Forums
Most Recent
- how to find friend
- The 50 move rule shouldn't exist!
- Whatever happened to....
- There should be Triple, Quadruple, and even Quintuple Board bughouse
- knight beats bad bishop
- queen trades
- Why most players on chess.com deny rematch?
- Make The Grob Opening Strong?
- Comments
- 10/18/2017 - Oll-Stohl, Manila 1992
Forum Legend
- Following
- New Comments
- Locked Topic
- Pinned Topic
I really need help. I really suck at chess. I need someone who will actually be a friend and help my chess problems. If you want to help send me a friend request and we will work.
My advice to improve when starting out
1) invest and study tactics every day for 15-20 minutes via chess.com tactics trainer or other sites
2) play a LOT of games 5 - 15 min by the boat load! You focus is on simple tactics and thought process you will lose a lot but you will also learn to look for simple things first. Most mistakes at the beginning level are due to missing basic threats such as capturing a piece. Until you get these down to a 1% chance per move dont worry about other stuff stuff.
3) play CLASSICAL openings. Avoid openings that block the center. french, King's Indian, Caro-Kahn,. you will lose many games quickly by playing open games but there is a ton of learning points in losing games in under 20 moves. Start with Guccio piano or scotch as white, Accelerated dragon or Taimanov Siclian against e4 and say a Tarrasch against the Queens gambit. All very simple fairly simple to learn and dont have too many opening traps and logical moves are 'good' even if not ideal.
3) Look at 100 wins and 100 losses games in your selected openings with a master playing the winning side the games should be under 30 moves. The idea is to learn what the typical mistakes are. Play over them fairly quickly, about a move every 2-5 seconds, pausing if you really cannt see why someone did something and try to sort it out in 30 seconds if you cannt move on! Dont worry too much if you dont get something but watch how the master moves pieces around, which pieces went where? where did they focus their attack? how did they punish passive play by their opponent? Once you have gone over 100 games you can start to focus on details such as move X is better than move Y... right now just get your instincts built up.. You can use the game search here , get a PGN game viewer for free and find databases all over the internet in almost all old openings. DO NOT focus on modern theory or the most recent innovation, get the ideas down first. For example, if you look at a lot of games in the 4 knights scotch you will notice one of the key ideas white tries to solve is the involvement of the queenside knight in an attack against black... how he does this is very interesting...
4) (repeating myself for emphasis - Tactics , tactics , tactics as a bare minimum . Play computers on easy level and just learn to capture pieces. play fast games and learn to capture stuff for now. recognize threats. LOTS AND LOTS of 3-5 min blitz helps in this but dont just do this in isolation. GO over the games with computer help (again free chess programs can do this easily or invest in some software) to look for SIMPLE oversights, so what if you miss a 3-5 move tactic for now this is not a concern.
Do these things and you will start to notice an improvement quickly
Thanks for the advice Tony! Gave me a way/structure!