Any high rated player have free time to play a game with me?

Hi everyone! It has been two weeks since I started playing chess. I watch chess videos(love John Bartholomow's and Simon Williams' standard chess videos.) all day, trying to play the game as much as I can.

Today I saw this section of the forum and thought it would be a great opportunity for me if a high rated player played a game or two with me and point out where I make mistakes strategically. The engine can tell blunders but I don't feel like I learn anything from it.

Thanks a lot!

Chess Mentor is the old name for the online lessons offered on the site. (Now just called lessons.) It offers interactive training.

This section of the forum is for questions about those lessons.

Paid coaching can be found on the coaches page. 

Every week people come here looking for free lessons. Most people who have invested thousands of hours learning the game do not offer free lessons.

The people who do offer coaching and lessons here can be found on the coaches page.

This is the first time in the three years I've been a member here that I looked seriously at this forum. Thanks for explaining part of its existence, notmtwain, since the sticky post and the FAQs do not explain it. I took a look at the coaches directory and it consists of only three pages of master level players and above, so I assume that a nonmaster such as myself either should not or cannot put up a profile there. So all that still leaves the question: How does a nonmaster such as myself post that they're interested in giving paid lessons, or is that not possible on this site?

Thanks for explaining the purpose of this section but instead of telling this to me, I think it would be much more worth your effort if you messaged a forum admin about us, people who come here every week. So that maybe you wouldn't have to come here warn people every week too.

Well, thanks again for your effort which does not help me or anyone else at all.

(You could really help me if you didn't just treat me like I want to steal hardwork of these people and showed me a way to find some high rated players. Obviously I am not asking for GMs, just 1500~ which I believe there are thousands of them.)

There is no reason why lower  rated players could not be registered. Perhaps you teach chess to beginners at a local library or school? There are curricula I have seen for teachers to teach chess without their having to know much about the game.  I would think that chess.com would recognize someone who had teaching credentials with experience at running such clinics,

Your profile shows you have only played 3 games here and says you do not have a reliable connection. I get the feeling from your posts that you are a pretty strong player. However, I think that the connection issue alone would make it impossible for you to give live lessons online. The connection issue is fixable. Do you have any qualifications that are demonstrable that would make someone like chess.com believe you are qualified to teach chess?  

Oh, I see now that you have completed writing an as yet unpublished chess and philosophy book.  I didn't see the title.   You should consider posting chapters here for the free critiques and suggestions you will get. Perhaps a blog would work.

Unfortunately, the forums and the Help pages are things that chess.com is paying little attention to. 

They set up the coaches page several years ago in an attempt to help qualified coaches get noticed and to help members avoid losing their money to unqualified coaches. I just point it out to you.

Nothing is stopping you from posting your fantasies of getting someone who will devote many hours of their time to helping you- for nothing.  I am sure it does happen sometimes.

Most of us are in the same position as you are.  We are trying to improve our own play. Wouldn't it be nice to just get a few tips and improve by hundreds of points?

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. If you played a few games with a high rated player, they could say "are you sure you want to do that?" and let you take back your queen but you won't learn how to avoid dropping your queen until you learn to think about what the purpose of your opponent's moves are and what he or she can do next. Learning is hard work on the part of the student. A few tips here and there won't do  much.

 There are great resources here for learning. You have them all available to you. You need to work hard at learning. If the videos or interactive lessons haven't made much difference yet, you have to keep trying. It takes patience and dedication.

Brilliant solution for chess.com's forum problem! Lets go warn all people ourselves one by one- for nothing!

Look, there are many posts like mine so it is the forum's problem, not mine. They don't make it clear enough. So unless you have a personal problem with me go ahead and tell it to admins.

Like I said, I am not looking for a GM "obviously"! Just a common 1500+ player like you. As I can see you have lots of free time to warn people so I think one of thousands like you might wanna spend their free time helping someone.

By the way, a common capitalist might not know but "free" in "free time" does not mean "free of charge time" it means when you got nothing to do! Just wanted to point the obvious thing out!

So please stop trying to boost your ego. I already said I watch many many videos and finished all lessons in chess.com as you can see in my profile. You should have easily assumed that I know there is no man with a magic wand. I just saw a section of the forum and an opportunity and asked for help, nothing wrong with me.

So, from now on, if you don't have any personal issues with me, talk to admins.

Thanks!

I get nothing from trying to point you in the right direction. 

I thought that by telling you a little of chess.com's history, you would understand your mistake.

"Chess Mentor" is a brand name.   Chess.com was started in the 1990's to sell packages of lessons under that "Chess Mentor" name. 

The current management bought the site in 2005. They have since added many other features to the site. However, the "Chess Mentor" lessons remain, but were renamed "Lessons" as part of the V3 redesign.  Perhaps it was renamed because the name has always been confusing to people.

You can post whatever you want here. It is obvious that many others make the same mistake- thinking that the "Chess Mentor" forum is a place to look for free lessons.

I try to point them in the right direction. I try to explain to people like you why it is unreasonable to ask total strangers to spend hours giving you free lessons. I say this because I have some experience in chess. I have been playing tournament chess for 40 years. You believe that 1500 ratings are "common". According to the site, my 1500 blitz rating says I am a better player than 90% of the players here.  I know that I am a terrible blitz player because I am always running out of time. I have invested thousands of hours in trying to improve my chess.  I achieved a 2000 rating in over the board chess a long time ago. The most rapid progress I made was a long time ago when I played regular tournament chess and paid a series of masters and international masters to review my games and teach me.  

Pointing you to the paid lessons page seems easier than getting chess.com admins to make changes in the site.  They almost never respond directly to suggestions.  Maybe if we get into a real cat fight, they will take notice and change the name of the forum to "Interactive Lessons on Chess.com" or something like that.  I doubt it.

Here is your most recent 15 10 game played on chess.com. Other than entombing your dark squared bishop behind a wall of pawns, you played pretty well. Your opponent dropped a pawn and the exchange and you were winning but you dropped a rook to an elementary fork on move 33.  

You and your oppoent both misplayed the endgame.

He did first with his knight sacrifice to mobilize his f pawn. I believe that he could have immobilized and won your pawns without needing to sacrifice his knight. At that point, his passed pawn would have been crucial.

Once he did sacrifice the knight, however, you should then have won the game or at least have easily drawn it.  The move 41.. a3 froze your pawns in their tracks.  41..b3 was necessary. You should study endgames with advanced connected passed pawns and bishops of opposite color to understand why. Your opponent's only passed pawn, the f pawn was easily handled by your bishop. 

The computer analysis shows how you could have won the game with 41.. b3:

 It also shows how you could have held a draw as late as your last move with 48..Bc7.  The computer says white still has a +1.03 advantage but it is impossible to win with bishops of opposite colors. White can force black to sacrifice his bishop for the two white pawns but then white has no mating material.

I am actually having hard time to believe how obsessed with this you are. Why would you care when site owners don't? Yes, 1500 is better than %90 but there are over a million players. Common does not mean average, it means common.

Well, now I don't think your intentions were bad since it looks like you feel sorry for coming across like that. But my point was you could played at least three games with me instead of arguing pointlessly. There is nothing wrong with helping people for free, in fact, now I have two 1900~ players reached me and I am playing one of them two daily games.

Thanks for your advice on my games, please, let's just stop arguing.

i just could! if you want then send me a holler

Thanks for the kind words. Here are a few comments and details to respond to your comments...

Yes, actually I have years of experience of teaching chess to very young players, and I was hired at Academic Chess at about the same time I joined this site, but they had numerous problems there, with the end effect being that I got only one day of work as a substitute teacher after all the training and paperwork I did there. They required only a 1200 rating, and I was well beyond that (I estimate my real rating to be somewhere around 1800). Last week I applied at another chess tutoring company but I haven't heard back yet.

At the moment my Internet connection is reliable, and I would not offer lessons at a location where my connection was not reliable. In the past few years I have kept changing my hangout locations, which is why I wrote that.

The tentative title of my book, by the way, is "The Cassaic Book of Wisdom: The Making of a New Science of Wisdom." I submitted a sample to my first targeted publisher just last week, along with the associated book proposal.

I haven't even looked into starting a blog here--another part of this site that is largely unknown to me. I'm interested in that but until now I haven't had the time to even look into that, even to see if a non-Premium member can do that. That would interest me quite a bit but again it's a matter of having time. Until recently I just haven't had time for such extra activities, which is partly why I've played so few games here.

I'll be looking into teaching here and elsewhere in the upcoming weeks. My tentative plan is to charge $5 per half hour, or $10 an hour, paid by Pay Pal. The chess tutoring company to which I applied recently has the same set-up, except the teachers there get $50/hour--*if* they get hired.

Are you looking for lessons? I am a National Master; for more information about me, see www.premierchess.com or www.facebook.com. 

My online lessons rate is $75/hour. For just playing, rate will be $50/hour. Email me at erabin66@gmail.com for more info.