I am serious about learning chess. Where should I start?

Hi I started playing chess for fun with my friends some time ago and I think I like it quite a lot. I want to learn how to play for real. Where should I start? Do you have any books/tutorials recommendations? I would like to learn from the ground up to become a good player (good enough to be competitive in tournaments).https://showbox.tools/ 

You should start playing. You haven't played any games here. Once you start playing, you will get a rating and people can get an idea of your strengths and weaknesses.

You posted another thread where you say you have a 1550 blitz rating on lichess.

That wouldn't be a beginner rating.

But you sound like you are looking for basic instructions.

Dear SituFangs,

I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck for your games!

You may say you are serious, but 3 days after your post you have been inactive for 12 days. That's a sign of infatuation - short lived passion that quickly went away. I hope you will raise like a pheonix bird and prove me wrong!