. 

And I absolutely understand your predicament about not knowing where to start. Perhaps I'll make a post about it so you can make more use of the other resources we have. 

Just my thoughts, sorry if this was too lengthy

idk you made a good point