Beginner advice please sitting on 638 on rapid

Has anybody any advice for what I should be doing to up my score? I am playing 10min games and quite often struggle time-wise, should I go for 15min games? Also I seem to have reasonably good openings, but my end game is woeful, dont know if thats a time thing, any advice would be appreciatted.

thanks

Gram

The quickest fix you could do right now would be to play 15|10 games if you are having time issues. If after trying this new time control you find that you still have endgame issues, start studying up on it.

I mostly read books such as Silman's Complete Endgame Course and that helped quite a bit. I think chess.com also has a few lessons on endgames but I haven't checked them out yet. You could give those a shot too.

At the end of the day, a beautiful opening and middlegame is pointless if you can't win a winning endgame, yeah?

Yes very true😂😂 that’s my life summed up

So are you advising play 10 and 15 min games?

thanks for quick reply 👍💎

Oh maybe my wording was confusing. I meant 15|10 or 15 minutes with a 10 second increment. You get 10 seconds added to your clock every time you move a piece.

Ah gotcha, thanks appreciate that 👍

To add to what MadMagister says, I really like the 30-minute format.  The potential downside is that it might take up to a full hour to play a game, but most are a lot shorter than that, in my experience.

As for endgames, the lessons on here are quite good, and there are lessons on all the basic endgame principles, including back-rank checkmates, the Rule of the Square, opposition, critical squares, and common patterns like rook and pawn.  It might be worth going for a diamond membership for a month just to explore the more advanced endgame lessons.  They're all excellent.

I think your opening still needs a lot of work. For instance, in your most recent game (a loss), you brought out your queen too early on move #6 in order to make an easily-defended check, and you retreated it to the back rank two moves later. In fact, your position was the exact same after move #9 compared with after move #5. You wasted 4 moves while your opponent developed pieces and castled. This mistake alone can be enough to lose to a decent opponent.

15+10 games should definitely be the shortest time control you play. If you have the time, from time to time, you can put in some even longer games. If you do that, try to be careful on your every move and take your time. This will probably reduce blunders in the long run.

Apart from that, perhaps you could make use of this, if you have some time for reading of course:

https://www.chess.com/blog/nklristic/the-beginners-tale-first-steps-to-chess-improvement

In any case, good luck on your chess improvement.

thanks appreciate that 👍

might well do that, thanks

thanks for all comments, looks like I have some homework 😂👍👍

👍👍👍

https://www.chess.com/live/game/9233728583

In that game, you hung mate-in-1 with 8:30 on your clock.

I would say that time management is not your main problem. Try to improve your tactics with puzzles and lessons. You should stop hanging pieces and checkmates, that is the only thing that matters right now.

Is hanging pieces putting them in positions without protection?

Yes, and hanging checkmate is failing to make a move that would prevent a forced checkmate assuming your opponent makes the right moves.

Thanks , is it true that I should never move a piece unless another piece is defending it?

Also if an opponent attacks my knights with bishops in opening game, what is best tactic to deal with this?

That's a good rule of thumb, but it's not an absolute rule.  You might want to do otherwise if hanging the piece tempts your opponent to make a capture that puts them in a worse position than they were before.  (An example of this might be to draw one of their defending pieces out of position to prevent an attack with which you plan to follow up.)  Also, it can be ok if there's no immediate threat to the piece, but you probably wouldn't want to leave it in that position forever.

Thanks your in my friends list now so yes 👍

Diamond membership although my elo isn't reflected in that. I just really enjoy studying. I'm far more proud of my learning rank (King 145) than my game elo